ENG 111 Wrap-up

I’m just about done with English class for the semester. I’ve handed in my final paper and presented on it. We’ve got one more class, but I think that’s mostly going to be getting papers back and such; no more homework to do. It’s been an interesting experience, and really good on the whole. There were a few things that were kinda annoying, and made me think about this whole way of going about educating people. But even that has at least given me something to react to, and helped give me some idea of what to do next.

I deliberately chose the real, in-person class experience over the more convenient distance-learning option. This turned out to be a really good class for that. There was a lot of very lively, even heated discussion. Several of the folks in the class turned out to be really smart, interesting people. I’ll want to stay in touch with them. I also really liked the professor, which is really important. I wouldn’t have worked as hard to earn the respect of someone who was just an email address to me.

Lest you get the wrong impression, let me say right off that this was really good for an academic class. The trouble is that that’s not how I’m used to learning things. I’m used to learning things at work, which means that the scope and level of detail of what you need to learn, and the time you have, are all driven by real-world concerns. There’s a goal that you’re aiming for, and you’ve got some latitude to figure out the best way to get there. There’s also a degree of focus that you miss by spreading the experience over a semester.

Learning in a classroom setting feels strangely arbitrary. It’s driven much more by process. Everyone has to go through the same material at more or less the same pace. That’s probably good when you’re trying to provide a measurably decent education for kids who may not be particularly motivated. It also makes sense when they don’t have much outside experience to bring to the topic. The problem is that the more engaged you are, the more annoying it’s going to be. You turn off the people who would get the most out of it. The flip side is that it assumes a common base of knowledge. That’s less of a given when you have someone like me jumping in randomly. I couldn’t slow down when I ran into trouble. I really needed a remedial detour to catch up on basic study skills.

The great thing about the class was the topic focus. It’s an English class, but you need something to write about, so we were reading about and discussing various aspects of globalization. That was really fun. It meshed with a lot of the non-fiction I’ve been reading over the last few years; and with students from all over the world, the class had a lot of personal experience to contribute. I could have spent months more on this. It was frustrating that I didn’t get to chase down all the stuff I found really interesting.

I would also have loved to have economics and sociology and political science professors on hand to pepper with questions. When you stop and think about it, it’s really weird how compartmentalized it all is. It’s also strange to have a single teacher running the whole show, rather than a bunch of people working together to figure something out, maybe with an expert or two thrown in.

So maybe what I need now is a writers’ group or something. A friend suggested that initially, but I think I was right to do the class first. I sorta had to learn what I didn’t know, so I could figure out what I need to learn. Like I said, one of the things I need is basic study skills. I don’t have a process for absorbing information. I read a lot of non-fiction on my own, just for fun. I even take notes on it, in a haphazard way. But since it’s just for fun, it’s very undirected. Not that I need to be totally goal oriented, but I do need to be more mindful. I at least need to work up some sort of Cliff notes, so I don’t have to re-read the whole book again. There’s also not much point reading if I don’t ever share what I learn. I should be putting out book reports, and probably working what I learn into a larger paper.

Rather than just randomly going through the books on my shelf, I’m thinking I should pick a topic and try to write about it. I’ve got a bunch. There’s post-zombie reconstruction: How do you boot-strap a society and an economic system? Sorta related to that is a bunch of medieval history; not the big events, but what daily life was like and how society fit together. On another tangent, I want to learn how to grow vegetables, and that completely goes down a rabbit hole about nutrients and microbes and ecosystems. I can already see that’s going to get completely out of hand. I’ve also got a bunch of professional geek stuff I need to learn. Related to that, there’s a bunch of mid-life/mid-career crisis, What’s really important to me? kinda questions.

Partly, I do need to write just for practice of writing, but I should do something more with it. If nothing else, writing forces me to pin down what I’m thinking about in some structured way. It gives me a way to track the development of my ideas and understanding. It would be cool if that also turned out to be something worth sharing.