Course Review - English

Pretty much every college makes their freshman go through some form of a First Year Writing Seminar. Usually, the only way around taking one is to do exceptionally well on a placement exam or to pass the Advanced Placement English exam according to the standards of the college you are enrolled in. This means that the majority of freshman end up enrolled in a First Year Writing Seminar. I completely dreaded taking the First Year Writing Seminar. I envisioned some cranky professor teaching a bunch of underachieving students how to declare a thesis and organize an essay: both things that any student should have mastered by high school graduation. But I was pleasantly surprised by the class. Instead of just reviewing boring basics, it was more about perfecting previously acquired writing skills. It also was a nice introduction to the way that college professors handle class discussions. I also was able to get a better grasp on my time management skills from the way assignments were distributed. I thought that the class was a great way to transition from high school to college because college professors expect a different level of writing that high school teachers do. Taking the First Year Writing Seminar allowed me to become acquainted with the new expectations.

English Composition II, had an instructor that was much more in touch with the students and almost to a fault. Part of the experience of my school is receiving feedback periodically from the instructor or instructors assistant via email. The teacher would tell you that a mistake had been made but unless asked to point out where left the student to guess where the sentence may be wrong. This can be very beneficial if the student is close to having it right, but to do this with students that thought the sentence structure was perfect, it can be a tough query. Several times students had to finally request that the instructor stop sending confusing email about assignments with no hints on what's wrong or how to make it better. By the end of the class the instructor had discovered that this method isn't a good thing to continue and began making helpful comments int he emails, which made a huge difference in teaching methods! The class, by the end, had given me the idea that simple sentences are good sentences and not to over complicate an article or paragraph.  Overall, that class with that instructor I would not recommend to other students. If Ashford can work out their instructor problems I think the class has more potential than it displayed. 

I like online web courses for various reasons.  It's convenient, you manage your own time, and normally you do the work all by yourself with some feedback from your classmates once in a while.  The creative writing online course was amazing though, and an experience I don't think that I'll ever forget.  As an English major, reading tends to always come at the forefront, and when it's not reading literary classics, it's learning about grammar, which can be only so enjoyable.  There are never enough classes that aim to improve writing, probably under the assumption that every English major is fated to become a teacher.  Whatever the case, I was lucky and able to snag a Creative Writing spot before it filled up. Professor Roy Burkhead knows the meaning of work.  He assigns reading packets every month, much of which can be a daunting task because of the number of reading material and reaction papers you must write to each section.  The stories were often interesting though, and I didn't have much trouble writing a two-page reaction paper to what I've read.  Some classmates found it difficult to respond to each packet in the time he gives, but I was fortunate because I didn't take too many classes that semester. I will warn that Professor Burkhead grades hard.  You must complete your packet work and the short story assignment, as he doesn't believe in giving partial credit for any assignment.  These packets are worth 160 points each, and you can't afford to miss a single assignment or face the probability of failing. If you overcome those two obstacles however, you'll find that a lot of the reading material is interesting and compelling to aspiring writers.  I enjoyed the short story assignment the most, where you need to develop a short story over the course of the semester.  Having the time to work on a creative piece of writing rather than a research paper was immensely satisfying, and I learned more about how to write and compel my readers through this course.  So I say, difficult professor or not, take it!  Just make sure you schedule an ample amount of time to work on all of the material, and you will learn a lot.

Ok, first I want to say - I loved this class! The teacher kept this thing moving smoothly and with few hiccupps. Feedback on class work was a bit slow in the return, but it didn't let the teacher stop from moving onto new material while dealing with the old material. It sounds like it's really a bad way to teach, but somehow the instructor, with the help of the TA of course, pulled it off nicely. The tests and written and assignments covered more about the history and viewing angles than anything else in the first few weeks. As the class progressed the teacher led us into film subjects such as the process of the story board going from written story to video and how plot is worked into video in contrast to the written story, so be sure that close notes are taken from the teacher and TA… not to mention the text itself. Oddly, near the class end the more simplistic topics get covered, as if the author simply ran out of things to say about film and stories that we don’t already know. The topics covered in class during the final weeks were genre and films impact on society, which maybe should have been in a cultural anthropology class, seeing how it affects large numbers of our culture.

