In class on Wednesday, it was our task at the beginning to think about how The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms is organized. Though I did not know how this could relate to our English class, I went along with this talking about how hard it is to find a word without having to go look up another word or the reasons why they choose the pictures that they did. Where the class got confusing to me is when we were instructed to walk around with our group and look for different achieves. And once again, though I did not know why I was doing it, I continued the assignment: looking at the posters on the wall, the books in the library, and the fingerprints on a glass. For me at the beginning, these two assignments seemed like the only thing they had in common was my confusion.
But when it finally hit me was when I was sitting in my sorority’s living room staring at the composites on the wall. In the center of the wall hangs the founding pledge class and next to it was the composite from five years and then next to that the one from next year. When I asked my friend why they were not in any kind of order she looks up at the wall and then just goes “oh, I don’t know” and then returns to her phone. It was then that I remember a conversation I had with my group about the Bedford. We discussed the best way to organize the different literary periods. We discussed that maybe chronological order would be the best way, but it was rejected when thinking about if a person wants to find a certain literary period but does not know the exact year. This made the most sense to the way my sororities’ composites were organized. Though it might be nice to have this achieve organized by chronologically, but if I was trying to find a certain person, if I don’t know what year they were at Geneseo, I would have to search for hours.
After much questioning I finally found the answer to the question about the ordering of the composites. As one of my sorority sisters finally told me that it is this way because of the sizing and color of the picture frames the chapter decided to buy that year and what would look best hung out next to each other. This reminded me of a quote from Interdisciplinarity stating, “the randomness of these groupings suggests that intellectual divisions that we regard as natural might also seem absurd from another perspective” (p.120). What I learned from this is that while it might not seem like the best way to organize something to me, for others this was the best solution to their achieving problem.