Ch.1: pgs. 1-92

Most homework assignments for college students entail reading from your assigned textbooks. Each afternoon, when I get home from school and sit down to start my homework, I always flip through the chapter I am supposed to read to see how many pages it is. After I am done flipping, I pick my jaw up off the floor because my assignment is no longer an assignment, but an insurmountable task. Hours later when I finish reading and taking notes, I am exhausted, my head hurts, and even though I took notes, I can’t even remember most of what I read because about half way through the chapter words began to blend and ideas turned into mumbo-jumbo. My point is, that college textbook chapters are too long. I am not some college student complaining about how much work I have to do because that’s part of being in college. They really are too long. Half of what is said in these chapters is examples or extraneous information that doesn’t even go along with what the author is trying to say in the first place. So why can’t authors cut that stuff out, and make a chapter ten or fifteen pages versus forty or fifty. Reading forty or fifty huge, long textbook pages for hours on end would exhaust anyone, I don’t care who you are. And, not to mention the fact that I still have other homework to do for other classes in addition to what I’ve already read. Oh yeah, and on top of all the homework, believe it or not, I have a life. A life filled with friends and non-school related activities that I feel like I will never see again when I am just on page one of my assignment. So besides the removal of extraneous information, here are a few other suggestions. Break the chapter down into other chapters! There are many different ideas within one chapter so why not just break them down into other chapters? Also, teachers could assign accordingly with that weeks lecture. If the lecture is about something specific from the chapter, assign the pages that cover that issue. Think about your students. I know that there is only so much time that teachers can cover information in a semester, and students pay to get the most out of a class, and I probably don’t have much room to talk about teaching or authoring textbooks since I do neither, but students, real students, not the students that are in college to coast through it, are there to learn, not to be piled down with work. And, while work and stress is something that is part of college, and life in general, it doesn’t need to be so much that a student feels like burning her textbook at the end of each semester instead of selling it back. Again, I am not complaining about too much work because I have always been the type of student that does what is asked of me in every class. I’m just simply making suggestions that might make students like me feel a little less overloaded.

What a difference blogging can make

I have never really known much about the world of blogging, but it seems to me to be a very helpful tool. According to professor Anne Bartlett-Bragg of the University of technology, Sydney, when used in a university setting, blogging can encourage students to think more critically and be involved in class, which is exactly what I'm doing by creating this post. With blogging you can share information, opinions, experiences, meet new people, dispute what others have to say, or ping, which, Bartlett-Bragg says, means admiring someone else's work so much that you mention it in your own. Who do I admire? Andrew Olmstead, a soilder to the United States army who was recently killed in Iraq. After reading his final blog entry, which appears to have been posted by a friend following his death, I was moved to see how much blogging can do for someone. Olmstead had a fresh outlook on life and death, the war in Iraq, and being a soilder for his country. He states that "I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact." I began reading this blog feeling sorry for this fallen soilder and his loved ones, but after I finished I realized that he didnt need my sympathy. This man reminded me that "we're all going to die of something. [He] died doing a job [he] loved." I'm not sure if this made him lucky or not, but I do know how blogging affected him. He states that "blogging put me in touch with an inordinate number of smart people, an exhilarating if humbling experience." I only hope that blogging can now do the same for me.