Course Response 1

Truly, I feel like any English course ends up being a reprocessing of our thinking. We gain new perspectives, new writing skills, and overall new insight to put towards future papers and readings.

Even beginning with the summer homework, certain thought processes in my head were rewired. That Foster's assignment? Huge revolution! Certain subtleties in numerous works of pop culture suddenly came screaming obviousness in my head. I kept wondering how I could have missed so much!

When the actual class started, the first few days really were nothing too surprising. We sat through class learning that we probably would read a lot of books and write a lot of essays. No biggie. But then we were introduced to things such as DIDLS, and CLOSED READING....these words and acronyms immediately drifted into the category of "foreign territory." Just like how in foreign countries they speak a different language, I felt that everything Ms.Holmes said was Greek. I was not scared,  but I was definitely uncomfortable.  DIDLS? Wait what? How do I logically apply each aspect of that to a reading? Isn't diction and language essentially the same thing? And syntax? I'm actually supposed to care about how long a sentence is?

All these questions were running about in my half awake head. Slowly though, I got the hang of it. With my fellow peers, we conquered the David Sedaris essay the second time we went through it. Diction transformed from a misinterpreted group of words to how a specific word conveys a specific meaning and effect. We immediately picked up on his paragraph switches between informal and formal by noticing key words like "faggy (Sedaris)" juxtaposed in the same essay with more eloquent words like "convincingly (Sedaris)."

Then we went through poetry. I guess I've always despised poetry, but it definitely helped when the poem we observed was something we were all familiar with: racial injustice. Most of us were satisfied with saying that he's complaining about racism, but that wasn't enough for Ms.Holmes. It soon became so apparent how shallow that was, because that barely even touched the surface of how deep his poem was. The Langston Hughes poem was not just complaining about the injustices about racism, but rather, presenting a completely hopeless and disillusioned perspective towards the nation that ironically stands for justice. This profound underlying meaning impacted me much more than the seemingly generic racism argument had. It left me realizing how much I have left to learn, not just about poetry and poetic techniques but really how think about things more deeply than I have been.

But since we're only at the beginning of a long (hopefully) enriching journey, I feel that I'm going to be doing a lot of observation. This is especially true since I didn't take an English course last year and I'm a little rough on writing formal papers. Though I've already learned a lot for these first few weeks, my writing brain is still a hard lump of dry clay. So far I'm adding to that clay, but what I really need to do is get it wet and sculpt with it. Create something with it. Write long beautiful essays with it. And never let it get dry and inflexible again.