I've been run through one of every class now (with the exception of my physics lab, which doesn't start meeting till next week), and thought I'd put down my thoughts on them.
Physics:
It takes all the math stuff I dislike, and makes it trickier. Plus, this is the first teacher I've ever had who's explicitly said that he's going to make his tests hard; most of my teachers have just said something about how they'll be "appropriate" when some nosy student brings it up. I have no clue what a "hard" test means to him, and I won't find out for some time. Until I do find out, that's going to be a cause for concern.
The course itself seems tough. We have lots of work assigned from online sources, offline sources, and then we have lots of textbook reading (although not nearly as much reading as there was in law school). I'm not sure how easy or difficult these will be, so I'm not sure how much time it will consume. It seems like it will be difficult though, if I want to stay on top of things (and I do).
Our teacher is in love with tech gadgets. That shows up in the use of Powerpoint (which I guess is common nowadays... I /hate/ it. I could have a huge rant about how terrible it is, and I might post that rant someday).
He also uses little remote controls in class, so he can ask questions, we can input the answer, and everyone can see who put in what (anonymously, but there's a computer program that breaks down the stats and graphs them instantly). Unlike Powerpoint, this is very neat. I can see lots of uses for it, besides the novelty. It helps him see if he has to slow down and it helps students see where they stand in relation to the rest of the class.
Grading wise, only ~40% of our grade is determined from the exams (which is probably why he wants them to be difficult). The other 60% is a combination of attendance, participation, physics lab, homework, and online homework. I've never had a grading set up like that, so I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet.
Chemistry:
Our Chemistry teacher makes good (by which I mean frequent) use of powerpoint as well, but doesn't bring online assignments, little remote controls, or any other technological gadgets to bear.
I'm sure it won't be an "easy" course, but I feel much more comfortable in Chemistry than in Physics. I'm looking forward to it, actually. The teacher seems nice enough, and I think she's on the lenient side. She said ~80% of exam questions will be copied from assigned homework questions, which means there's no excuse for getting lower than an 80% on any exam. That sort of stuff helps my GPA, but it won't help me when I take my MCAT in a year. So I've got to make sure I stay 100% focused, and learn the material well enough to keep it with me until I get to my MCAT - not just well enough to manage a 4.0 in the course.
The thing about this class is that it's, more or less, a first year class. Calculus was too, but it had some older students since I took it during the summer. Being in a course with a full compliment of freshman really brings out the fact that I'm older than these people. I never thought of myself as having changed /that/ much since college, but I'm really a bit self conscious about it. It's funny, and sort of depressing at the same time.
Chemistry Lab:
Chemistry lab looks a lot like my old chemistry lab at Vanderbilt (I took one semester of Gen. Chem. there - I didn't take the second though, so I get to do it all over here). The lab itself is, marginally, nicer than the lab I had at Vanderbilt, though the lab I had there was in an old building that was being redone (I took Chemistry there my first year, by my last year the building had been completely redone and was /much/ nicer). Still, that's a pleasant surprise.
We got lab partners, and I think I like the one I'm with. I don't really know after just one day of course, and that's one day without any experiments. Just in cleaning up the drawers and taking inventory of our things and such though, you can get a sense of a person. How self-motivated they are, how able to assist they are, how careful they are, and how you'll be able to get along with them in general. Having a bad lab partner for a semester would be unfortunate, but I don't think that will be a problem at all.
