Self-Evaluation

When I applied to be in this 360, I didn’t really know what to expect from it. I had a good amount of friends that had been in some of the other 360 programs and they all had positive experiences to talk about. One of aspects that I was looking forward to was not taking courses that are primarily taught in Park. Being a Chemistry major, I hadn’t had one semester without a class in Park and I knew that if I was accepted to this program that my semester would be incredibly unique. Acceptance into it made this possibility concrete and I was incredibly excited for it but equally as nervous. My nerves all stemmed from the same reasons that I was excited for the courses. I was entering into a new world in Bryn Mawr. It wasn’t going to calculations and equations 24/7; I was going to be doing non-stop readings with unexplainable answers and having discussions with my classmates.

Coming into this course, one of my worries was that I was not going to be able to keep up with everyone else. I knew a lot of the people in our 360 and I knew what they were capable of accomplishing. Most of my classmates I had never shared a classroom with before this fall. The meeting we had during the spring semester allowed me to see who else would be in the course and made that much more nervous. I had grown to be comfortable in Park and was pulling myself out of it all. I was beginning this experience in a place full of potential, nerves and vulnerability.

Going through the semester, I have had to adjust how I learn. I say this because coming from my major, I have a set of notes from every single class that I walk out with, knowing exactly what was taught that day and what will be taught tomorrow. Going into my courses this semester, I had a small idea of what I was expecting during class time but for the most part, it never turned into what I was expecting. Though this was one of the most nerve wracking aspects of taking three humanity courses, I ended up enjoying it by the end of the semester. I felt that this type of learning pushed me out of my comfort zone and forces me to think in a new way. It allowed me to explore new ways of learning in an environment where I would not be penalized. I felt like this was made more possible by a lack of grades in Voice and Silence and a load of exploration in Vision.

Of all the classrooms this semester, Voice had to be the one I was the most comfortable in initially. This has a lot to do with the fact that I had Jody last semester and was already used to having her as a professor. During my previous class with Jody, I was able to share my nerves and assumptions about my writing and my level of performance in her classroom. Because of this, I was able to extend myself more, initially, in her classroom. I didn’t have much anxiety doing her readings because I already knew that if I had a hard time with them, she could and usually would open the floor to the class, allowing us to dissect the meaty part of the reading. Allow us to bounce our own ideas of the readings with each other. This process allowed for the 360 class to get a better feel of each other and where we stood with that day’s readings.

With the readings, I had a wide range of joys and pleasures with them. There were some readings that I enjoyed tremendously and grew excited to discuss in class. One of these is Reading is My Window. I grew to love this book, enjoying it to the fullest. I liked it because it touched on a topic I held dear to my heart, reading, in a new and critical way. Books has always been a passion of mine and I liked being able to see how it affected women in a different environment. Considering I have never been restricted on what I could and could not read by a higher authority, it broke my heart a little to see how these women were. But it also allowed me to see how powerful literature can become. I enjoyed how Sweeney was able to take a constant token of knowledge and link it between two communities I thought to be unconnected at the beginning of this semester. Most of the readings I enjoyed this semester were a fair balance of analysis, comprehension and accessibility. If a reading was really inaccessible to me, I usually had a rather difficult time pushing myself to finish it. I found that this happened most when I felt in a time crunch. When I felt that I wasn’t allocating my time well enough between all of my classes, I would give myself a certain amount of time to finish. If I didn’t get to the end, I would take what I read and bring that to class with me.

The same goes along with my writing for Voice. In general, I have never been very confident in my writing and throwing myself into three writing intensive courses was going to be a challenge for me. Coming from the lens of voice, I was able to look at my writing as place to evolve my train of thought. Voice was also somewhere where I could evolve more comfortably because of my previous experience with Jody as a professor. I enjoyed Serendip because it let us get brief ideas out to our classmates without too much pressure of conjuring completely constructed thoughts and ideas. This is how I often thought about my Serendip posts. Looking back, I did more stand alone posts than comments and this probably stems from that lens. I looked at Serendip as a place to explore each other’s thoughts.

When it came to my papers in Voice, I think that I explored the topics a sufficient amount but did not always do the right amount of work when it came to tidying up and critiquing my own writing. Since I have found myself growing in my writing skills, I have come to see that my ideas are there but I need to work on developing them. I get them written down but get nervous when it comes to evaluating it. I feel like I have made the proper steps to improving, such as beginning to visit the writing center. When speaking with Jody about my writing, I expressed my concern with the writing center. I visited when I was a freshman and did not have the most productive meeting. Since then, I had not gone back. With chemistry, my writing was very strategic and planned out and I didn’t see the necessity for the writing center. But with these courses, I knew that I should be going but I still avoided it. I felt very hesitant visiting because I am already self-conscious about my writing and I did not want to put myself in a place where a peer could judge me. Nevertheless, I visited the writing center for one my papers for Anne and it ended up helping me a lot. I was able to reevaluate my writing and had a productive meeting my peer.

I ended up going to the writing center for one of my web events. The final paper, about Eva’s Man, was the one I chose to go for. I felt like I was really pushing myself with this paper and that it would benefit me to go to the writing center. This was a paper that my ability to connect different parts of the semester together was challenged. I had really enjoyed reading Eva’s Man for many reasons and one of those was the incompleteness of the story, the open ending. I used this web paper to further explore her in hopes of beginning to understand her. It is safe to say that I did not get much close to understanding Eva but through the paper I have come to terms with the concept. With the Silence section of this course I have been able to better come to terms with the openness, with unexplained endings and non-concrete answers.

