So, final English exam went well. Three critical analyses to write - two compulsory and one free choice. It was tough producing work under time pressure and although I had a lot to say (it was an open book exam), I think I drifted off topic now and then in the sense of writing about plot rather than about style or content or word usage. I guess / hope that as I get more used to exams, I'll do better. Still waiting for final result on that.
I handed in my final Religious Studies research paper on time - 2,700 words on Baptism in the Holy Spirit, for which I got 80% - 40/50. In his comment, he had nothing but good things to say about it - excellence in research, structure, writing, critical engagement ... which leaves me wondering how on earth one could improve on 40/50? What would I need to do to get a higher mark, if he didn't fault anything? Where was the lack? I'm not sure, and rather doubt I'll ever find out now that the course is over.
The coursework for the second semester is starting to appear on the uni intranet and it looks so cool! I know LING 101 is simply a beginner language course, but I really like the look of it. Nothing posted yet for FILM 101. And for my third paper - the writing workshop - well, it is already all systems go! Received a bunch of emails from the facilitator which included a first writing exercise to be completed during this vacation break and prepared for presentation at the first course meeting on Monday 11th July. Woo hoo! Time to get writing, methinks!
But for now, I'm on holiday, thousands of kms away from Welly and my kids, spending time in South Africa with my aging parents and some of my oldest and dearest friends.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Writing Workshop
Just picked up the email that said I'm accepted into this workshop!! I was really very doubtful about getting in, as there are always far more applications than there are places and according to the admin lady, the standard amongst applicants was very high this year, but I made it! I am REALLY excited about this one!
(Just hoping that I'm not biting off more than I can chew, taking three courses... but they're ALL brilliant and ALL in fields I absolutely love and feel so at home and comfortable in, so hell, why not give it a go?
This workshop introduces you to key craft skills as well as to the magic of the imagination. It is led by well-known children’s writer Eirlys Hunter, and among other things offers an insider visit to one of New Zealand’s best-kept secrets, the National Library’s astonishing Children’s Book Collection..... we do not teach a specific set of predetermined skills. Our aim is to develop the imaginative capacity and individual literary skills of emerging writers in a stimulating workshop environment.
(Just hoping that I'm not biting off more than I can chew, taking three courses... but they're ALL brilliant and ALL in fields I absolutely love and feel so at home and comfortable in, so hell, why not give it a go?
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Tutors and other people
A word about tutors:
I had two very different tutors this semester. Both were guys and both were post-grads, but that's where the similarity ends. Let's call the English tutor John and the Reli tutor Joe . We met with John weekly and with Joe every second week.
John is probably in his mid-20s. He has floppy dark hair, brown eyes and dresses in that shorts, jandals and a big shirt style so typical of your average Kiwi bloke. John is doing his Masters on Milton. He really likes Milton, he's interested in him and takes every chance to mention him in relation to whatever we are talking about in English. Now, John was very new to tutoring. The first session was a disaster: he handed out some poems, made us go round the room reading them - no one knew where they were supposed to start or stop, or even how to pronounce the weird Old English words. At the end of each poem, he's say: so what do you guys think? and after a few moments, someone might say something and he'd just nod, and the silence would continue. We'd then go on to reading the next poem and the same thing would happen. If someone asked what something meant, he'd hunt about on the page to find the reference and then say he had no idea, maybe it meant such-and-such. He also kept checking the time on his cell phone, as anxious as any of us for the torture to be over. We all left ten minutes early.
Now, one of my new mature student friends was in the tut with me and she immediately arranged to be moved to another group. I asked as well, but due to numbers they couldn't swop me out. So I talked to the senior tutor and gave her feedback on why I wanted to be moved. She supervises the tutors and she must have done a really good job because from then on, John just got better and better. He relaxed, he brought biscuits, he came up with really interesting exercises, he wrote down everything we contributed on the white board, he was active, he divided us into groups and got us to debate issues - in other words, he engaged with us and more importantly, he engaged our attention during the tutorial too. By the end, we were a cohesive group and we'd learnt a lot and we were all sorry to say goodbye. He was a bit slow with marking our assignments but kept us informed and apologized for the delays, one of which was due to personal bereavement.
