In the media, college life is portrayed as “the best four years of your life”. The Greek life and independence is strongly emphasized and gives the audience something to look forward to once they graduate high school. Unfortunately, the movies and television shows fail to pick up on the cons of being a college student. Michael Wesch and students of Kansas State University were able to create a video that showed them. The video starts out in an empty lecture hall with things written on the walls, desks and chairs. As each question is shown, it is as if the inanimate objects were speaking. A classroom full of students is on the screen and as the camera pans on students, each one raises a sheet of paper with an off-putting fact about college. The ones that I found the most relate-able were: “18% of my teachers know my name”, “My neighbor paid for class but never comes”, and “I will be $20,000 in debt after graduation”. The combination of the number of facts and silence of students help express the lack of “say” university students have nowadays in their own education. As a college student, I wholeheartedly agree with what Welsch is trying to get across to his audience with this video. Even with a class of 30 students, some teachers do not bother learning students’ names. There are students that are enrolled in a course but only show up for exams and still manage to do well in the class. With the recent increase in tuition and the difficult eligibility of financial aid, the only other option is student loans which will set me back once I graduate as well. In the video description, Wesch writes that the KSU students wish to see changes in their lifetime. Whether it is politically or economically, as long as it improves in favor of the students, hopefully we can all agree with the message in the video and try to help.
Welcome!
Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!
--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!
--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100
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