Walking into my first class of summer session 1 I felt uneasiness about an upper division writing course. Reason being it has been a few years since I last taken an English class. So I'm not quite sure what to expect, especially with this new way of going about doing assignments. At least the required text for this class wasn't as daunting as a 1500 page anthology that I've seen a few of my unfortunate friends carry along with them to class.
Having time after class to pick up the book, New Keywords, I went ahead to the bookstore and got myself a copy. With time to pass before my next class I pulled out the text and started flipping through a few pages and going through the keywords. I thought to myself, this is quite a list because I see such words as "pornography", "gay and lesbian". This will lead for an interesting discussion in class. Also looking up the original version I found a small list of keywords from Raymond Williams himself. I compared the new and old and found a couple words taken out and or renamed (Source: http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Keywords:_A_Vocabulary_of_Culture_and_Society). For example the word "Western" in the original Keywords has been changed to "The West". I don't know if there is a great significance to this or whatnot but I found that quite interesting.
In closing my first actual post/assignment, my overall feeling about this class is optimistic. It's great to have a teacher that wants to experiment from the traditional way of teaching. Looking forward to improving my writing in and out of the classroom.
2 comments:
This is not a complete sentence: "Looking forward to improving my writing in and out of the classroom." It should say "I am looking forward to..." Even though we are writing in blogs, we need to keep a high quality of writing.
This is a very interesting narrative of your initial experience with the book. I was intimidated about taking the course, too. I haven't taken an English class in forever, and I was not ready for the flurry of writing that comes with any English class.
I'm surprised you did some research about the new and old "New Keywords" book, which incorporated informative elements into your narrative. This made this blog entry more entertaining to read. For example, it was very interesting to figure out that "Western" in the old version of "New Keywords" has been changed to "The West" in the new one.
I agree with your optimistic assessment of the class, and while experimentation of teaching methods can be scary, I’m glad we have a great teacher that can successfully pull it off.
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