Our discussion regarding scholarly questions really helped me understand a bit more how writing for college is different from writing in high school. It really marked a turning point for myself, internally, that I’m in college now. This was even more honed in by how the poems for this week were more difficult, at least for me, to process and analyze than the previous ones, but no less rewarding once I figured them out!
Week 4 was full of close reading which I ended up thoroughly enjoying. In class, as we reviewed the scholarly questions, I reread Li-Young Li’s Persimmons repeatedly. Through each reading, I focused on one stanza at a time and by the end of the class had a scholarly question I was confident in. I took the same idea of slowly breaking down something piece by piece when I was watching My Cousin Vinny and even some anime. It’s generally a great way to understand and properly digest a piece of creative work.
I unfortunately was out sick this past week, but I really enjoyed the poetry. I especially liked the use of languages other than English and how they were incorporated stylistically by the poets.
My takeaway for this week is to focus a lot more on the idea of my writing, and letting that guide where the paper goes. The session we did in class of just learning how to write a scholarly question made me realize there is almost always a way to find a question within a piece of writing, but sometimes it takes a few tries to get there. I will really be utilizing the question-building process while writing the assignment for this week, as well as on assignments in the future.
I think my primary takeaway this week is the notion that there is always somewhere else for an idea to go. Both through the group close analysis we did of poems on Tuesday and the collective scholarly question revision we did on Thursday, we were able to see in real time how everyone had a different interpretation or conclusion from the same piece. The first question or the first takeaway is never a stopping point, especially when there are so many voices offering input, which is something I really love about discussions of literature.
This week was challenging yet very rewarding for me. The poems I am getting to read in this class are very fulfilling, deep and rich. All the poems are beautiful in their own way. My favorites have been “Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying” and “Immigrant Song”. Thursday was a helpful day for me and gave me a lot more confidence to create an essay question. It provided clarity for what an acceptable question should look like. It’s a little intimidating writing an essay from such a creative stand point because I have never been allowed to do so before in any English class. But I am also looking forward to writing the essay for the very same reason.
I think my takeaway for this week is the idea of revision: I’m still trying to narrow down my scholarly question, and I think the most helpful step in that for me was talking through the revisions of other questions in class. I’m usually worried about getting something perfect the forst time, and I have a hard time seeing problems after the first draft. Hopefully, knowing that I’m not capable of starting out perfect and being able to participate in revision as a group will help me to work on refining my ideas on my own.
I’ve been pretty nervous about writing this essay for next week, but Thursday’s class helped me feel much more confident about it. My English classes in high school, specifically AP Lang and AP Lit focused on strict, formulaic essay writing. I’ve been so used to sticking to that format that it really scared me to break away from that, especially without a prompt. However, talking about good scholarly questions and going over the freedom we have with this essay made me so excited. I’ve never been allowed to be so creative with an essay and I’m looking forward to crafting my own question and structure.
This week was challenging for me, both in watching Sin Nombre, and formulating an appropriate scholarly question. My big takeaway is that poems don’t have meaning. Throughout high school, I was taught to find meaning in everything, and that there is a correct and incorrect way of interpreting meaning. However, the idea that poems ‘evoke,’ is new to me, and I’m excited to explore how this manifests in analysis when I write my essay, and how it will affect my scholarly questions (mine is still being workshopped, and it’ll probably take a while before I find the right one). I hope everyone has a great weekend!
This week was stressful for me, but I feel glad that we ended our class for the week by talking about scholarly questions. I found it extremely helpful to have those examples of how to work through crafting a question, and I feel more like I know how to approach my essay now. My big takeaway is that my essay will be an argument about the poem (as opposed to analyze what the poem is trying to prove), and even though it will be hard for me to move away from the 5-paragraph style essay from highschool, I am interested to see where I will go.
I loved how flexible our class on Thursday was. Taking the time to collaborate as a group of students and asking us what we needed was so refreshing, and honestly helped so much. I loved working together as a group to rethink and evaluate a few different scholarly questions. It felt so rewarding when we finally found a “perfect” one! It additionally helped to reshape my frame of thinking about writing my own essay; I now feel like I have a better understanding of where to start and am even excited about writing. I hope to soon all grab lunch together after class one day and continue our discussions, or even just get to know one another outside of an academic setting, which will help us inside the classroom as well.
I struggled a lot with coming up with a scholarly question because I truly had no idea what to expect. There were so many different directions and discussions I wanted to explore within my essay about “Immigrant Song” and it was so difficult to feel comfortable with starting an essay when I did not have a proper question. Workshopping through the question in class was very eye opening and although I did not arrive at a satisfactory question in class, I believe I needed some time away from the poem and to do some other work in order to come back and look at it with a fresh mind. Last night, I had a lot of different thoughts and ideas on how to freshen up my scholarly question which made me feel much more confident.