High school never tends to prepare a student for college, even though that's always what they promise.  In this case, I can say that the only piece of American Literature I remember reading was Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.  I'd also known some tidbits here and there about a few authors, just never really enough to recall the difference between them. Then I took my American Literature class.  Not even a full course but a survey, a brief glance at famous authors and various works of literature.  Taught by Professor Sandy Hughes, I learned to love and appreciate the written works I'd never had a chance to read until that class. Any class is going to require reading, and this class is no different.  However, the teaching style of Professor Hughes is very open.  She is capable of making anything interesting, from recounting stories that relate to the content we are learning, to really showing passion for her field by setting up displays of her favorite authors.  She is one of those professors that you can enjoy listening to, and one of the few that can make lecture notes compelling. Her tests can be somewhat difficult.  There are three tests in all, and she requires you to remember a lot of quotes from the authors we read.  That can be difficult, but if you study and acknowledge the different beliefs of each author, it becomes a lot easier to identify what they say. There is also a  make-up project which she uses in case someone did badly on a test and wants to make it up.  I don't know if she changes this project each semester, but the project we could choose to do was to go for a week without using any technology.  We then had to write about our experiences and what we did with the time.  It was an interesting experiment and one that didn't require any research other than our own time and dedication. Hughes is an amazing professor and if you are in the English field, be sure to take one of her classes.  You'll come out learning a lot and gaining a thorough appreciation for the authors before our time.

I am a journalism major, which also means a lot of reading a lot of the time, and a lot of english classes! I have taken many other classes that have concentrated on grammar and sentence structure, but it seems that the creative writing class you experienced was well controlled and guided. I have this class coming up, and I am glad I took the time to read your post. I now have an idea of what to expect in the semester to come. The teacher you had sounds like he pushed you all very hard, but not to the point of breaking a dedicated student, and I think most are better for it.  I loved the fact that the class you took had a short story as a final. That is a brilliant way to test what the student has learned and the their writing talent. I have to say I think I will enjoy taking this class, if my experience turns out to be any thing like yours. With all the work, was the teacher fair with the grading, or did the class work off a curve? I'm just curious, I know it changes with each teacher and class. 

With a good professor and a good class, you can go leaps and bounds in terms of learning.  This was the case for Theories of Rhetoric and Composition.  I've learned so much from this class that I continue to practice some of the strategies I've learned in the classroom. Don't let the name confuse you too badly.  It sounds difficult, but with Professor David Lenoir, everything was easy to understand.  Basically we went over various teaching strategies for high school English teachers.  We read from three different books and had to write a response for each one before class but the class only met once a week so there was plenty of time to get that done.  Responding to the text also helped generate discussion during the class period, which was the whole point of it.  These discussions were actually fun and interesting to listen to; quite possibly the one class where I never felt a need to fall asleep! There is a lot of reading involved though, and this you cannot fake since you need to respond to each one.  Depending on the book portion assigned, it can be difficult getting through a chapter and understanding the gibberish that the author wrote.  That one I skimmed through rather than read.  The other two are more interesting and should hold your attention. After each discussion we would do a little writing activity that could be incorporated easily into a high school classroom.  For one exercise, we picked a random adjective and a random noun from a cup, then had to develop a poem about it.  For another example, we would give opinions to a text via a small piece of paper.  The papers would be shuffled and given out to random classmates who would address this opinion and what they thought.  It was all really interesting. The big grade was to compose a green folder with four pieces of writing.  Professor Lenoir is very lax about it, and some classmates even used the writing exercises in class as portfolio pieces.  When all the pieces are finished, he allowed two students in the class to grade the portfolio anonymously, then grades it himself, combining the three grades to form one final one.  This was not a bad class at all, and for all the reading that was required, it was to be expected- this is a college English class after all!  The atmosphere was fantastic, and I hope that Mr. Lenoir goes on to teach that class for many years to come.