Now, Religious studies and Joe. Joe is doing a PhD in - I don't know what. He's been in the PhD program since 2007. Joe always wear a cap, a big fisherman's jersey, jandals, has fuzzy facial hair and a perpetual half-grin on his face. If I'd seen him on the street, my first thought would not have been 'academic' - I'd have been looking for the collecting tin on the ground. Joe, however, is very academic indeed. He runs his tutorials from his chair at the head of the room and his method is to simply rehash on of the set readings and ask a number of questions. Most of the students just sit and stare, a few contribute a thought now and then. When they ask questions, it is usually about which reading they should pick to write about for the next essay. After this discussion, Joe then gives us one or two of the preceeding week's student essays to read and comment on. Generally they are essays which have scored 9 or 9.5 out of 10. It's quite hard commenting on the work of your peers, even if it is anonymous. When it comes to returning essays, Joe is also very, very slow and his comments generally come off a pre-typed list (I know this because sometimes they'll show up as ... 4. In future essays, you should .. etc - but there is no 1 or 2 or 3 preceding it. One girl I know got a comment that started 11. Try to ... etc. He knows everything about citations and how to put together an academic argument, but on the whole he seems to be going through the motions with us, rather than exhibiting any genuine enthusiasm for his subject.
John may have been young and relatively inexperienced but in the end - for me - I think he was the better tutor.
I had two very different tutors this semester. Both were guys and both were post-grads, but that's where the similarity ends. Let's call the English tutor John and the Reli tutor Joe . We met with John weekly and with Joe every second week.
John is probably in his mid-20s. He has floppy dark hair, brown eyes and dresses in that shorts, jandals and a big shirt style so typical of your average Kiwi bloke. John is doing his Masters on Milton. He really likes Milton, he's interested in him and takes every chance to mention him in relation to whatever we are talking about in English. Now, John was very new to tutoring. The first session was a disaster: he handed out some poems, made us go round the room reading them - no one knew where they were supposed to start or stop, or even how to pronounce the weird Old English words. At the end of each poem, he's say: so what do you guys think? and after a few moments, someone might say something and he'd just nod, and the silence would continue. We'd then go on to reading the next poem and the same thing would happen. If someone asked what something meant, he'd hunt about on the page to find the reference and then say he had no idea, maybe it meant such-and-such. He also kept checking the time on his cell phone, as anxious as any of us for the torture to be over. We all left ten minutes early.
Now, one of my new mature student friends was in the tut with me and she immediately arranged to be moved to another group. I asked as well, but due to numbers they couldn't swop me out. So I talked to the senior tutor and gave her feedback on why I wanted to be moved. She supervises the tutors and she must have done a really good job because from then on, John just got better and better. He relaxed, he brought biscuits, he came up with really interesting exercises, he wrote down everything we contributed on the white board, he was active, he divided us into groups and got us to debate issues - in other words, he engaged with us and more importantly, he engaged our attention during the tutorial too. By the end, we were a cohesive group and we'd learnt a lot and we were all sorry to say goodbye. He was a bit slow with marking our assignments but kept us informed and apologized for the delays, one of which was due to personal bereavement.
