Katherine Fleming

Literary Spinoffs

Exit Microtheme

How has the content this semester helped me?    This semester I have really enjoyed the readings that we have read.  It was fun to track the influences from one piece to the next, and also from each piece to real life—like with all off the allusions in Snowball’s Chance.  Although Robinson Crusoe was interesting, I think I liked the smaller readings better.  Sometimes I get overwhelmed when we have such huge novels to get through, but the smaller ones are easier to keep up with and remember things from day to day.  I really liked the poetry that we read, it was fun to get to read all of the different examples and compare several different pieces instead of just two.  I think my favorite thing that we read this semester was Snowball’s Chance.  I really liked it and I though it was very powerful and also very clever.  I also liked Animal Farm a lot.  It was the first time I had ever read either, so I liked being able to be introduced to them in a scholarly setting.  I really like reading through and finding the similarities and also looking for differences—all of the Harold Bloom stuff.

What I thought about the Teaching Style:  I get distracted really easily because my mind is always going about a million miles a minute and in about a million different directions.  I’ve been lucky with my English teachers out here this past few semesters and I have had teachers that make it easy to shut out the rest of life and engage in class.  I think Brother Babcock was right when he said that teachers seem to take on the job of also being a comedian, but if they are actually funny I think that is a useful tool.   It makes class fun and I always want to go because I don’t want to miss out on anything.  I really liked the creative ways Brother Babcock got us to participate in the module discussions and I liked how the class was broken down into the different parts each day.  Sometimes 90 min classes kill me, but when we are doing different things ever 10 or 20 minutes it makes it much more manageable.

The only thing I thought was hard was that all of the due dates for the essays were so up in the air, it made it super easy to procrastinate—maybe that is just me being irresponsible, but I would rather have had check in due dates all along the way.