Letters

10/20/09

Dear Marlen,

            When I first came into this course I was very skeptic on how it would be, in term of work load and getting a good grade. The emails that were sent during the summer made me feel this way as well as the first day of class. I like how every assignment is either pass fail, except when the quizzes have more than one question. I don’t like that because it is possible to get two out of the three correct and still get a zero out of ten. Other than that I like how the grades are earned. This course is a lot of work for a three credit course. It is not that the work is extremely hard it is just time consuming. The hardest thing for me to do is the poems. I think that this is because I have never had to write much in any of my courses in high school or college and now I have to be somewhat creative in my writing. I like how the class is an open discussion class. I like how everyone can give their thoughts and beliefs on a topic that we are talking about and no one will make fun of them for their thoughts and no one will make anyone feel bad if they answer a question wrong. I do not like that we post all of our work on blogs because, I do not really understand how to do much on the blog except for post things, and sometimes it doesn’t post and I have to repost it the next day or it posts on someone else’s blog post when I am commenting on someone else’s blog post.  Over a;; I like the course and do not have any complaints about the way the course is structured or run.

Sincerely,

Brandon Barton

                                                                                                                                                                                                     December 14, 2009

Dear Marlen,

This class has been a class that I actually enjoyed and did not mind going to. Class time never seemed like it dragged and it always went fast. This is because I enjoyed it, it was a class that was open minded and everyone could speak their minds. When I first got the emails about this class over the summer I was scared that I was going to get a bad grade in the class and I thought I was going to get a failing grade. When the first day of class came I was thinking that I might drop the class and try to get into another English 121 class. To my surprise it did not seem to be that bad when you explained how the class was going to work. I decided to stick with the class to see what would happen and how it would be. My English 101 professor had a grading policy that was very similar to yours and I liked that kind of grading policy. It was also set up in the same kind of way in the way class was run. Everyone in both my 101 and 121 classes could say what they thought and not have to worry about someone calling them a dumb ass or a retard for what they thought, what they believed in, or how they interpreted something. That is another thing that I liked about the class.

            This class made me think a lot more than any other class that I have taken so far at IUP. That is a good thing that I was forced to think more in this class and, it made class more interesting. The topics that we went over in class never disappeared, they were used from the day we learned them till now. That is something that I have not had in any other English class that I have ever taken even in high school. That is a good thing because we always knew what to look for when we were reading and had a good idea of what we were going to be talking about in class.

            This class has taught me more about myself. At the beginning of this class I never would have thought that I could write a poem and now I have written thirty of them. Before if an assignment came up where there were two options and to write a poem was one of the two options I chose the other option. I did that because I never thought I could write a poem even though I had never really tried to write a poem.  So this class has taught me that I should not say or think I cannot do something until I try to do it because, I might be wrong and be able to do it.

            This semester I am taking four classes; English 121, Math 217, Crim 215, and Economics 101. This class was the class that I have had the most work outside of class in. I have two good professors this semester, my Crim 215 professor and you. You were informative and you could always get us talking in class. You always had our minds working and interpreting what we have read or what we had heard. You had us relating all the characters from the books we have read to characters in other books and then to real life people or, ourselves. You made us figure out what kind of person we are, what archetype we are, and that is what kind of personality we have. I have never had a professor do anything like that. You always had a good attitude when in class and you always seemed happy to be there, except that one day right after break. To sum everything up about this class I would say that, I liked this class and I learned a lot of things about characters in literature and about myself.

Thank you,

Brandon Barton