Adjusting to College - Yay!

Literature and Civilizations II is my first college-level English course, and one of our continuous class assignments is to blog. Basically, I get to fine-tune my writing skills with the whole class (and any strangers who find this) viewing and commenting on my posts. As a freshman, this is a little bit intimidating. I expected the class to have mostly freshmen, I am not sure why but I did, and there are actually not many freshmen and a bunch of upperclassmen. So not only must I learn to write at a college level and have my attempts graded, I will pretty much be evaluated by everyone. However, I am thankful that blogs are casual.

Over the past few weeks of class, I learned that this situation was no big deal whatsoever. We are all in the same boat. Maybe a few people know each other, but many of us are strangers. I am a fairly shy person, but I have still found people to talk to and I am getting comfortable. Sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, I can see everyone else doing the same thing and settling in. 

So now I am excited. We have some pretty funny people in the class, and everyone is intelligent. Conversations that were already good before are going to get much better now that everyone is opening up and ready to express themselves freely. In my opinion and past experiences, the knowledge you absorb from a class and the experience you get out of it over all is greatly based off of the environment the teacher and the students create. If the teacher is laid-back enough to let students take the reigns but still help guide us, then we learn not only about whatever subject we are discussing, but also develop critical thinking and discussion skills. If there is an atmosphere of relaxed but serious students willing to participate, then the class will delve deeper into topics and have fun with it at the same time.  Which is all wonderful, it is like the ultimate dream class for teachers and students (well, students who actually want to learn). I feel like this is exactly the type of class environment we are beginning to create.

I learned all my worries were pointless. Any worries I did have were most likely shared and are dissolving as everyone starts to relax and get into the swing of things. I learned and am still learning that college education is flexible and open to interpretation and creativity, as evident in the wide variety of the “What is humor?” video projects. I love the new freedom of being able to take liberties with assignments and getting a general schedule from syllabi and planning for myself from that, and not simply being told what to do. This is probably a lot of old news to any one reading this that is not a freshman, but I am a freshman so it is all new to me and it has me extremely excited for the next four years.