If I seem a little sophomoric lately, it's because I'm now in my sophomore year of college. I haven't felt this way in four years.

But seriously, my first day of classes wasn't so bad. Well, the classes weren't, anyway. There are no labs the first week, so I didn't have to wake up at 6:45 for my Monday Morning Physics Lab from Hell. (That's right, I said "hell." HELL!) My first class was physics at 12:50. Right after that, I had programming, and then I was done for the day. Both are continuations from classes I took in the spring. I have the same lecture hall for physics and the same lecturer for programming. The lecturer is cool. After a long weekend (or a summer), he asks the class how they spent their time away. He spent his summer not shaving, and now he has a cool beard.

It rained a lot last week. Like, a lot. I had to do some walking around, and I got pretty wet. My tennis shoes (sneakers) also got pretty wet. I thought they would dry out eventually, but they didn't after a few days. They also stank like whoa. My roommate and I decided that I should toss them in the dryer, but as I was leaving with them, I caught a glimpse inside. Now, I'd never looked at the insides of my tennis shoes before, but I'm pretty sure they weren't supposed to be bright yellow with black spots.

Today I had to get up early for my technical writing class. After putting on my only remaining pair of shoes (a pair of sandals that aren't comfortable for walking long distances), I made my way toward the class.

"Excuse me. Do you know what you have to do to get to heaven?"

I'd had a year of mental preparation for this, but I was surprised that they were just stopping passersby rather than just talking people who were sitting around and doing nothing. Last year, I took the bait to avoid being confrontational and to get a sense of the guy's argument. Since then, I've decided that I'd be more frank in future meetings.

"I don't think heaven is a real place." The bespectacled, well-dressed young man smiled knowingly. "But," I added hastily, "that doesn't mean I think people should go around doing bad things. I think people should do good things for the sake of other people."

"So you don't think people should go around killing each other?" he said with a chuckle.

"No, no." I shared the laugh. "People should be good to each other."

"Do you know what the Bible says about what you have to do to get to heaven?"

"I think so." Last time, I had been quoted to, chapter and verse.

"It only takes a minute, and I could walk with you."

"Sorry, but I'm going to be late to class," I said. "Thanks anyway."

I was early to the tech writing class. It was an honors class for engineering majors, so I wasn't surprised when my former floormates Cameron and Jason showed up. (Also, they had told me they'd be taking the class.) Then class started. The professor was a woman; I've never had a female professor. She went over the basic rules: no cell phones, no tardies — and at that point, someone came in late. Then a co-worker came in to tell her something, and she asked to use someone's cell phone. She had to call the other professor, who had gotten into a car accident on her way to work. After that, she went over the course material with us. This was a tech writing class, but it was also a speaking class. She would be teaching us the speech component, she said. She had a slight lisp.

We did an ice-breaking activity where we each wrote facts about ourselves on a piece of paper and then swapped with other people and initialed by the things that we had in common with them. By that time, the other professor had come in. She said she was still shaken and that the other driver was "an illegal Nicaraguan who didn't have a driver's license." She spent the rest of the class giving us some basic rules of writing. I think I've probably broken about ten of them in this post. We already have an assignment: to write about a scientific topic in a way that a junior high school student (11-14 years old) can understand. It should be about something we already know; researching isn't the point. I wonder what I could write about.

Here's this year's Beloit College Mindset List for the class of 2012, describing the world as it is to incoming college freshmen who were born in 1990.

You've probably seen some of these hilarious exam answers before, but I got some big laffs out of the new ones.

It's hard to believe that students are still harassed at school due to their sexual orientation. At one Florida high school, the perpetrator was the principal. Here are details from the court ruling on this criminal activity.