I found our discussions this week really interesting and rewarding. Staring at a stack of 16 poems over the weekend, it was really difficult to give each one the time needed for in depth analysis. However, by having both the small group and full class discussions, I was able to see a number of the poems in a new light—either because of details I overlooked or insights that I just wouldn’t have ever had myself. Coming from a high school where we didn’t read very much poetry or if we did it was very much about searching for literary tools or the “message,” it’s been really nice to listen to these conversations about the complexities of poetry and how a poem can have a profound impact on us as readers.
This week was one of the more difficult – I’m still struggling to process several of the poems we read – but definitely really helpful in preparing for our first essay. I particularly appreciated the group activity where we refined scholarly questions as a group, as I felt it gave me more direction for my own essay.
This week has definitely been a whirlwind. However, one of the most academically rewarding weeks yet. The poems we read this week have been so richly dense, that I feel like I haven’t digested them all yet. A few of my favorites were “Choi Jeong Min” and “Do you speak Persian?”. Choosing only one of these to write about were difficult because there are so many aspects in each of these poems I would love to unpack.
Coming up with a scholarly question has also been stressful, but a good type of stressful because I am learning to un-learn the typical 5 paragraph English essay structure. Even though I am very nervous for our upcoming essay, I am excited to talk about my poem and explore this new essay structure!
This week has been the most academically pressing yet, but I’ve felt challenged and expanded in a positive way during our classes. Especially today, formulating and workshopping scholarly questions together took an intense amount of brain power, and though tough and tiring, it was genuinely helpful for my understanding of how to build a framework question to map a compelling essay. It can be vulnerable and scary to open up our thoughts to criticism, but I felt that we handled it well and made good progress as a collective. Also a growth moment for me was our discussion of Sin Nombre on Tuesday. Hearing other people’s thoughts and meaningful reflections allowed me to see the movie for the art that it was rather than just how it made me feel. I particularly resonated with the idea of multiple love stories and the significance of the one between Smiley and Casper rather than Casper and Sayra. I’m left still thinking about if that’s really the love story Fukunaga insists is the focus of the film (rather than immigration). Good luck to everyone during the endless midterm season!
Our discussion regarding scholarly questions really helped me understand a bit more how writing for college is different from writing in high school. It really marked a turning point for myself, internally, that I’m in college now. This was even more honed in by how the poems for this week were more difficult, at least for me, to process and analyze than the previous ones, but no less rewarding once I figured them out!
Week 4 was full of close reading which I ended up thoroughly enjoying. In class, as we reviewed the scholarly questions, I reread Li-Young Li’s Persimmons repeatedly. Through each reading, I focused on one stanza at a time and by the end of the class had a scholarly question I was confident in. I took the same idea of slowly breaking down something piece by piece when I was watching My Cousin Vinny and even some anime. It’s generally a great way to understand and properly digest a piece of creative work.
I unfortunately was out sick this past week, but I really enjoyed the poetry. I especially liked the use of languages other than English and how they were incorporated stylistically by the poets.
My takeaway for this week is to focus a lot more on the idea of my writing, and letting that guide where the paper goes. The session we did in class of just learning how to write a scholarly question made me realize there is almost always a way to find a question within a piece of writing, but sometimes it takes a few tries to get there. I will really be utilizing the question-building process while writing the assignment for this week, as well as on assignments in the future.
I think my primary takeaway this week is the notion that there is always somewhere else for an idea to go. Both through the group close analysis we did of poems on Tuesday and the collective scholarly question revision we did on Thursday, we were able to see in real time how everyone had a different interpretation or conclusion from the same piece. The first question or the first takeaway is never a stopping point, especially when there are so many voices offering input, which is something I really love about discussions of literature.
This week was challenging yet very rewarding for me. The poems I am getting to read in this class are very fulfilling, deep and rich. All the poems are beautiful in their own way. My favorites have been “Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying” and “Immigrant Song”. Thursday was a helpful day for me and gave me a lot more confidence to create an essay question. It provided clarity for what an acceptable question should look like. It’s a little intimidating writing an essay from such a creative stand point because I have never been allowed to do so before in any English class. But I am also looking forward to writing the essay for the very same reason.
I think my takeaway for this week is the idea of revision: I’m still trying to narrow down my scholarly question, and I think the most helpful step in that for me was talking through the revisions of other questions in class. I’m usually worried about getting something perfect the forst time, and I have a hard time seeing problems after the first draft. Hopefully, knowing that I’m not capable of starting out perfect and being able to participate in revision as a group will help me to work on refining my ideas on my own.
