GLH10302-B.1.

George Lewis Hughes

English 103: Accelerated Composition – Learning Record

Daniel Richards

September 29, 2008

B.1.: Personal Learning Development Hinging on Course Fundamentals within the Time Bracket of the First Quarter of English 103 Class

This first half of the semester in English 103 has overall inspired me to apply my relatively comprehensive liberal arts education that I had acquired from a competent private school to the major I am pursuing, which is currently – and I hope will remain – architecture. For instance, for my first major, visual-rhetoric assignment of analysis, I suddenly experienced from the very beginning of my research, free-writing process the revelation that visual rhetoric is an extremely weighted attribute to when one is deciphering the quality of any particular work of architecture. Hence, I was currently exposing myself to the architectural research topic regarding world-famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s most renowned creation, Bear Run, Pennsylvania’s Edgar J. Kaufmann House, or what is more familiarly recalled to be Falling Water. In effect, I had seized the rare opportunity to incorporate my own field of interest into the challenges of a compositional class, such that by my peaked interest in the topic of choice I might fruition the best result given the particular set of criteria I was instructed to fulfill regarding this particular, extended assignment.

I have finally been allowed, since the beginning of this semester, to piece together all I have learned and all I have toiled into a greater whole. With each passing day, here on out, I become increasingly removed from my old cynicism, which bases all its antagonisms on the flaws of the American educational system at large. For instance, in the midst of my graduating

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from high school, my experiences wrought upon me the misfortunate concept that all I had done and learned was up till tomorrow completely worthless and insignificant, all on the notion that I would hardly ever again use any such knowledge base as the trivialities that had overwhelmingly swamped me such as History, Chemistry, Calculus, and above all, the backward institution that wreaks of rhetoric at its worst – the breeding ground for future, blood-sucking lawyers – Literature! As such, I could not wait to arrive at my first breath of the college air, gasping for it quite desperately in the impending moments prior to my belated indoctrination into the only American society which from my own menacingly weary and ill-exposed mind remained currently the sole surviving refuge for all the thinkers of this world who were not so quick to compromise their sanity for the bliss of American ignorance, indulgence, and pristine gluttony in its highest manifestation – college, the university, became my own mental rendezvous point for the rescue of only the most deserving and trying of individuals who so zealously and passionately groveled for the salvation of their own ethical honesty to their very own souls. I came here to get away from the standardization of education which was in kind recklessly belching the phrase, “No child left behind!”

Caught up in the chaotic whirlpool of peers unworthy of even applying to college, I was forced into senselessly and mercilessly pressing my way through the teeming crowds of drifting “masses,” most of whom had not even the slightest clue of what they were to do with their lives; but because American policy proclaimed all youthful minds of equal value during their college application processes, the fact that I had known deep within the vestiges of my soul that I was born to become a great architect, was no longer significant in the face of the faceless, the bureaucratic scrutinizers of these applications, who were more concerned with cultural mixing

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than any other type of “superiority,” if even worthy of being called such. For too long had I believed that college was after all betraying its own value system as well, no longer interested in the unity of the intellectual elite, much less a conglomeration of competent American Dreamers.

Yet sure enough, when I had entered the sphere of university living, once recognized to my overflowing relief as finally a fully-fledged student at a legit university, the contrary was immediately barraged upon my archaically bleak and even “Hitlerian” mode of thinking. I was, indeed, surrounded by people just like me in the desired sense, and if they were not, they were self-evidently just as intelligent or special in their very own ways.

Clearly, I was once a weary, hardened veteran of the institutional weed-out system, thinking that it marked simply the beginning of the competitive troubles that would ominously await me in college. The fact, however, that we are essentially allowed to grade our own selves for the class without having to run any extraneous, time-wasting gauntlets, suggests otherwise; I am, after all, realizing that this particular curriculum ingrained here within Clemson’s Freshman English department actually contradicts the put-downs I’ve heard from rather encouraging high school teachers, saying certain things like, “Oh, our Freshman English professor only allowed two people per every three hundred to earn the ‘A,’ thereby giving it the cut-throat atmosphere we all love and cherish; o, where would I be today without those character-building times?”

More than any other class I have taken or am currently taking to date, the various strands of this class have convoluted to impose upon me this new – more optimistic than ever – school of enlightenment by which to approach and interpret the actions which are stipulated of me according to the institutional contract to which I am indebted. Namely, this school suggests that all my studies are from a certain standpoint completely interrelated; that one class with its

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viewpoints will help me to perform better in the other class by utilizing such wisdom, and vice versa.

I have learned for the first time how conventionally to write my compositions exclusively in first-person format. With this general progression I have gradually learned how to implement my own personal interpretation of rhetorical devices into my expositions on rhetorical artifacts, and – even more importantly so – how such devices appeal to and influence me as an individual. Ultimately, with this new mindset thus instilled during my transition into the collegiate realm, I am able to say again that I am indeed learning something meaningful, whatever the subject may be, regardless of its arguable disparity from the rigid definition of my own, narrow major of study at Clemson University: architecture.

Above all things, however, I have fortunately learned early into my freshman year of college Composition that there is still much to learn, and that my writing can still be improved, which I will always believe to be a far better alternative altogether rather than having it die away during my future career. To be more specific, I have finally been taught in here how to apply my compositional skills to the lives we will all inevitably live in the future. A former high school classmate of mine, who is currently a first-year at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has to read one classical text per week for his Freshman English class. In this light I am forced to ask myself, how would such a juvenile requirement help its victims in the long run? Quite frankly, the classics are more or less dead when it all comes down to performing our professional occupations as soundly as possible in the context of exponentially upgrading times. In my shoes, on the other hand, I am accommodatingly allotted the chance to explore my designated major from the critical and analytical perspective thereby housed within the elements of any

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compositionally based course. In turn, I may become more quickly apt to the literacy of my focused study that ultimately proves endemic to the mastery of any profession.