My first class today was Academic Writing and it was all about summaries. I now know that a summary should be a shortened version of the original text (about 10%) and that it should not contain quotes, examples, figures, numbers, or any other types of details whatsoever. More importantly, it should be in your own words. From the way he was looking through the classroom, I got the slight impression that the professor would penalize any plagiarism with corporal punishment. Homework: write two summaries. Done. Ha!
Second class was Didactics, where we got to share the last class we taught with another student, who was supposed to force you to clarify your rendition and to make you think about your underlying ideas of language teaching. For example, if you say something like “I let them record the presentations on their mobile phones, because that made it less boring for them,” your underlying idea of (language) learning is that it is supposed to be fun. While I used to think so, I’ve retracted this opinion and altered it into “(language) learning should be relevant.” Homework: read two articles and think about how your teaching practice fits into one or more frameworks of language teaching/learning that have been discussed.
Lastly, I made my way towards Literature I. There I was bombarded with information concerning different approaches to the analysis of literature. The group was large; the windows were closed, ensuing in an oxygen depletion that completely obliterated my attention span. Fortunately, someone who apparently did get enough oxygen had the presence of mind to open some windows. I desperately wonder why we discarded the mimesis principle.* Homework: read an article on the comparative approach to literature analysis. Almost done.
This semester is all about the writing of essays, so at the end of it, I will have written at least four of them, amounting to 10,000 words. Luckily, I don’t mind writing. I actually plan on posting my essays on this blog once their checked and marked. So, if you’re interested, look out for them in the upcoming months.
*In the Greek days (think Plato and Aristotle), literature and other forms of art were regarded as ‘great’ when they adequately resembled things in the real world. So, when a perfect description of the sound of a humming bird was written, other writers would just copy this. Condoning, or rather encouraging, plagiarism. This is why the mimesis principle is also known as the imitation principle.