Throughout my day I am constantly questioning my thought processes. I’m not really sure if this is a positive or negative thing. I’m always wondering if my thinking is aligning with my values or if I actually believe what I’m coming across as. For instance, I recently chose to become an English major this semester and that’s something I strongly feel makes sense because I consider myself an expressive person with words as my main tool. I’ve always been fond of writing, from essays to poetry. However, there is still a part of me that wonders if these things are inherently part of me or just predisposed notions that I have about my identity. How many things that I think I know about myself are just things that I have heavily linked with myself and how many things are truly “me”. Continue reading “Internal Inquiry”
Trigger Warning: Trigger Warning
College is not necessarily a “safe space”. It is a place where students are challenged to discover new things about themselves and the things around them. This may entail tackling some big scary stuff. And guess what…life is big and scary. TRIGGER WARNING: ranting about trigger warnings Continue reading “Trigger Warning: Trigger Warning”
Interdisciplinarity~common core?
As I was reading just the introduction of Interdisciplinarity, I couldn’t help but think of the Common Core. On page 14, there is a thesis of sorts when Moran states interdisciplinarity “attempt(s) to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether”. The common core is basically a huge failure that immediately has me worried about the authenticity of interdisciplinarity. From a surface layer, common core may sound appealing—the tying together of all subjects to one standard of education, everyone treated equally and at the same level. However, this is not well executed because it turns into a profit making game for large corporations, such as Pearson, which pretty much controls common core. It amounts every student to a number and it becomes all about “meeting a standard” which translates to certain grades on a test, which doesn’t mean thorough learning at all. Teachers are forced to produce the right numbers, which means more money for the right(wrong?) people. What happens is that students feel helpless and are not learning, just merely training to achieve a certain grade on a test so that it looks good as data. In this way, I’m not sure about interdisciplinarity— not sure how much sense it all makes to lump all the disciplines together—how practical it is to apply math to english and vice versa. These are, of course, all things I have to think about as I just switched my major to english. I’m not sure how much the english major applies to the real world as much as just being something I love doing and comes to me most comfortably. Maybe the english major is actually just general knowledge that everyone should participate in?