This course was my first college class ever — the first classroom I stepped into on my first Monday as a first year college student. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, and I was both nervous and excited about the fact that it was a class in my major. One thing I was immediately surprised by was the way that we began the class — with a meme. Even though it seemed a bit absurd as it seemed at first, as we began to unpack, the idea that something so directly embedded into my everyday life, something so seemingly unrelated to school, could be the initial introduction to a 200-level English course in college was refreshing to me. Throughout the semester, I would come to discover just how connected the real world, my life experiences, and my own thoughts were to the difficult, challenging and stimulating academic work I was beginning as a college student.
As we began the semester, I found the course engaging immediately because the conversations we were having sparked an abundance of thoughts in my head. The blog post assignment felt like a way to get my feet wet sharing these ideas and finding validation in the feedback I was receiving, as well as learning how to strengthen my voice and the way I articulated them. However, there was an overwhelming amount of ideas swirling around in my head when I thought about the vast amount of topics these posts could cover. This can be proven by the fact that Dr. McCoy’s feedback on my first post (in all caps) was to “SLOW DOWN”. I had so many ideas, and I had no idea how to make sense of them. This was real stuff, and it excited me more than I could have ever imagined to be exploring concepts like these within a course at school.
Immediately, this course took my expectation that the academic and real world would be kept separate and subverted it. I was excited by the idea that the conversations I would be having with my peers in my classes would engage my identity outside of who I was as a student. As I began to understand this, it reflected in the subject matter of my blog posts. In my second blog post, I wrote about what I had been dealing with in my personal life — my breakup — and how validating it was to me to read things and connect with literature and art in a way that made me feel less alone. I referenced a quote from Frenzy — “It isn’t much of a life, though, is it? – representing a thing.” and wrote about my experience leaving a relationship that I knew was no longer the right thing for me or for my partner. This blog post was an important step in the right direction for me, because it allowed me to make a concrete connection between the academic work I was doing and the things I was going through outside of the classroom.
However, it became easy for me to utilize blog posts as journal entries rather than academic work. This confusion and tension between how personal the posts should get and how many academic references they should involve is obvious in my third post, which was titled “Order Restored”, and originally intended to be about the concept of order > disorder > order restored, but as I wrote, became about so much more. This prompted Dr. McCoy to share that she felt there were “four blog posts crammed inside of one”. In retrospect, it’s obvious I was trying desperately to get all of my ideas in to make sure there was enough substance, and forgetting to unpack. I went from not providing enough substance and connection to providing far too much for a single post.
My excitement about the connections I was making between the course and real life took over my blog posts, until we were assigned to work collaboratively on a blog post in class. For me, this was my fourth post, and I began to feel as though I was falling behind. Working with my classmates on this blog post gave me a window into the writing process of my peers and reminded me just how rewarding it was to work hard and contribute. The grade on this blog post reflected that, which motivated me to keep going and keep growing. This was an important lesson and reminder for me both inside and outside of the classroom: contributing to something bigger and working with others made the end result so much more meaningful. I was continuing to learn and grow, not just as a writer, but as a person. I was incredibly proud of and fascinated by this duality, or this both/and.
In class, we were working with Everett’s collection of poetry re:f (gesture) when Dr. McCoy gave us the assignment to imitate the abecedarian structure of Everett’s poem Zulus. What began in that class time was the spark for a piece I finished outside of class, titled “for the boy from music class:”. I shared the poem with Dr. McCoy in an email, thanking her for the prompt and jokingly writing “you can’t tell a Creative Writing major to start a poem and expect them not to finish it”, and her response encouraged me to reflect upon potential connections between the piece and the course. She told me that if I could do so in a response to her email, I could keep it confidential and still receive credit for a blog post. Having someone respect the time and craft put into that poem and recognize that it deserved credit while still maintaining confidentiality (since the poem was quite personal) validated even more for me that the separation between the academic and real worlds is only as rigid as you make it.
After this, the blog posts became easier for me to write, and they felt less like a checklist of boxes to fulfill and more like an exercise that allowed me to expand my ability as a writer and as a thinker, which is what they were intended to be from the start. The idea for my sixth post came from a conversation I had with my peers in class while discussing Interdisciplinarity. I found that the seeds for blog posts were everywhere, and when I was writing about something that really interested me, it didn’t feel as challenging. It almost felt like the blog posts were writing themselves, and the ideas for them were coming from organic, genuine conversations and experiences I was having inside and outside the classroom. Though Dr. McCoy still had feedback to offer in terms of how to make this post stronger, the feedback became more conversational. It was rewarding to know that I was getting the hang of things, and that Dr. McCoy was able to read my work and connect it to experiences she had encountered throughout her educational experience as well.
My seventh post was, again, drawn from a conversation I had during discussion with classmates. This became the most exciting part of blogging for me: knowing that the ideas and conversations I was excited by and enthusiastic about could be more developed and unpacked for credit through this assignment. This one came even easier than the one before it, and I finally felt as though I knew just what to do and say in order to produce an effective blog post.
However, old habits die hard. Towards the end of the semester, procrastination got the best of me, and my last three posts were a little bit rushed. Though the ideas behind them were ones I was proud of — getting my voice back as a writer, what the lack of a concrete deadline taught me, and the concept of structure or lack thereof — I regret the fact that they were rushed in order to meet a deadline. I think that writing these three posts in order to get them in before December 1st really drove home the idea that the lack of a concrete deadline was important in order to teach my classmates and I how to pace ourselves and responsibly manage the work throughout the semester. I had been trying my best throughout the semester to remember the blog posts and get them in, but the lack of a concrete deadline made them somehow always feel like less of a priority than other assignments. This taught me the hard way that that simply isn’t true, and that is a lesson that I will take with me throughout the rest of my academic career and my life.
Something I am grateful for is the realities this course taught me. I learned so much this semester, as a student, thinker, and writer, but also, as a human being. I learned that the real world and the academic world aren’t as separate as we make them out to be. The blog posts are a testament to that and an artifact of it, and I’m proud of the ideas I was able to develop and connect throughout the semester through them. I’m thankful that I’ll always be able to look back on them and track my growth throughout my first semester of college in such a tangible way.