Over the course of this class my perception on English as a discipline has certainly changed and my change in thought is even linked with the coronavirus in some sense. When I think of English as a discipline one of the aspects that sticks out to me as important is the way in which it is taught. When everyone first started hearing about the coronavirus I didn’t really take it all that serious. Then when we were all heading home for spring break and eventually realizing we were not coming back for the rest of the semester; the reality of it sank in. At the time I thought about how this could possibly affect the way in which teaching happens for everyone in the future. Since everyone has to learn remotely, I figured that it was possible that many could change their viewpoint on college in general and its necessity or lack of it. I thought this could possibly turn towards to making college obsolete if everyone can learn at the same level from home. After a few weeks of remote learning I realized my initial assumption was very wrong. I far underestimated the importance of being in and learning within a classroom surrounded by your fellow classmates. One takeaway from the coronavirus I have been thinking about is how much easier it is to do college work within the structure that colleges have set up.
I think this relates to this class in an interesting way because of its focus on English specifically in the digital age. As we move towards a society that will probably become more and more intertwined with technology, we cannot lose many of the foundations that got us here. In person teaching being one of those foundations. There is something about having a specific time to show up to class and be a part of a collective of other people going through the same thing that fosters a beneficial space to learn and grow as college students.
This class also opened my eyes to the extent of English as a discipline. I came into the class northing essentially nothing about things like coding and how it could relate to English. I only thought about coding as a way to creating software, websites, video games, or even a business intelligence analyst system. However, I didn’t make that link to how it could relate to English. In having things like the writing of Walden and putting into code seemed like it had no benefit from my own perspective when it was first introduced. As we progressed and I saw the potential for the computer to analyze certain things like the patterns of words within the book. The website that tracked things like certain word count for how many times they repeated and overall word repetition counts over the whole book helped take new things from the text we would not have otherwise. This completely changed my perspective on coding and to what it can do.
First getting into VS code, python and such I had no experience but the coding turned into what was probably my favorite part of the class. I had heard of python and other popular coding languages. I always had some bit of an interest in learning to code but I had always put it off as something for the future. In some ways because I didn’t know anything about it I thought it might be something that would be way to technical in terms of the fact you can’t make any mistakes in typing for me to personally like it. After getting first hand experience starting out learning a bit I came to realize that coding is definitely something I can learn and thrive at. That is one thing I will always take from this class is that first introduction to something that is going to be very important to know how to do in the future. I look forward to learning a lot more about coding in the future and I will always appreciate the first look into it!