I am tired of being in the same English class for three semesters now. The titles of the courses may differ, the works as well, but the way my mind has to work is absolutely the same. Many people need to look at the small things present in the text and pictures deeply in order to grasp the larger ideas and themes.
My mind grasp all the small things while connecting them to the large idea. Its not that I cannot grasp that he is paralyzed and could hardly move, however communities through the french alphabet (letters of the language) or the blinking of his eyes. Or what a hermit crab is and how it relates to his dependency on people to work in the world. But why not go into why he might feel this way, and why the timing for this information sets up the story. Or maybe thats exactly what we are doing, but the questions phrased are too simple for my mind to put in energy to answer, what is the point of saying what I see when its so obvious.
I am much more into debates and discussions about the tones and picking out quotes to reason our thoughts. I do not like picking out sentences as a class to analyze what he means. I felt that was part of the assignment when the syllabus said read 1-68 for September 28th. Class should be about hearing the students bring up different interpretations of the text that they read on their own time, not looking at each sentence together to identify our interpretations.
I got a little excited, to the point where I even stopped writing this paper when the question of if we would rather be euthanized than to live like Jean Dominique Bauby. But this conversation lasted all of 30 seconds.
Maybe I should contribute to these conversations to organize my thoughts, but every time I try he tells me my comments will be more useful at a later time. This becomes very evident when I raised my comment of the irony in his use of language while he is almost completely paralyzed and speechless. It makes this book particularly interesting to me because I love to see the combinations that exist that seem nonexistant. But then we talk about the combination of him shaving his father and then someone shaving him, but never really talking about why he chose to mention this specific experience out of all the experiences in his life.
But then of course the class changed to everything I was waiting for through five minute reflection piece where we chose a chapter and wrote our ideas on it. However, even when I talk about my ideas, belief, and interpretations in this section of the class it still does not seem to be taken as highly as everyone else’s ideas. I am wondering if my thoughts are not as advance or intellectual as it was in my first year of college when I constantly got acknowledged of how well I articulated and how important my voice was in the class.
Maybe I speak more willingly in discussions. But as I look around the classroom, maybe being the only person of color has everything to do with the lack of reaction.
Naked. 