Smothers 1 Joshua Smothers Ms. Elizabeth Feltey ENGL-102-W09 September 17, 2018 Is Online Education Better Than Classroom Education We live in a new day and age. A day where society is steadily progressing to help itself but helping us simultaneously. Time is something that waits on no man, which I’m sure we’ve all been told. Life happens and no one’s future is set in stone. College is probably something that should be started directly, or soon after high school, while the body is still in school mode. For some apparent reason, I couldn’t wait to hit adulthood. As time has went on, I matured and started taking my future seriously. My discovery of online classes was a pivotal point for my return to the education world. Many would tend to disagree, but online classes are instrumental to my success as an individual pursuing a degree more so than a classroom education. Through periods of procrastination from education most of us obtain responsibilities. These responsibilities can make it difficult to commute to and from school with our already hectic daily schedules. The weekly scheduled tasks are way more convenient for working students. The digital education world can be applicable to high school students as well. Anyone, regardless of age can be going through anything, this should not mean education should stop. “The National Center for Education Statistics reports that between 2005 and 2010, distance learning course enrollment among American public high school students increased by 77 percent to 1.3 students, representing 53 percent of public high school districts (Ray McNulty, 242).” “Today’s students need the resources of round-the-clock instructional and technology helpdesks, tutoring, and virtual library services (Chris Bustamante, 225).” It allows us to know what needs Smothers 2 to be reviewed, studied and completed for the allotted time given without having to worry about being somewhere at a certain time on a certain day. Online classes require great responsibility and can instill discipline to one’s self. Just because you are moving at somewhat of your own pace, you need not to feel alone. The digital learning system can promote resourcefulness. “Don’t understand something? Ask the class, email a group of professionals, call the company, interview your grandmother (Pete Rorabaugh, 247).” You may be in a variety of places with people or things that are not in your generic classroom that can assist you with your assignments. “By removing the sense of structure from a course, you remove the student’s notion that he or she is under any sort of pressure, any sort of time constraint (David Smith, 229).” Yes, I agree that actual attendance to a class can be more informative of how a problem or paper should be completed correctly. Does this mean that going to class is better than online course? If anything, I just think it requires a bit more research. With a combination of self-teaching and the teachers provided notes, we can still be successful. It boils down to how bad you want it. After all, YOU are the one going to school for YOUR future. Regardless of what, how or where your work is completed, YOUR success resides directly upon YOU. In conclusion I believe that online classes are better than classroom education, but this can also be dependent solely on one’s situation. Some may feel the need to go to class every day to be successful in their studies while others do not have that option. Online classes serve the same purpose as an in class setting. With the right motivation, dedication and determination we all can thrive in our education. Smothers 3 Works Cited Bustamante, Chris. “The Risks and Rewards of Online Learning.” Community College Times. November 16, 2011. pg.224-226 McNulty, Ray. “Old Flames and New Beacons.” January 2013. pg. 241-244 Rorabaugh, Pete. “Trading classroom authority for online community.” HybridPedagogy.com. January 5, 2012. pg. 246-247 Smith, David. “Reliance on the online materials hinders learning potential for students.” Daily Nebraskan. University of Nebraska. November 29, 2011. pg. 228-229 ENGL 212 Mankin American Literature II Final Term Paper Requirements Worth 25% DUE 10:00 a.m. 7/10 – Topic Proposal & Questions DUE 11:59 p.m. 7/21 – Rough Draft DUE 10:00 a.m. 7/30 – Final Draft Paper Format – Adhere to MLA document design requirements. • Use a 12 pt. standard font (such as Times New Roman). • Your last name and the page number should appear in the upper right of the document’s header. • Double-space the entire document, and do not add space after the heading or title. • The complete heading should appear in the upper left corner and include your name, my name, the course number, and the assignment due date. • Include a title. Center the title but leave it otherwise unembellished. It should make clear your topic and perspective. Ex.: Politics & Poetics: Reading Paul Laurence Dunbar • Use MLA guidelines for citing and documenting summary, paraphrase, and quotation to avoid plagiarism in your analysis. You must cite page numbers and include a works cited for this assignment. • You may use no more than two approved outside sources that you have located through DCC Library research. You can find guidelines for when and how to quote poetry in the Helpful Resources module on Canvas. Remember, for short poems, you do not need to include parenthetical citations for the line numbers. For fiction, you need only cite page numbers. Paper Length – Your essay should be approximately 5-6 pages. No matter which topic you choose, your essay must: • Provide an introduction that establishes which text(s) you are writing about AND asserts a thesis that the rest of the essay will support. • Include several body paragraphs that develop and support the thesis with textual evidence for and an explanation of your literary argument. You must cite all textual evidence according to MLA documentation requirements. • Offer a conclusion that reinforces the essay’s main argument and gives the essay a sense of closure. • For an explanation and example of a literary argument, see “Writing Support,” which is available on our Canvas course homepage. Additional guidelines for writing about poetry and for citing literary source are also available in this module. 