Not All English is The Same

From George Orwell's 1984

In high school I was enrolled in AP English where we were assigned loads of reading every night which we almost never talked about. It was very difficult keeping up with the reading because it was a lot of it and it was not easy to understand. I also took AP Literature, and this class was amazing. We didn't really focus on doing essays nor big writing assignments. We read Medea, 1984, Dante's Inferno, Oedipus, Othello, Ovid, The Odyssey and many more. We critically and philosophically analyzed these texts which has helped me with all the texts that I'm currently reading.

Last semester in English 104/105 we focused on stereotypes portrayed in the media and it was very interesting because it opened my eyes to things that I did not know about the media. However, we still focused on the five-paragraph essay structure but we improved our on writing our introduction and conclusion.

When this English course started it was very confusing because it was not like all the other English classes that I've taken. We were given freedom which was a bit scary because I was used to being told what to do and what specific topic to focus. I never before did an Editorial nor blogged. So far the most difficult assignment was the Editorial for the same reason that it was the first time that I was introduced to this. After doing this, class was still confusing.

It wasn't until I read Ariely's, Martin's, Gladwell's and McCurtry's texts that I began to understand class and the purpose of it. These texts discussed different non-related topics in order to show us how they exposed invisible narratives. They showed invisible narratives being exposed as stereotypes, norms and beliefs that don't necessarily represent everyone's belief.

Source: Deviant Art
Stereotype right here !

From the readings that we have done the one that had most of my interest is Martin's "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles". I liked this one the most because I could somehow connect to it since I do belong to the female gender. When I read this I remember being shocked because of all the stereotypes that people say just through a science textbook in something so simple as our reproductive system. Its crazy how even in science people try to make the male seem more dominant than female when in reality eggs are the ones that do mostly all the work, of course with some help of the sperm.


Furthermore, completing our Paper 2 was actually very satisfactory. For my paper I focused on the Child and Adolescent Development Program although I am not yet declared, but I do have a huge interest in this. While doing this assignment, I was provided with many articles that allowed me to focus on the text of a discourse that I was new to. The most difficult part for this paper was finding invisible narratives because they weren't stated in the paper so I had to really think outside the box. Overall, I really enjoyed completing this because we were able to explore a new field. Also, we were able to learn and expose the invisible narratives that are in our field of interest. For me, I am still very encouraged in this major.