Standing Ovation: Reading Response #4

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Reading Response #4

Many students are in school because they have to, not because they want to. Either they need to be there for a certain job requirement, or because they didn’t cut it in the working world, or because they lost their job and can’t get another without a degree. Not everyone needs a university education, but for most jobs, you do need an education. While in school, which many people do not want to be at, they need to be in certain class as requirements for a program. One of these required classes are English classes. Everyone needs to know English to take other classes.

College is not for everyone, but it is where most people end up; As Professor X states “For many of my students, college was not the goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed.” Most people do go to college, for some time or another, and most people fail. Why is college something that is expected? Why are the smart people in the world the ones that graduated from a prestigious university? Why can people not be smart in their own ways?

The claim he makes about how everyone ends up there is really accurate. This shows me that even though people have other intentions, they end up conforming to what we see as “normal” in our society. The evidence he uses is by saying “I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.” This helps show that most people will go to college even though that is not their intentions. I feel this is important because it is reality and is happens every day in the world around us.

Professor X is correct with his idea that most people end up in college, I agree with this because, even though my dad has a steady good job, he needs to go back to college to relearn some things to be the best he can be at his job. He is not required to go back, but it will benefit him greatly to just go and take a few classes to further his knowledge in the area of work he is in. I feel it is important to be the best you can be, and the only way for my dad to do this, in the working world, is to go back to school and learn more!

This writing by Professor X, made me realize that most people are in college, it is the normal thing in our society, but what about other societies? What is there normal? It weird to think that each place has a different thing that is normal. The only way to explore that is to go to other places, and put yourself in their shoes!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Standing Ovation”! The title of this blog refers to the audience of active readers we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. I hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it!