Now, Religious studies and Joe. Joe is doing a PhD in - I don't know what. He's been in the PhD program since 2007. Joe always wear a cap, a big fisherman's jersey, jandals, has fuzzy facial hair and a perpetual half-grin on his face. If I'd seen him on the street, my first thought would not have been 'academic' - I'd have been looking for the collecting tin on the ground. Joe, however, is very academic indeed. He runs his tutorials from his chair at the head of the room and his method is to simply rehash on of the set readings and ask a number of questions. Most of the students just sit and stare, a few contribute a thought now and then. When they ask questions, it is usually about which reading they should pick to write about for the next essay. After this discussion, Joe then gives us one or two of the preceeding week's student essays to read and comment on. Generally they are essays which have scored 9 or 9.5 out of 10. It's quite hard commenting on the work of your peers, even if it is anonymous. When it comes to returning essays, Joe is also very, very slow and his comments generally come off a pre-typed list (I know this because sometimes they'll show up as ... 4. In future essays, you should .. etc - but there is no 1 or 2 or 3 preceding it. One girl I know got a comment that started 11. Try to ... etc. He knows everything about citations and how to put together an academic argument, but on the whole he seems to be going through the motions with us, rather than exhibiting any genuine enthusiasm for his subject.
John may have been young and relatively inexperienced but in the end - for me - I think he was the better tutor.
Mid-year exams already!
And here we are in early June already. It is almost unbelievable how quickly time has gone. In ten days time, I'll be writing a three-hour exam in English and handing in a 2,500 word essay in Religious Studies, and that will be the end of Semester One. Luckily for me, I'm on vacation from my paying job so have ample time to study and prepare!
It's been a wonderful, wonderful three months, on the whole. Practically speaking, the work remains more than manageable and I've been able to keep my grades up at an average of A for English and A+ for Religious Studies. The final exam and the final paper count for 50% of the marks in both courses, so I'm going to have to do really well in both to maintain those averages.
Things I have learned:
I really dislike the whole academic essay thing (as in the Reli course essays). The subject matter is fascinating, stirring up all sorts of thoughts and ideas (the kinds of things I had naively hoped would be discussed and debated in tutorials!). But the academic approach is to take this fascinating subject, examine it through the lens of some academic theory and then say how the THEORY works to either explain or fail to explain the fascinating subject. For the final essay, we have to describe a spiritual practice, explain it using a theory of religion and then say how the theory works or where it falls short. They make a point of saying 'we are NOT INTERESTED in your conclusions - we just want to see evidence of your creative and critical thinking'. Talk about sucking all the life out of the subject ... So, despite having a deep, deep interest in all things religious and despite there being some really fascinating courses available at levels two and three, I'm not going to be doing any more Reli papers.
On the other hand, I really enjoy doing the critical analysis papers in English. As I got to grips with this over the term, my grades improved and my enjoyment increased. I like the challenge of taking a passage and going into it both 'wider' (seeing how it relates to the work as a whole) and 'deeper' (what do the particular words mean and what else could we infer from these word choices?) I love learning about where particular words originated, how they evolved and how they can be used to create layers of meaning. I'm at the moment preparing for the exam by reviewing the set texts and annotating wherever possible - it is an open book exam and all three questions will be to write a critical analysis of a poem/extract. The two compulsory questions will be from Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and Keats' poems. The last one will be a choice from four other extracts, so there's a bit of leeway there.
I've also rediscovered something else about me: I'm a procrastinator of the first order. I mostly kept up with the pre-class readings in Religious Studies but fell behind in English (probably due to unfamiliarity with Old English and not knowing the stories therefore getting confused by reading on my own). I also fell behind in revising post-lecture - no excuse except laziness and lack of focus! Which means all my prep now is what I should have been doing in that pre-and post-reading! Ah, well. Better late than never. (Yeah, I said it!)