This has happened a lot through the readings we have done in Silence. I had many joys and pleasures with the readings but plenty of challenges. When I would begin the readings, many were challenges. Thinking back, many, if not most, were some sort of challenge for me. Readings forced me to pay close attention to the specific words and phrases being used and what they meant for the piece as whole. There were times where I thought I understand and days where I knew I didn’t understand. Discussion of the readings was also a unique experience in Anne’s class. Since we were focusing on silence through the semester, we were able to apply our readings to the idea of silence, wherever that silence stemmed from. Brothers & Keepers was one of my favorite readings for this very reason. It is a book that could have easily been read in any of our courses and had been looked at in the appropriate lens. By focusing on silence, I was able to put myself out of my learning comfort zone. It was such an unfamiliar topic and this is really exemplified by the initial silence activity from the first day of class. I took the activity to be unnerving but as the semester went on, I began to look forward to our silence activity. I started to take full advantage of whatever activity we were doing. 

My experience with the Vision course was one with a different path than Voice and Silence but it was important to the 360 experience. In the first half of the experience, I felt like we were getting the historical and factual information that was not focused in Voice and Silence. Readings such as The Colored Amazons and The New Jim Crow allowed us to explore the history that correlated with the current issues we were discussing. With these readings, I felt like the challenge was getting through the density in order to be able to apply them to the other classes and to the ideas of walled communities. This isn’t to say that all the readings in Vision were denser than the other courses but they were looking at the topic of prisons in a different lens. We were looking at prisons with the historical context in a larger spotlight than the other classes. The New Jim Crow was one reading that really stuck with me after reading it. It opened up my eyes to a lot of the engrained structures that I have never looked at in an analytical manner. These readings were more challenging than the readings we did while we were visiting the Cannery but were no more important. I appreciated the small amount of reading assigned for our time in the Cannery because it allowed for our time in the Cannery to be used wisely. Not having too much reading allowed for us to focus on the art and still have some time to have discussions.

The variety of writing done for Vision also stood out from Voice and Silence. The memos were a good way to allow us to explore a topic of our choice. Although finding a topic was often difficult because of the broad guidelines, it forced us to explore for a topic we found interesting. The memos pushed me to apply what we were learning to something we were not directly discussing in the 360. I really enjoyed my first memo where I spoke on the current presidential election and how voter disenfranchisement could possibly affect the Electoral College votes, specifically those that could go for Presidential Obama. This paper not only allowed me to apply our classroom conversation to something I was very passionate about but it let me see the presidential election and voter disenfranchisement in a new light. Assignments, like the memo, forced us to engage with our class work in a critical way that wouldn’t necessarily just happen.

For me, journaling served as a way to prepare for the Cannery experience. In the beginning of the semester, I felt like my journaling was a lot more in depth and I feel that this is due to a lack of certainty around the Cannery experience. I wrote a lot about my worries and expectations. The journal prepared me for the start of the Cannery. During my time at the Cannery, I only wrote the required reflections and even then, I felt a bit forced. This is because I didn’t really feel like directly reflecting on my time after the Cannery. I internalized a lot of because I wasn’t sure how to express how I felt about it. While in the Cannery, I gave all the activities my all, in an attempt to get the most out of the experience. I felt that I owed the women that since they always spoke about the experience in a positive light.

When attempting to engage with the women, I felt al little awkward putting myself out there during the first few sessions. I wasn’t sure how I would be taken and I was worried I would not be taken seriously. But after I got over that fear, I tried to actively engage with the women. I would take advantage of the moment if someone I have never met was sitting next to me or across from me. I also tried to stay away from sitting next to Bryn Mawr students so that this would be more likely to happen. Engaging with the women was a lot easier when it was on a one-on-one moment. Working with Kimberly on the collage was one of my favorite moments in the Cannery and I wish I had more like it. The conversations we had were not something I critically reflected on or made the conscious effort to. I wouldn’t appreciate someone taking the little things I told them and critically analyze them. I feel like that takes the serendipity out of the conversation.

The art projects served as a good catalyst for these conversations and connections between the Cannery women and the Bryn Mawr women. They gave reason for my questions based on curiosity. While making the collage, it wasn’t weird or awkward to ask someone why they were ripping out the pictures for their collage. The poem we wrote prior to the collages allowed for a small look into their lives, a small look into what they considered their niche. Niches allowed for us to delve into the art in a personal manner. We were required to dig within ourselves with the poems and that spilled over into the collages. These art creations gave us an avenue for contemplation. We were able to take our final products and think about what they meant for us and for those viewing them.  With this art, we were able to bring in Silence and Voice. We got to tell people how we saw ourselves while they were allowed to make their own judgments.

When thinking about this whole experience, it is hard to have some final thoughts. I don’t feel like much was finalized during this experience but more was opened up. We explored controversial topics, engaged in activism, went to jail for six weeks, released some tears and got to know each other. As a student, I was stretched in my writing abilities and reading skills. As a person, I was pushed on my personal stories, experiences and opinions. Like we have mentioned as a class, there is no conclusion. All the work we have done in this 360 is going to be with us for a long while and who knows when we will be able to conclude this chapter of our lives. I don’t know when that will happen for me but I hope that I am aware of it when it happens. I hope that I don’t forget everything I have learned in this semester but am able to apply to my last semester in college and the rest of my life.