English 100 is my school’s introduction to English for all freshman students. I love writing but I didn’t love the class. We wrote a lot of papers and received good feedback from our professor on our papers but I didn’t really learn anything new. The corrections made on my papers may have been helpful but it still felt like a high school English class. Through middle school and high school I remember learning about things like persuasive essays, determining the audience you are writing to, grammar, format, etc. This class basically just took everything we had previously learned about writing and tried to show us how to use our knowledge of writing effectively. We would have a lecture every week that I surprisingly enjoyed. I would take some notes during the lecture and I usually found a few things in each lecture that I would try to use in my next essay. This is a good class for students who don’t love English because it fills a requirement and isn’t too challenging. For students who really love English and want to do things with writing that they have not done in the past, they will not find what they are looking for in this class. With that said, the class is supposed to be a review class and it does offer a review on high school English.

It’s all about the greats. For avid readers, this is the perfect class! In this class you will read only classics, the books that have gone down in history as being fantastic for one reason or many. You’ll read the books and learn why it was that they became so famous. If you’re an English major taking the class or just someone who loves to read (like me!) than I would definitely recommend taking a Literature class.             In this class you will read, read, and read. I loved having to put aside time I normally spent doing homework to relax and read a great book. Finding good books can be hard to do, and having so many presented to me was a treat. You will talk about your views on the book with other students and interpret meanings in the text. Being able to analyze a book in this way is a mark of great writing on the author’s part. You just can’t do that with most modern books!             The major downfall of this class is that it takes time. You’ve got to be great at organizing your time to get in enough reading to do a good job in the class, so prepare for that. Another warning: don’t take this class if classic literature is not your genre of choice. Some of these classic books are a different style than we’re used to, and the writing may be hard to understand at times. Take these things into account, and you’ll definitely love this class. 

I’m sure that not all universities have this class. It’s pretty unique! It was a class that met once a week in the campus library. For one amazing hour every week, students enrolled in the class had the opportunity of listening to local authors come and share their work. It was incredible! For someone who likes to read and hear new works of art from the creators themselves, this class is for you. If your university offers something like this, go for it!             We got to hear all kinds of writing, right from its source. We listened to local authors of creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. They would read to us excerpts from their work and then discuss what they had read. It was truly amazing to listen to the authors telling their own work and then filling us in on how it came to be or their experiences with it. I devour almost any kind of writing, and so this class had me on the edge of my seat, scribbling down notes, my eyes and smile wide.             It was also a very easy class. We had to submit a write up about each author (piece of cake) and purchase one book by one of the authors of our choice and read it that semester. We then gave a review of that book on a book selling website. That was it. No tests, nothing. If you love to read or you love to write, take this class! 

  This course was taken as a required literature course in order to fulfill my ancient texts requirement. This class was mostly discussion based and the topics were very broad. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to scratch below the surface to look for meanings. While the course looked at many texts from the Greek and Roman worlds, a large portion of the semester focused on Plato’s Republic along with the dissection and application of the Socratic Method.                 I do not recommend a course such as this one for someone who lacks a very strong classical or philosophical background. While I’m sure that my classmates did learn from the course, it was obvious that they did not take away as much from it as they would have liked. Having been educated in classics, I managed to use my prior knowledge as a foundation and lens for analysis. If taking such a course is still of interest, I strongly urge the student to take at least one introductory course regarding ancient civilizations with an emphasis on the classical world. In addition to this, it would be wise to familiarize themselves with the great philosophers of Greek and Roman times. There is no need to take a course on this. Having some general knowledge about Plato, Sophocles, and Aristotle and their contributions to philosophy can go a long way in a course such as this one.