I’ve been pretty nervous about writing this essay for next week, but Thursday’s class helped me feel much more confident about it. My English classes in high school, specifically AP Lang and AP Lit focused on strict, formulaic essay writing. I’ve been so used to sticking to that format that it really scared me to break away from that, especially without a prompt. However, talking about good scholarly questions and going over the freedom we have with this essay made me so excited. I’ve never been allowed to be so creative with an essay and I’m looking forward to crafting my own question and structure.
This week was challenging for me, both in watching Sin Nombre, and formulating an appropriate scholarly question. My big takeaway is that poems don’t have meaning. Throughout high school, I was taught to find meaning in everything, and that there is a correct and incorrect way of interpreting meaning. However, the idea that poems ‘evoke,’ is new to me, and I’m excited to explore how this manifests in analysis when I write my essay, and how it will affect my scholarly questions (mine is still being workshopped, and it’ll probably take a while before I find the right one). I hope everyone has a great weekend!
This week was stressful for me, but I feel glad that we ended our class for the week by talking about scholarly questions. I found it extremely helpful to have those examples of how to work through crafting a question, and I feel more like I know how to approach my essay now. My big takeaway is that my essay will be an argument about the poem (as opposed to analyze what the poem is trying to prove), and even though it will be hard for me to move away from the 5-paragraph style essay from highschool, I am interested to see where I will go.
I loved how flexible our class on Thursday was. Taking the time to collaborate as a group of students and asking us what we needed was so refreshing, and honestly helped so much. I loved working together as a group to rethink and evaluate a few different scholarly questions. It felt so rewarding when we finally found a “perfect” one! It additionally helped to reshape my frame of thinking about writing my own essay; I now feel like I have a better understanding of where to start and am even excited about writing. I hope to soon all grab lunch together after class one day and continue our discussions, or even just get to know one another outside of an academic setting, which will help us inside the classroom as well.
I struggled a lot with coming up with a scholarly question because I truly had no idea what to expect. There were so many different directions and discussions I wanted to explore within my essay about “Immigrant Song” and it was so difficult to feel comfortable with starting an essay when I did not have a proper question. Workshopping through the question in class was very eye opening and although I did not arrive at a satisfactory question in class, I believe I needed some time away from the poem and to do some other work in order to come back and look at it with a fresh mind. Last night, I had a lot of different thoughts and ideas on how to freshen up my scholarly question which made me feel much more confident.
I found our discussions this week really interesting and rewarding. Staring at a stack of 16 poems over the weekend, it was really difficult to give each one the time needed for in depth analysis. However, by having both the small group and full class discussions, I was able to see a number of the poems in a new light—either because of details I overlooked or insights that I just wouldn’t have ever had myself. Coming from a high school where we didn’t read very much poetry or if we did it was very much about searching for literary tools or the “message,” it’s been really nice to listen to these conversations about the complexities of poetry and how a poem can have a profound impact on us as readers.
This week was one of the more difficult – I’m still struggling to process several of the poems we read – but definitely really helpful in preparing for our first essay. I particularly appreciated the group activity where we refined scholarly questions as a group, as I felt it gave me more direction for my own essay.
This week has definitely been a whirlwind. However, one of the most academically rewarding weeks yet. The poems we read this week have been so richly dense, that I feel like I haven’t digested them all yet. A few of my favorites were “Choi Jeong Min” and “Do you speak Persian?”. Choosing only one of these to write about were difficult because there are so many aspects in each of these poems I would love to unpack.
Coming up with a scholarly question has also been stressful, but a good type of stressful because I am learning to un-learn the typical 5 paragraph English essay structure. Even though I am very nervous for our upcoming essay, I am excited to talk about my poem and explore this new essay structure!
This week has been the most academically pressing yet, but I’ve felt challenged and expanded in a positive way during our classes. Especially today, formulating and workshopping scholarly questions together took an intense amount of brain power, and though tough and tiring, it was genuinely helpful for my understanding of how to build a framework question to map a compelling essay. It can be vulnerable and scary to open up our thoughts to criticism, but I felt that we handled it well and made good progress as a collective. Also a growth moment for me was our discussion of Sin Nombre on Tuesday. Hearing other people’s thoughts and meaningful reflections allowed me to see the movie for the art that it was rather than just how it made me feel. I particularly resonated with the idea of multiple love stories and the significance of the one between Smiley and Casper rather than Casper and Sayra. I’m left still thinking about if that’s really the love story Fukunaga insists is the focus of the film (rather than immigration). Good luck to everyone during the endless midterm season!