100% Reason to Remember Whatever it Was we Did this Week

It is truly astonishing to consider how much I've done in this class, considering it's only the first week of school. Of course, to really do that, one would have to count the mass of summer homework I managed to complete during crunch time, but regardless of the exact date that I started absorbing course material, I've certainly sucked in a lot.

Considering this is my fourth blog entry, as opposed to about my third time having a sustained conversation in class, I feel that the best place to start is fittingly the first day of school, when Ms. Holmes said something along the lines of "I've come to know you as writers, and as people, but I cannot attach names to faces just yet." It really got me thinking that our lit teachers, whether we like it or not, probably know the most about us as people. There's really no way to avoid giving away your personality when you write- it's in every word and every space that you put on a page. That is especially apparent in this class, with this summer homework, where we were seen only online. All we had to offer in terms of personality were blog posts and forum comments. It kind of makes me wish I'd thought through what I posed a bit more, to be honest. Heh.

On the topic of things hiding in writing, I feel it is only fair to mention how frequently the Foster presentation blew my mind. While reading the book, Foster made pretty reasonable parallels to classic works, things in the public eye that had been there for a while (spoiling the ends of many in the process, I add to my dismay). It was a whole 'nother kettle of fish for me to try and apply it to the things I love and experience without: a) leaning too heavily on one particular show or movie, b) not using examples that Foster had already given, and c) falling back on Jane Eyre or Shakespeare or other old things that I read and love but aren't considered 'pop culture.' Much time was spent staring hopelessly at my bookshelf. Certainly my most memorable victory was working on the chapter involving politics. Never in my life had I ever tried to put a political angle on anything I'd ever read, ever, but as luck might have it, I was doing AP Gov homework concurrently. Something put the Turner Thesis in my head, and suddenly I had a massive realization that Star Trek was continuing to encourage rugged individualism in the modern age. Even the phrase "Space: the final frontier" had never hit that particular switch in my head, and I definitely never would have made the connection without Foster pointing out that political writing can be nonspecific. It isn't necessarily 'vote democrat' so much as it is 'dictatorships fail and communism is bad' (Animal Farm) or 'if you overextend power it is inherently unstable' (Yertle the Turtle). It legitimately blew my mind.

The forums were not my strongest suit, but they were certainly an interesting exercise in my inability to pick up on color symbolism. Or any other kind of symbolism. Every time I think my analytical ability has improved, I'm met with a massive wall of other things I failed to notice, or things that I haven't yet been taught about. My biggest challenge was not so much finding things to talk about as it was finding a way to express my idea without simply parroting my peers. I recall looking in the forum for example posts, and seeing one that said almost verbatim what I meant, and a friend of mine looking at mine later on and having the exact same experience. Complete agreement makes commenting difficult as well- it strikes me that true analysis doesn't always question, per se, more that it builds off of what it has been given, and takes it in a new direction, or further along the path it was already travelling. It also strikes me that with the ability to pick out things in poems that usually escape me will come the ability to pick things out of people's statements to examine and dissect.

As I seem to be going from my strengths to my weaknesses, I feel 'The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing' fits the next to last slot perfectly. While I found the book immensely frustrating at times, when Harvey would make edits 'due to context' without providing the context for us, it had several useful tips and tools that I know I should make use of. His book brought up many of my bad little writing habits. However, his writing instructions seemed to me to be for a very specific type of writing. Such strict commands always make me want to set an author down with a mug of their beverage of choice and an e e cummings collection to wean them from their drug of choice. However, there is a place for everything, and Harvey's writing tips are tight as a battleship. Whether they were applicable to the Sedaris essay we had to apply them to was another story, but I couldn't help trying to apply Harvey's tips to his own book. Editing a book on grammar must be a royal pain, because any mistake is going to be that much more glaring in the face of the small folio you just published on fixing people's grammar. I know for a fact it made me self conscious as I was writing about it- which may in fact have been Harvey's point. Even if you don't absorb everything on the first read through, you begin questioning yourself. "Is this as succinct as it could be?" you ask, staring at a run on sentence, "am I using the passive voice?" Questioning my own ability is doubtless the first step to improving it.

And finally, the mother of all depressing things, the terms test. For someone who 'started making flashcards in the last week of August' I feel I did fairly well. Not good, certainly, but not enough to warrant dismay. It all comes down to practice, which is why it kind of chafes me that I can't see the mistakes I've made. I understand it in this context- same exact test, wouldn't want to give out the answers, but the way I learn best is by constant trial and error. Certainly, there are a few practice sections online, but not enough to provide practice that doesn't quickly become memorization. If I know myself at all, though, I'll start asking myself 'is this a caesura? what is this supposed to symbolize?' when I'm reading something for pleasure, and I'll know that the claws of analysis have dug into my brain.

If I had to give this first week of school a purpose, it's purpose would be to tell me 'you are not as good at all of this as you thought you were, now sit down and think about it. Hard.' It's been a week of basic run downs that will take time to drill their way into my head. Each class comes with its own set of rhetoric, its own rules on essays, and its own testing quirks and thought processes that are most helpful. All of the AP Lit rules were just tossed into my arms- now it's my job to sort them out. We've had a run down of the basics on essay writing in terms of grammar, essay writing in terms of rhetoric, essay writing in terms of argumentative structure, and what parts to pick out to prove your point when you write an essay. It's certainly enough to think about for now.