Letters

Marlen,

I must admit that when I first enrolled in this class I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew is that this is one of a very few classes that stand between me and graduating this December. Over the summer when I received your barrage or emails about the class I began wondering what I had gotten myself into but decided that with my very limited availability for classes it didn’t matter what was going to happen in the class I was not going to change out of it because I really couldn’t.

On the first day of class you told the entire class that this was going to be a “shit load” of work and that if we felt at all like we would not be willing to do this work we should drop out now. As usual for me I took this statement with a grain of salt figuring that I have been in college long enough that I can work my way through and this was simply a scare tactic to weed out the less than motivated students that had enrolled in the class for an easy A. I also am not one to back down from a lot of work as has been shown in my life time and again as I continuously attempt to bite off more than I can chew. An example would be last year when I took the full time position at work. I am now working 40 hours a week and still attending classes as a full time student for the past two semesters. I rather enjoy this however as it keeps me busy and I can laugh at all of those students who can’t manage to handle just their classes because of poor work ethic and organization.

This class has since become one of my favorite/least favorite classes since I started here at IUP four and a half years ago. I have grown very tired of taking classes which either don’t teach you anything, don’t teach anything worth knowing, or have professors that care less about the class than the Friday night frat boy sleeping in the back row. I have taken so many liberal studies classes that fit into this description that I don’t really care to think back on it. I am glad to finally have a class that challenges me and pushes me to be a better me like college classes are supposed to do.

The only thing that made me want to drop this class at the beginning was when I saw that I was going to have to write a bunch of poetry. That almost pushed me over the edge because at that point I had very little understanding of poetry and everything that I had encountered seemed to be beyond me for the most part. I have never been able to get all of the hidden meanings out of poetry and when trying to write my own I never feel that the poetry goes any deeper than what is simply written on the page due to the constraint of “first line must have 5 syllables, and the next 7 syllable etc.” This has always driven me crazy. I don’t see how if poetry is supposed to be natural and free flowing from the soul how can there be a basic form for it?

At any rate I have grown to really like this class and enjoy the work even though it does get to be a lot on my plate with having to practice my musical instruments every day and work 40 hours a week but I feel that nothing worth doing is easy so I am prepared to go along with it. I hope to gain a better understanding of why I am the way I am through this class. I have often compared my life to that of mythological heroes and dreamed that I could be of some importance in life and I feel that, while my life may not be interesting I am well on my way to doing just that.

In closing I would like to say that I do like the way that the class is structured. I have enjoyed learning about the monomyth and the different archetypes that govern every day actions and reactions. Upon starting Watership Down I had my doubts about the book but I soon realized that it was acutally a good story just packaged a little differently than I would normally expect in a college class but it was a nice change of pace.

 

Sincerely,

Randy Miller

 

Letter 2.

Dear Marlen, 

This has been a very odd semester for me. In all of my time here at IUP I cannot compare this, my last semester cannot really be compared with any other that I have been through. This class is one of the big reasons for that feeling.

The whole time I have been here I have felt like all of my classes were watered down and were being taught for no other reason than just to be taught. I have never brought much away from my studies here as nothing really struck my interest or the professor that was teaching the class was either totally out of touch with what students needed to learn or just plain didn’t care because he/she has been teaching that way for 30 years and it worked then so it should work now even though it clearly doesn’t.

This class has changed that. It has been a great relief to finally have a class that is not geared for the slowest student in the class but is rather set up that everyone must work harder than they are used to in order to succeed. The fact that every student no matter at what learning level they are at have an equal opportunity to get an A in this class, all they have to do is do the work that is assigned to them.

When the first scary emails went out over summer I thought about dropping the class but didn’t for two reasons. Firstly because I needed this class to graduate and this was the only one that fit into my crazy schedule. The biggest reason that I stayed though was because of the course content. Learning about the heroic journey interested me from day one and I was very excited to study it more. Growing up I read a lot of fiction novels with the hero always going off on some grand adventure and like every other kid I wanted to be that hero and set off on a grand adventure. This class helped show that we are those heroes, each and every person is a hero in his/her own way on their own journey. While my journey may not be particularly interesting at times it is still my journey and I am still the hero in it.

I felt that the movies we watched helped with the learning a lot. It was nice taking a break from the books and just listening for awhile. Into the Woods was the one that I enjoyed the most because the characters were not so cut and dry, each character seemed to be rather complex which made analyzing them fun and interesting. I also enjoyed The Color Purple but I was a little stunned by how different the book was from the movie.

The reading for the class was a little heavy at the beginning but there are very few ways that it can be changed and still get the same learning out of the class. Awakening the Hero Within was interesting but it seemed to drone on and on at some points making reading parts of it seem like a waste of time as we had already read what it was saying. Power of Myth was also a good book and it seemed even if I picked up the book and began reading without any clear idea of what I was looking for, I would almost always come away with a new knowledge or perspective on some subject.

All in all I really enjoyed the class. It has been interesting and fun, for the most part and I do not regret taking the class at all. I really appreciate that you have talked with the class on how to better use the texts that are required for the course. I hope that you have gained some new ideas on how to better structure the class to fit your liking and benefit the student, and I can not think of many other college professors that concern themselves with matters like this and even fewer who take the time and initiative to ask the people who have experienced it, the students.