Digital Discomfort: Coming Clean About Career Doubts

Ok, time for me to be completely honest. All this talk about technosaurs, and the professors that cling to their VHS tapes, thereby halting the forward progress of our university and our world? I am one of those. Not to that extreme, per se, but I will definitely always love paper books, and will always feel that the most important kind of communication happens offline. I may not ever really immerse myself in all of our digital resources, either. I'm sorry. That is just how I am right now. I'm not saying I can't change, and I'm not trying to rebel against the order of the class. I just thought everyone should know.

But I still have a problem. Since I was very little, it has been my dream to become an English teacher. (No, that is not the problem.)

Take Two

Oops. Turns out I'm a lot less technologically savvy than I thought, and have therefore been posting under the wrong blog title. (Well that is embarrassing...) The first two posts, then, are just reposts of what I put up before. This one will serve as a short intro to my title, which I was dismayed to find I had to invent myself. Dang. That was much easier when I thought we had a specific format! This title, though, draws from my favorite poem, which I kinda like :) It is called Desiderata, a Latin term for "things desired." I've loved it ever since I first saw it on Mrs. Eisenhart's wall, sophomore year of high school. It is all the good and beautiful things I'd like to say about life, in all the words that I couldn't find myself. Forgive me for sounding cheesy, but thats what it is! Yay for poems that somehow sum up your whole life motto in twentyish lines! Love it.

Learning Model!

As for the BYU-Idaho Learning Model, (prepare, teach, ponder, and prove), I guess part of me is wondering why it belongs to BYU-Idaho. It almost seems like a Gospel learning and teaching model, not a collegiate one. Just from my personal experience with it in that context, I expect it would apply brilliantly to a more scholastic setting. It would require a lot more work than just a syllabus-driven attitude, but it would likely produce a more solid and applicable understanding of course material. From what I've seen of it so far, I can definitely improve. I'm not as used to the group learning, which sounds sad and antisocial, but I'll really work on it and try to be better, I promise!

And Erica's chosen novel is...

Second blog post ever. Maybe once I get to double digits, I'll get tired of starting them like that... My chosen novel for the term is The Scarlet Letter. I kinda love classics, (ok, I really love them), so that is one half of my motivation here. My other, less pure reason for this choice is kinda comparable to those times when someone insults you, and you can't think of a comeback until the moment they walk away. I loved this book the first time I read it, and am very open about my passion for classics like this. After sharing that information with a boy I was dating, I was surprised to see him react so negatively, specifically to this book. He hated The Scarlet Letter, and laughed at the idea that anyone could consider it at all enjoyable. (Needless to say, that relationship was rather short-lived haha) If he ever wanted to tease me about being an English major, or a scholarly elitist, or anything like that, this book was the channel of his passion. So after all those times of hearing, "Anyone that likes the Scarlet Letter..." or "I mean, you like the Scarlet Letter, for Pete's sake!", I finally came up with a comeback! If you could call a term project a comeback... Mostly, I'm just excited to study the novel and validate to myself all the good impressions I have of it. I'll be reading it for my sake, not really for that of a tardy comeback. That served as a nice spark, and now I can take it from there and do what I love to do- read, think, and remember. Or would it be brown-nosing to say consume, create, and connect? Yeah, I think it would... But I'll be doing it either way!