We made it! Our first week of classes as Carolina students has ended, and those of us who are first-years are now undoubtably college students. Whether you grew up in Chapel Hill, Charlotte, or Chicago, we can now all stand together and take these next few steps in our lives together. We can all take a sip from the (hopefully clean) Old Well on FDOC, we can all cheer for the Tar Heels at sporting events, we can all hate Duke, and most importantly for the scope of this blog post, we can all work together through Paul Blom’s English 105.
Our first day of English 105 featured all the hallmarks of a FDOC/SDOC class session. We, weary- eyed and drowsy from our dreaded 8:00 AM start time, spent a solid chunk of time going through Paul’s exhaustive syllabus, discussing everything from office hours and course goals to the resources available through UNC Libraries and UNC Career Services. After concluding our syllabus review, we broke into our groups, with the purpose of meeting our classmates and coming up with team names. My group based our name, “Team 2AM”, off the fact that we are all night owls. At long last, 9:15 came and we took our leave, prepared to return on Thursday and begin real work on the course content.
Between Tuesday and Thursday, we were tasked with reviewing some preliminary materials, including the intriguing “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott, which began to deconstruct our preconceived notions about the writing process. We also cracked open the “Tar Heel Writing Guide” and began to learn about some college writing techniques.
Soon enough, we found ourselves back in Greenlaw 318, early on Thursday morning, waiting patiently for Paul to step in the classroom and begin our lesson. However, 8:00 soon came and went, and we still found ourselves waiting. Although we had all thought at one point prior to Thursday of what to do if the teacher didn’t make it to class, very few, if any of us had experienced it before. Whispers began to circulate, saying things such as “I think I’m going to leave if he’s not here by 8:15”. Sure enough, after a while, students began to trickle out. By the scheduled dismissal time of 9:15, nobody was left.
However, the class session was not to be wasted; an email came later that evening with instructions on how to view a recorded lecture video. Even though we did not receive it at 8 in the morning in Greenlaw 318, we all received our lesson on rhetorical situations, where we discovered how our writing, as college students, should be guided by our rhetorical situation. We dove a little deeper, learning how our rhetorical situation is defined by our role, the genre we’re writing in, our audience, and our purpose. Paul closed the video lecture with an overview of the four stages of writing, emphasizing the importance of prewriting and planning while also clarifying the differences between revising, editing, and proofreading.
I’m not sure how it is for everybody else, but the first week of a school year is always both the shortest and the longest. On one hand, each day feels extraordinarily long, with syllabus days dragging on, and boredom setting in with no assignments to do between classes. However, the week felt like it came and went faster than just my last two days at home before my move-in. As we all transition into this next stage of our lives, weeks will come and go without major incident, but it is without a doubt that each of us will remember this FWOC as the first step in the next chapter of our lives.
Featured Image Citation:
(unsplash.com, for free and fair reuse)