I think it has honestly taken me 17 years of schooling to finally figure this out.
Thank you for a great first semester, and thank you for teaching me something far beyond playscript interpretation.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
What I Learned in Class
Although this might be silly, I have found I've learned something very interesting in this class. It has nothing to do with form or content, with beats or scansion, with dialogues or monologues or anything like that. But it comes down to respecting other people's opinions and being able to back up your own. I have been in classes similar to this, a discussion based class working with several scripts. I love these classes, especially when they get heated. However, I used to walk away from classes sometimes feeling upset at classmate's opinions. I have not done that with our class. At first I thought this must be because... well, everyone agrees. But that is not true. Not everyone had the same opinion. I thought maybe it's because no one had strong opinions, but this is not true either. Our class is full of strong opinions. I believe this class was successful based on the idea that we all have separate opinions that we could support. Because students were able to support opinions with text, form, content, whatever a specific play may entail, it was easier to respect these opinions without necessarily agreeing with them.
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I find that I agree with you in terms of what the class is about. I am such an open person and realyl easy going but I do sometimes get lost in my "right" opinion and VERY often forget to indulge myself in the idea that...someone else thinks they are just as right as I am. The hard parts of this are when you hit a brick wall head on and are faced with just as much evidence to dispute your case as you have to dispute theres.
Evidence is fun that way...the other hard part of this class, and in any Amy class honestly, is that I get so caught up in connecting things that I cannot (am just unable) to string ALL the things together that just make sense together....does that even make sense? I find that all the plays in this course have a through-line or 2 or 6 and I spend so much time connecting them and support or disputing my own opinions throughout while using evidence and then I am just unable to ever say it correctly. I think there were two occasions where I said stuff, early on, in the class and after reflection and some responses I got from other people, realized that I may not have been able to construct what I wanted to say properly, which is extremely embarrassing...to me. I'm very thankful that you don't think any opinions were silly and under-defended!
I agree that this class was a good time and that what you learned is an amazing gift.
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