Thursday, August 26, 2010

Things I Have Learned as an English Major


1. Don't skip Composition I. Don't do it. Even if they tell you, "Your ACT scores are high enough to 'test out' of this class;" even if you think, "This is great, I can save money and time;" even if there are no foreseeable problems ... don't do it. As a naive freshman who didn't know any better, I took SFCC's advice to skip ahead and it has caused a lot of problems both with getting into other classes and now with getting into the UCM Teaching Program. It seemed like a great idea at the time but it turned out to be one of those too good to be true ones.
2. Don't become an English Major if you don't like reading. Duh, right? Well, after the reading load I am going to have this current semester I am thinking that even though I love reading I am probably going to reconsider that choice several times this semester. This past weekend alone I had to read approximately 500 pages.
3. It's great to see everyone in my non-English classes scramble for the back seats, only to have to fight for a front row seat in my next class of all English majors.
4. "Never trust a writer." - Dr. Charles Martin on writer intention.
5. If you use or hear the same word over and over again in conversation about a piece of writing, after a while it seems to become an ambiguous concept that encompasses more than you can grasp at once. The other day this happened for me with the words "binary" and "multiplicity" used in regard to feminist writings.
6. Bruce Wayne could never understand Deconstruction.
7. You will never be able to win a war against a concept. Concepts don't die.
8. (April 2011) If you are in a poetry class and your first choice for a poet over which to write a short paper seems to have been overlooked in scholarly writings ... switch to T. S. Eliot.

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