  This course focused on the birth of British Modernism as well as the epic Ulysses by James Joyce. Honestly, I did not think this would be a likeable course, but I was proven wrong on so many levels. My first doubts came as we read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. This is perhaps due to the fact that I had never been a fan of Virginia Woolf since I had read The Lighthouse. The writing seemed cardboard and just so ordinary. There was nothing more that grabbed my attention until we dived into Ulysses. Now, Ulysses was a daunting book well over four hundred pages. Not to mention, there was almost always some obscure reference which had to be decoded or researched. It also did not help that Joyce decided that he wanted to write this work as an experiment and experimented with different styles and forms in every chapter. Funnily enough, the whole story is about what happened in a twenty-four hour day in Dublin, Ireland.  It was hilarious, and there was something that everyone liked about the book. It was also one of those books that a student could open to the middle in order to begin reading. They would not have missed anything from the first half of the book that they would need later on to understand the story. I recommend a course like this to anyone who is looking to take a course centered around a specific author.

  This class was definitely one of my favorite literature courses. I had a very enthusiastic professor; but even if this wasn’t true, the course material was interesting enough that it kept us motivated to do the readings. The material ranged from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to poems by Shelly and Coleridge. I was not a fan of some of the poetry we read; but I did take quite a liking to Shelly and some of the Romantic poets. The writers also had very interesting lives! Many people do not know about Shelly’s Casanova-esque lifestyle or how his wife came to write Frankenstein (she won an informal contest held with Shelly and a friend of his). For students who cannot bring themselves to work through writing similar to Beowulf or Chaucer’s (Early English and Middle English), I recommend that they take a literature course which focuses on works written after this period for a more enriching experience. The writer’s and poet’s works will be in more modern English which will make the reading process easier (especially if this is just taken as an elective or a course of interest). During the first week, make sure to take a look at the syllabus to see if the workload given by your professor is manageable. My class had to have a discussion with the professor that his workload was unreasonable since it was too much to handle with other courses and, to add more weight, that we could not cover all of the material in class.

                  I was not looking forward to looking at Medieval works and a little excited about finally getting to read Dante’s Inferno (which was the only part focused on in this course). I was happily surprised and found myself voraciously reading all of the material provided in class. This class really gave Medieval Literature another dimension which was deeper than just an undecipherable mix of languages written about holy saints and kings.                 There were mentions of saints (Eulalie) and kings (Charlemagne), of course. However, the writers of the middle ages also had an amazing sense of humor! There is one unicum (only one copy exists) of The Pilgrimage of Charlemagne. There is probably a very good reason there is only one copy. This story represents Charlemagne of France, who was painted as a noble king in other works, as a vain, petty leaders who wages war against another, more noble, king just because his wife said the other king was more majestic, taller, and wears his crown better. This shows that not all Medieval writings are stuffy or serious. Dante’s Inferno was everything the class had hoped it would be and I recommend that every university student should read once (and then read it again with footnotes).

The ENG 219 Creative Writing class offered by Finlandia University was probably one of my favorite classes offered.  As an aspiring writer myself, I found the class both informative as well as inspiring.  We studied different short stories, wrote some of our own, and after each assignment was completed, turned in, graded, and handed back we would take turns and share what we had written for a peer review.  I found it extremely interesting the way my classmates worded their comments after I had read my material aloud and by having the experience of sharing what I had written, the experience gave me significantly more confidence in my future writings. During the poetry section of the course, we were to share a poem that we had written, and the class would take turns trying to identify what the original intent of the poem was.  Although my poetry tends to be more on the esoteric side, I found it quite peculiar how my classmates interpreted the meaning behind them.  We also learned about different styles and formats of poetry writing, identified the different tones and points of view.  I was also introduced to the different ways a poem can be written, that poetry does not necessarily have to rhyme but has to have a certain flow to it. If given the chance, I would not hesitate to take this class again.  The instructor was extremely helpful and insightful (Timo Koskinen) and I really admired his perspective and knowledge.