Category Archives: Class Work

GenEd Comment

I agree with the statement above that “students’ perspectives and expectations of General Education come from their experiences” as this statement can apply to almost any subject matter. Taking GenEd classes as a freshmen I had no idea what to expect of GenEd classes and no idea which ones were said to be easy or difficult. I instead chose the GenEd classes that I thought would be interesting to me. It is inevitable that there will be easier classes than others but I believe the point of GenEds is for the experience not the credits and if the teacher cares about what they are teaching, the rigor will follow. For the students who actually want to explore different subjects outside of their major Gen.Eds are the perfect way to do so. Out of the two GenEds I took freshmen year both were plenty rigorous involving going to every single class and work outside of class about every other day. However it is a problem that these “Easy A” classes do still exist in the GenEd curriculum. For the lazy students who do only want the credit they will take the easy classes and this is not fair for the rest of us. My personal opinion is that rigor stems from the teacher wanting to teach the class and therefore teach the students. The material of any course can be rigorous subject to the fact that the professor makes it that way.

Notes Option 3: Skills

Basic knowledge is good, applicable to many careers

Necessary to know how to read and write (better than theme idea)

Badges are weird? Just another thing, no point

Taking more skills based classes is a nice break from other classes

Finance/taxes class would be nice

As well as speaking to learn how to perform well in job interview/public speaking event

Con: students only worried about checking off requirements but you are still taking the class and going to learn regardless

Few more skills classes would be nice but exploration is still very necessary

Digital communication class important in society, technology constantly growing and should be tailored towards building up online presence

No expert teachers available to teach the classes

More exploratory classes (Gen Eds) may have to be cut for the skills classes to be available

Group consensus: Exploration. Compromise between exploration and skills would be best thing, 50% exploration, 50% skills no theme!

Money classes will help a lot for the future. Learn how to do taxes, loans, accounting, stock market

Skill classes that are specific or exploratory skill classes?

Everyone required to take Gen Eds even returning students who are grown ups

Main skill course: Public speaking, money, writing

Need broad skills and specific skills that are tailored to your major. Ex: Psych major needs to know how to talk to people

Badges are optional, don’t see what benefit of badges are, people will only do them if incentives are given out

Personal Stake

I believe that Gen Ed’s are very important in our development as a student and person in college. They allow us to take classes that we might not have ever considered taking before. This gives us the opportunity to explore new fields and help shape our future academic career.

Last semester I took both an architecture course and a immigration course, I am a psych major. When I told people I was taking these classes they asked me why and my answer was because that is just what I signed up for out of the given Gen Ed options. It turned out that I loved both of these courses, my immigration class taught me how to write a real research paper and architecture class showed me there is much more to a building. The classes showed me that there is more to college than just learning about your specific field and there are many more interesting fields to be studied. Gen Ed’s help one find out what they enjoy and maybe what they want to learn more about in the future.

March 7 Satire Assignment

http://www.theonion.com/articles/malaysian-airlines-expands-investigation-to-includ,35524/

This article written by the onion is using satire to show how little has been accomplished in the search for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. The title of the article states that the search area will be widened to also include time and space. This is obviously impossible, but the article is provoking the thought that the search for the vanished Boeing 777 has not been going so well. The location where ships and helicopters have been searching for the plane has been changed many times due to the lack of solid information on where exactly the plane ended up. The article also comments on the fact that no experts know exactly what happened to the plane. In the first paragraph, the article lists a number of proposed reasons of what really happened to the plane and then finally lists the illogical one they came up with, “representatives from the Kuala Lumpur–based carrier acknowledged they had widened their investigation into the vanished Boeing 777 aircraft today to encompass not only the possibilities of mechanical failure, pilot error, terrorist activity, or a botched hijacking, but also the overarching scope of space, time, and humankind’s place in the universe.” The article successfully uses satire to try and evoke an angry response from the reader at these so called search efforts. There were 239 passengers aboard the flight when it disappeared and that is 239 families wondering where their loved ones are.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/433407/march-03-2014/caitlin-flanagan

In the video clip above Stephen Colbert is interviewing writer Caitlin Flanagan who recently wrote an article titled “The Fraternity Problem”. Colbert was in a fraternity himself and uses satire and sarcasm to disassemble Flanagan’s argument on why fraternities are bad.

Colbert starts out by asking Flanagan questions about why she thinks fraternities are so horrible and then says the worst thing he did while pledging was “pass a grease 45 record from ass-cheek to ass-cheek”. This is something that most people would consider horrible hazing but the tone that Colbert says it in makes it seem funny and not that big of a deal at all. Colbert then uses logos and statistics that 85% of fortune 500 company owners and Supreme Court Justice’s were fraternity members. For his grand finale Colbert forces Flanagan to drink a cup of beer with him that came from a mini keg that was on the set. This is poking fun of the fact that Flanagan said one of the bad things about fraternities was the “violent hazing”. By jokingly having her chug a cup of cold beer with him Colbert is showing that it is all in good fun and fraternities cannot possibly be a problem in any way.

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

I read “A modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift back in high. While reading it I was shocked and really had no idea what Swift was trying to say. The concept of eating babies is a little gross to imagine in your head, don’t you think? Through this obscure and illogical idea, Swift creates a satire that serves to criticize the current state of Ireland at the time and the people living in it.

Swift uses the appalling thought of proposing to consume babies to bring up discussion of the horrors in Irish society. Swift uses his satire to shift blame towards many people including not only the wealthy and the English but also the Irish themselves. He shocks the reader in a way that makes them think critically about the policies currently in place in Ireland.

Swift does a very good job of using such an extreme and horrible idea to his advantage, and successfully get his point across.