The second trimester starts on 11th July. Between now and then (once exams are done) I will be flying back to South Africa for three weeks to visit my parents and friends - having worked for the last 18 months, I've accumulated a lot of leave time and am taking six weeks in total. When I get back, I'll have a week to get back into the uni schedule before I start back at the hospital. I'm registered for two courses next trimester, with a possible third ... seeing as it's been so manageable this term, I figured I might try three while they're still 100 level courses - once we get to the 200 and 300 levels, I don't think it'll be as easy. So, I'll be doing Ling 101 (Introduction to Language) and Film 101 (Introduction to Film). Both fall within the choices for English Studies major, so will work as far as total credits are concerned. The third paper I've applied for is actually a 200 level limited entry creative writing workshop - they only take 12 students and apparently up to 40 usually apply. Entry is strictly on merit - I spent all of last weekend polishing the two samples and cover letter - so we'll see. They don't encourage first years to apply, but neither do they preclude them specifically. Fingers crossed for that, as I would absolutely LOVE it!
So, for now, back to the books and specifially, Keat's Lamia. If you're interested, read it HERE.
It's been a wonderful, wonderful three months, on the whole. Practically speaking, the work remains more than manageable and I've been able to keep my grades up at an average of A for English and A+ for Religious Studies. The final exam and the final paper count for 50% of the marks in both courses, so I'm going to have to do really well in both to maintain those averages.
Things I have learned:
I really dislike the whole academic essay thing (as in the Reli course essays). The subject matter is fascinating, stirring up all sorts of thoughts and ideas (the kinds of things I had naively hoped would be discussed and debated in tutorials!). But the academic approach is to take this fascinating subject, examine it through the lens of some academic theory and then say how the THEORY works to either explain or fail to explain the fascinating subject. For the final essay, we have to describe a spiritual practice, explain it using a theory of religion and then say how the theory works or where it falls short. They make a point of saying 'we are NOT INTERESTED in your conclusions - we just want to see evidence of your creative and critical thinking'. Talk about sucking all the life out of the subject ... So, despite having a deep, deep interest in all things religious and despite there being some really fascinating courses available at levels two and three, I'm not going to be doing any more Reli papers.
On the other hand, I really enjoy doing the critical analysis papers in English. As I got to grips with this over the term, my grades improved and my enjoyment increased. I like the challenge of taking a passage and going into it both 'wider' (seeing how it relates to the work as a whole) and 'deeper' (what do the particular words mean and what else could we infer from these word choices?) I love learning about where particular words originated, how they evolved and how they can be used to create layers of meaning. I'm at the moment preparing for the exam by reviewing the set texts and annotating wherever possible - it is an open book exam and all three questions will be to write a critical analysis of a poem/extract. The two compulsory questions will be from Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and Keats' poems. The last one will be a choice from four other extracts, so there's a bit of leeway there.
I've also rediscovered something else about me: I'm a procrastinator of the first order. I mostly kept up with the pre-class readings in Religious Studies but fell behind in English (probably due to unfamiliarity with Old English and not knowing the stories therefore getting confused by reading on my own). I also fell behind in revising post-lecture - no excuse except laziness and lack of focus! Which means all my prep now is what I should have been doing in that pre-and post-reading! Ah, well. Better late than never. (Yeah, I said it!)
The second trimester starts on 11th July. Between now and then (once exams are done) I will be flying back to South Africa for three weeks to visit my parents and friends - having worked for the last 18 months, I've accumulated a lot of leave time and am taking six weeks in total. When I get back, I'll have a week to get back into the uni schedule before I start back at the hospital. I'm registered for two courses next trimester, with a possible third ... seeing as it's been so manageable this term, I figured I might try three while they're still 100 level courses - once we get to the 200 and 300 levels, I don't think it'll be as easy. So, I'll be doing Ling 101 (Introduction to Language) and Film 101 (Introduction to Film). Both fall within the choices for English Studies major, so will work as far as total credits are concerned. The third paper I've applied for is actually a 200 level limited entry creative writing workshop - they only take 12 students and apparently up to 40 usually apply. Entry is strictly on merit - I spent all of last weekend polishing the two samples and cover letter - so we'll see. They don't encourage first years to apply, but neither do they preclude them specifically. Fingers crossed for that, as I would absolutely LOVE it!
So, for now, back to the books and specifially, Keat's Lamia. If you're interested, read it HERE.
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