Dear next year students of English 110,
This class is designed not to teach you how to write papers but to more clearly express your ideas via engaged analysis. I myself was pretty unhappy when I learned that the topic of my english class was Religion in Secular Media. I went to a Catholic highschool however I am not religious and consequently religion had a bad connotation for me. I sooned learned, however, that this title of religion was merely a topic not a focus. Individual beliefs are not relevant in this class, grades are guaged on how well you defend your opinion. So do not get stressed or discouraged if the topic of your english class next year is one you do not find interesting.
A word of advise I would give is to not procrastinate. Procrastination will cause you to breeze through assignments and not pay attention, resulting in you not to be able to actively participate in class the next day. This mannor of doing work is inefficient and causes you to miss out on practicing beneficial skills such as analysing articles. Another flaw of procrastination is it does not allow you to perform at your best. With our Analytical Research Papers this year I found myself procrastinating on certain stages of the paper. Looking back at the different stages there is a drastic difference in quality between parts when I was in the middle of the night racing to finish and then when I was writing at the library with ample amount of time.
Hopefully this letter gives you peace of mind if you are not particularly excited about your english 110 topic. Also please let the advise of actively doing assignments on time sink in. This is certainly a class that you will get out as much as you put into it.
Sincerely,
Graham
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Blog 4
Over the summer I was involved in an argument with a friend who is in the near future joining the army. After a few too many drinks his internal filter, which decides whether he should speak what is on his mind or not, was turned off. After the topic of the war in Iraq was brought up he quickly and energetically announced, "I cannot wait to get over there and kill every single Muslim person I see in the scope of my gun." (This quote is very censored and involved much more demeaning adjectives for the Iraqi people.) Immediately after this was said a dark cloud of irritated silence emerged. After a few seconds of processing what was just said me and all of my friends began grilling our friend who said the naive statement.
I will guiltily admit, my initial reaction was I want to punch his face in for saying something so naive and for over generalizing. However, after taking a few deep breaths and realizing that he had too many drinks to think clearly, I lead him away from the rest of the group that obviously wanted to punch sense into him rather than talk sense into him.
After leading him to the side of the house we were at I began to interrogate him, rather aggressively about if he truly believed what he had said minutes earlier. He owned every word of it, adding that he wanted to kill every terrorist out there. I spent over an hour talking with him trying to make relevant that not every Islamic person is a terrorist, and even farther, not every terrorist is even Islamic. I tried putting his statement into perspective by offering the scenario that a soldier from another country was given the mission to come to the U.S. and eliminate every red neck (just for an example of a small minority of a larger group of people). I asked him if the soldier would be justified in killing several hundred non-redneck people in order to get maybe one redneck. This example did allow him to see the flaws in his plan for killing every Islamic person he saw in hopes of killing the terrorists.
After this devastatingly long hour of talking we had agreed on the fact that killing everyone in sight was an appalling idea however he still had a tainted image of the Islamic religion itself. He still whole heartedly believed that the Islamic religion promoted terrorism. I did not even attempt to shake him from this belief because it seemed so ingrained into the manner in which he was raised. We left agreeing to disagree on the terms that he would keep his beliefs to himself and be open to change his opinion of the Islamic religion as he saw fit during his time spent in the army.
I will guiltily admit, my initial reaction was I want to punch his face in for saying something so naive and for over generalizing. However, after taking a few deep breaths and realizing that he had too many drinks to think clearly, I lead him away from the rest of the group that obviously wanted to punch sense into him rather than talk sense into him.
After leading him to the side of the house we were at I began to interrogate him, rather aggressively about if he truly believed what he had said minutes earlier. He owned every word of it, adding that he wanted to kill every terrorist out there. I spent over an hour talking with him trying to make relevant that not every Islamic person is a terrorist, and even farther, not every terrorist is even Islamic. I tried putting his statement into perspective by offering the scenario that a soldier from another country was given the mission to come to the U.S. and eliminate every red neck (just for an example of a small minority of a larger group of people). I asked him if the soldier would be justified in killing several hundred non-redneck people in order to get maybe one redneck. This example did allow him to see the flaws in his plan for killing every Islamic person he saw in hopes of killing the terrorists.
After this devastatingly long hour of talking we had agreed on the fact that killing everyone in sight was an appalling idea however he still had a tainted image of the Islamic religion itself. He still whole heartedly believed that the Islamic religion promoted terrorism. I did not even attempt to shake him from this belief because it seemed so ingrained into the manner in which he was raised. We left agreeing to disagree on the terms that he would keep his beliefs to himself and be open to change his opinion of the Islamic religion as he saw fit during his time spent in the army.
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