December 18, 2014 - 18:27
Coming into Bryn Mawr, I was fairly confident in the quality of my writing. I was similarly confident in the soundness of my worldview. I thought I had a pretty good sense of what it meant to advocate for social justice. I felt my arguments about what I thought were some of the biggest issues concerning our society were not only inarguably correct, but also something I needed to talk about no matter the context. This class has taught me a lot about the way I write as well as the way I look at the world.
Stylistically, I feel like my work has definitely improved. Structurally, my prose is tighter, with less run-on sentences and comma splices. I also feel that I’ve improved on making a clear argument. I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to go on a tangent about something I’m interested in talking about if it doesn’t relate back to the main argument. I’ve also been working on creating a balance between arguing one central point clearly/convincingly and addressing doubt. I have struggled on some papers this semester to come up with something I wanted to argue or state. Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t in a position to make a grand sweeping statement about a subject I wasn’t an expert on. It’s been interesting to work on this balance between trying to say something new and interesting while also not trying to use the voice of god to make a single judgement on a huge issue.
In terms of class participation, I definitely feel like I’ve been working on listening to what everyone has to say and tuning into the point of the discussion instead of just jumping in with a vaguely related statement that I’m really excited to talk about. I think some of my best contributions to the discussion were asking questions to other students to try and add complexity to the subject. But there were also times when I spoke on a subject and didn’t really add anything new to the discussion.
I loved a lot of the readings we did in this class. One of my favorite things about these readings was the way in which so many of them were connected to each other. Some of my favorite writers we read this semester were June Jordan, Octavia Butler, Mary-Louise Pratt, and Teju Cole. Although I was resistant to the environmental studies aspect of the class, I feel that I have actually learned a lot from it. Part of my resistance came from the sense of inevitability we feel when we view the ecological destruction of the world. But through readings like Latour as well as class discussions, I feel like I have a better understanding of what to do with the knowledge and responsibility we learn about when we learn about ecology. This class has also made clear to me the link between capitalism and environmental destruction, before this I hadn’t really thought there was an alternative, that our destruction was pretty much a fact of nature. Also I really enjoyed the way in which the class did what was in its description, describe the link between personal identity and the greater environment. I enjoyed exploring the idea of personal identity as well as learning about how the idea of the individual is not only nonexistent but also dangerous for the future of the environment.
I think I gained a lot from the interactive structure of the class. When I was trying to come up with an idea for a paper, talking it out with classmates helped a lot to organize my thoughts. I also liked reading other people’s postings to see what they had to say on the same subject. The shorter postings were interesting to make. When they were on the readings we did they were helpful for making sure I had an idea of what the argument of the paper was. My favorite short posting was the one we did after spending time outside. I liked working with Emily on our group project. We had lots of good discussions especially when our papers were accidentally really similar. We were excited about our 10 week project, but we were nervous about talking to people about our topic so we kind of put off a lot of the work we needed to be doing. After you helped us, we managed to talk to two great people, although if we had started earlier we would have been able to talk to even more. I think the final result of our project was pretty good and we learned a lot. However we did fail to make an argument based on the information we gathered beyond the argument that moving forward needed to be done thoughtfully.
I think I want to take more reading/writing classes with similar themes in the future, although I’m not sure what kind of classes I should be looking into.