Class Reflection: Building Ideas and Sharing Them

Like I've said before, the reason I decided to join this class was mostly because it fulfilled a course requirement and fit into my schedule. It also had the word "blog" somewhere in the course description and I thought: Bird Course.

What I'm learning, though, is that there are no courses at BYU that you can just fly right through. I'm glad we were warned that we would be reading Moby Dick over the course of a month, which helped give a better idea of what this class would require. (I'm sure that was a mechanism to weed out the weak. Like Accounting 200.)

This class has been challenging, but is has given me a lot of tools that I know I'll be using beyond this classroom. I made real-world connections with people in fields that I'm interested in by experimenting with tools for connecting. The class helped me get outside my comfort zone and email people I didn't know to ask them questions about a field that's still developing. I know I'm actually learning in a class when I stop focusing on how I think I know everything and open myself up to what other people have to say. Reading the posts from other people in the class helped me see what other people were getting out of the same discussions in class and how there are a lot of different ideas we can build on if we share them with each other. I already have a lot of ideas that I want to continue building and sharing even after the class is over.

Something that has been a running theme in several of my English classes has been a push to go deeper than a simple analogy and to make claims about things and back up those claims with facts. I have been resisting a lot of these ideas because I have thought that it's always better to just tell a story or make a simple analogy without working yourself into a philosophical fit trying to constantly connect to a greater whole. The more I've seen movies this year and thought about the stories, the more I've found that deeper stories or stories that resist a simple reading are a lot more satisfying. A lot of elements of our culture are becoming immediate and shallow and we could use English majors in this world to help us create more meaning. This doesn't mean I'm going to find Christ analogies in everything like my high school English teachers seemed to want, but it does help me appreciate how my professors are trying to teach me to think and what this could do for me outside the classroom.


Photo taken from Sister Act 2. Used for illustrative purposes as fair use.