1 ENGL 212 Mankin Paper Topics – Choose ONE of the following prompts. 1. Discuss the theme of the Christ-man (the poet as savior), sections 6-7, in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” or any of his other poems in which you think this theme is relevant. You might consider his unrestrained acceptance of people as well as his inferred ability to save (or at least positively influence) others by his example. 2. Compare Mark Twain’s narrative style with Ambrose Bierce’s style. Choose 2-3 points of comparison, whether they are the chronology or ordering of the story, the development and depiction of the characters, the nature and significance of the settings, or the themes. What does each writer reveal about American society at the time? 3. Henry James has often been called a psychological realist who was more interested in the development of consciousness than in portraying character types and social reality. Discuss the extent to which this observation holds true in Daisy Miller. 4. Although Henry James’ Daisy Miller appears to focus on Daisy herself, a reader might argue that James’ real interest is Winterbourne. Write an essay that supports this argument. 5. Write an essay about the convention of regarding Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois as political opposites. How appropriate do you think that assumption is, and why? What aspects of these texts are you thinking about as you form your opinion? 6. The structure and rhetorical strategies of The Souls of Black Folk are markedly different from those favored by Washington in Up from Slavery. Write an essay describing some of these differences, and consider the relationship of these strategies to the intentions of each author. 7. Individual poems can illuminate one another, and works stand out more because of a background of other verse, a landscape in which we can see them better. Considering the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the elegy for Fredrick Douglass (638) and the elegy for Harriet Beecher Stowe (637) praise these writers for plain and forthright speech, for moral courage in what they published. With that context in mind, what tone and implications can we find in Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” (636)? 8. Consider Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles. How good a fit is the genre of the thriller/murder mystery to feminist subject matter? Is Glaspell trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, or has she identified the perfect medium for her message? 9. Compare poems of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, focusing on one of the following pairs: Frost’s “Desert Places” and Stevens’s “The Snow Man” OR Frost’s “Directive” and Stevens’s “The Plain Sense of Things.” In what ways do Frost and Stevens contribute to modernist ways of knowing the world? 10. Write an essay about the ways in which Zora Neale Hurston makes use of myths and archetypes. What emotional or psychological impact does mythology bring to “The Eatonville Anthology” and “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”? 11. Langston Hughes’s poetry is open to the experiences of women. Analyze “Mother to Son,” “Madam and Her Madam,” and “Madam’s Calling Cards,” and explore the ways he transforms women’s experiences into emblems of African American experience. 12. Section I of Ginsberg’s “Howl” may strongly suggest Whitman, especially those passages in Song of Myself in which Whitman offers a catalog of numerous Americans and their work and personal experiences. Compare and contrast the experience of reading Ginsberg 2 ENGL 212 Mankin with that of reading Whitman. While Whitman is only figuratively invoked in “Howl,” he actually appears in “A Supermarket in California,” in which Ginsberg asks him, “Where are we going, Walt Whitman?” Does “Howl” answer the question posed in “A Supermarket in California”? Does Whitman’s America in 1855 provide a model for Ginsberg’s America in 1955? Why or why not? 13. In section 9 of Adrienne Rich’s “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” the speaker says, “Time is male / and in his cups drinks to the fair.” In her poem “I Am in Danger—Sir—,” Rich’s speaker addresses Emily Dickinson as “you, woman, masculine / in singlemindedness.” In these and other situations, what does Rich mean by “male” or “masculine”? Why does she refer to time itself, and to an admired woman poet, in this way? 14. The Willie Best that Amiri Baraka refers to (1485) is an African American television and film actor from the early twentieth century who frequently portrayed characters who conformed to racist stereotypes about blacks. Usually, a poem about a historical figure will focus on the person’s achievements and legacy, but Baraka’s references to Best are considerably more indirect than this. How does Best appear in the poem? As an individual? As a cultural type? As a point of reference to examine larger issues of race and racism? Consider Baraka’s fragmentary style alongside that of other African American modernists and post-modernists, such as Jean Toomer (967) and Ishmael Reed. Do these writers use modernist and post-modernist literary devices to different effect from their white counterparts? 15. Choose one of the contemporary writers that we read this term and trace his or her literary influences. Who did we read earlier in the term that led to the works of this writer? Consider comparing specific works to illustrate formal and thematic connections. 3
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