Midterm Portfolio: Cover Page
All of the projects we’ve done in this first half of the semester contain two main objectives—one of increased knowledge in the field of technology and one of deeper analysis through timely study. English, to me, is the possibility of understanding between peoples—a direct result of stepping back and taking a look at a situation or person in order to understand and consequently communicate. The assignments we have been given so far this semester do just that—give us time to look deeper into a story or character, and then communicate their complexities in our own, individual way—through music, through pictures and words.
Although this is just an English class, those two ideas—understanding and consequent communication—are base necessities in all of society. This is the same reason I love English, the same reason I love reading, the same reason I love writing. It gives the opportunity to discover the product of understanding within a subject, be it a person, a period of time in history, a group of people, a vice—whatever the situation, this way of learning gives the occasion. However, the problem with English is that within a school setting, more often than not, there is not enough time to fully gravitate towards an understanding of a character or state of affairs. People are complex and authors attempt to recreate these complexities in stories. It’s really the reader’s job to figure out the character or situation and even if the reader is wrong (in terms of what the author originally intended) it’s interesting and relevant to decide what the reading is about because those even those “wrong” ideas are just amplifications of who the reader really is, whatever trait or experience he/she had to cause him/her to come to that conclusion about a story. It’s refreshing to be able to do situational or character studies and actually have enough time to reproduce them in a way such that others might actually like to see the result, in such a way that others can actually communicate with them.
With the projects we’ve done in this class, I feel that we’ve used technology on two fronts. One to be able to communicate the actual content of the stories or characters we’re learning about, and two, to use the internet and software/hardware as an actual form of networking in the form of a blog, using the internet in order to communicate rather than selective viewing. We, the class, have a common place to meet and look at our work or discuss our thoughts. I’m not suggesting that the blog has become some blossoming literary network of communication because it hasn’t really and I don’t excuse myself from that failing as I haven’t even made enough blog posts to count, but I’m just defending the structure. In the right moment, it could be successful and really enjoyable and significant at the same time, and perhaps that can be my goal for the last half of this semester.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve always thought that music, pictures and technology could serve as relevant modes of discussion so I didn’t really come to any of these realizations because of the structure of this class or these assignments—it just gave me the opportunity to actually implement exercises that are in accordance with those methods of thinking and working. I can say that even though all my talk about communication and understanding may sound hokey, it’s quite true and I hope that my work in this class translates that idea—that using these exercises to understand one another is important, and important to execute fully as in the same way stories are a model of society, our connections we can make and communicate about those situations and characters are also models of our own interactions with people on a day-to day basis and therefore the backbone of human existence.