Wiping away preconceived notions of AWD

Having read many of these blog posts already I can see an obvious theme that we all felt worried about taking this course. Our class is small—consisting of only 19 students—but in this summer session alone there are twenty-five 3301classes. I can only imagine that the overall consensus of expectations for all of these students before registering for these classes was fear. Of course I cannot over generalize about 25 classes from our one but based off of our first day of class I can assume that we all had reservations about the outcome of this course.

I for one judge a class heavily based off of my first day and my preconceived notions about this class gave me a very negative bias for how this first day would go. Coming off of an amazing coop abroad I was not looking forward to reentering classes for the first time in 6 months, and to make it worse I had to take three. I was advised countless times to not take such a heavy course load in a summer semester, especially when one of those courses was AWD. My advisor repeatedly warned me of the heavily work load and fast paced nature of this class and as someone who hasn’t taken a writing course since my first semester freshman year she thought this would be an overwhelming experience. I must admit that she scared me and I was dreading this class to say the least. As many of my fellow students have already written I figured it would be better to tough it out over 7 weeks then a full semester. I must admit that I have been presently surprised with this class. This isn’t to say that I haven’t found it difficult, because to be honest it’s by far the most work I’ve had to complete for a summer course and it will probably be my lowest grade. Does this mean I am not enjoying the experience? No. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. One of the ideas that our professor has tried to instill in us is that he wants us to feel disoriented and I certainly have. The style of the writing in this class is definitely out of my comfort zone but I would like to think that it has improved since my first day. 

I have never had to close read or thin slice in my field before and so I believed these assignments to be useless. Even if these papers were not my best written I am pleased with them because I learned to look at my field from a new perspective.  More then the final product itself I found the research and process of writing and revising to be the most important parts of these projects. The collaborative nature, through both class discussions and peer reviews gave me an insight on how I write and what I need to change about my writing process. In almost every writing assignment that I’ve had in college (except for college writing and a few group projects) I have done solitary research and written papers on my own with no outside influence. In this class, however, I have often changed my entire project idea based off of a discussion with a fellow student in a different major. Despite the fact that they may not know or understand psychology, they are also academics and their opinion on my writing is unbiased. Instead of writing to fit a particular prompt I will hopefully see my writing as having purpose. Overall the collaborative nature has been my favorite aspect of this class and my preconceived notions of a dreadfully boring required class have been wiped away.