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. Continue reading “Real World Stuff”