Wrapping It All Up

Is it here already? The end of the semester? Wow. It really does not seem that long ago when I first sat down in Daniel 211 on a sunny Wednesday morning near the end of August. What a young teacher, I thought to myself. This will be interesting. It sure would be. Three projects, 14 blog posts and 15 weeks later, I can say I have successfully made it through English 103. Miss Charlsie is still young and I'm still a naive freshman here at Clemson. But she's not as young, and I'm not as naive. A lot has changed since that morning in August. I can now successfully navigate my way all around our beautiful campus, and I've adjusted significantly to life out from under my parent's roof. The workload? Overall, I'd say I've adapted pretty well, but I've still got a lot to learn. Seven semesters, if all goes as planned.

So let's get the meat of this post. "400-500 words of your reflection of the course as a whole, a personal note to say what worked best for you and what failed..." Where do I start? It looks like this post could easily degrade into another one of those where I talk about my emotions. Still don't quite have that whole idea down quite yet...let's see where we end up.
Since this course really isn't too involved, it is appropriate for graduate students to teach and, of course, this was the case in my class. I really like the idea of graduate students teaching the course as it sort of allows students to interact with one of their teachers on more of a peer-to-peer basis than a high-and-lofty-professor-to-student basis. I mean, what conventional professor would Skype their student through Facebook to talk about a rough draft? That was pretty cool. I think the interactive student-teacher experience was the most valuable facet of the course.
Overall I enjoyed the class. I would cut the readings and would have had Charlsie make breakfast more, but other than that I can't complain. (Don't pay attention to the breakfast reference. I really enjoyed those muffins on the three occasions we were lucky enough to get them.)
So I guess that's that. Maybe in closing it would be best to draw in a quote from my very first post, composed on August 26: "Hopefully by this time in four months I will be able to distinguish more clearly between good and bad reasoning as well as sharpen my own skills of persuasion." Fortunately for me, I would say the class has caused me to accomplish just that.

Project Update

It's so close. The end of my first semester in college. One-eigth of the way through my undergraduate career. Everyone says it goes by fast, but you really have to experience it for yourself. They're right. Fast. But before I start packing my bags, there are quite a few items left to accomplish to wrap up this semester. One of these is the English Multimedia Project. Since our team of four lives in four different states, we accomplished nothing over Thanksgiving. I don't regret that. We all needed the break. But this past week has been...eventful.
To record a proper description of all we've done this week, I will break up the narrative according to days of the week. Read on.
Monday: At around 9:15, the four of us met in the dining hall to discuss our plans and to assign jobs to each team member. Alex wrote up five questions for students and five questions for faculty, to be asked in video interviews. I rented a Bloggie videocamera from the library.
Tuesday: I interviewed four freshmen students in General Engineering. Since I live in the RISE (Resident in Science and Engineering) program, finding fellow engineering students was easy.
Wednesday: Our team met with Charlsie at 9:30 to update her on the progress of the project and to iron out any misunderstandings and confusions.
Thursday: Originally, we had planned to have Alex and Andy interview the General Engineering faculty Wednesday afternoon, but since Alex had a math exam to take Wednesday evening the interviews were postponed to Thursday. Alex brought up the point that we need two or three students to rebut the faculty's responses, and Andy said that we will also require input from upperclassmen engineering students who have taken CES. What did they think of the course? Looking back, was it beneficial? Why or why not? Was CES helpful in choosing an engineering specialty? If they could do it over again would they take CES? Why or why not? Alex conducted the rebuttal interviews Thursday night.
Friday: In class, Alex passed off the camera to Adrain to conduct the upperclassmen interviews.

As of now, this is as far as we've gotten. Alex has started work on the response essay, with plans for Adrian, Andy and I to contribute our portions over the weekend. As soon as Adrian finishes up the upperclassmen interviews (this afternoon), we will polish the video footage on Alex's computer and get it ready for presentation Wednesday, December 7. Let's hope all goes as planned.