January 19-20, 2013: Crowd-sourcing Back to School Hopes

[Every new semester brings with it lots of promise and possibilities; since I was on sabbatical in the fall, this will be my first time back in the classroom and the department in seven months, making it that much more of a new start. So this week I’ve highlighted some of those hopes and goals for my Spring 2013 semester. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses, and other spring hopes, of my fellow AmericanStudiers—add your hopes and thoughts, please!]

Responding to Wednesday’s post on the Capstone course, Max writes, “I do rather wish we'd had capstone when I was there... It's extremely scary going out into the world with an English degree. From all sides you get that question of ‘What are you going to do with that?’ It can be very disheartening.
How to fix that problem is a whole different barrel of fish of course. Emphasizing that it’s possible to be perfectly successful with an English degree is certainly important. Maybe point to all the people you know who have humanities degrees who are successful? Definitely pointing to people outside of academia who use their degrees. I always felt a little pigeon holed as far as job opportunities. Because seriously people love hiring English majors since we can write well.”

Responding to Friday’s post, Max adds, “Speaking as some one who was in that first year writing program it would be monumental to actual see some change/growth there. Writing 1 is to this day probably the worst class I ever took and if that could be changed and/or better teacher/teacher communication could be brought about it would be amazing in my mind. Good luck!”

Friday’s post was also Re-Tweeted by Monica Jacobe, Les Harrison, and Frank Mabee, reminding us of how many colleagues are committed to this kind of departmental and institutional change.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. So what do you think? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share?