I had no idea what to expect when I signed up for English 302.  I took this class because it fulfilled a requirement for the IT minor.  I had taken a team based learning class before, Biochem 394 RI.  I didn’t like it because it was a poorly thought out and poorly run class that nobody asked for  and only existed because the university now requires all majors to have a team based learning class.  On the first day, I realized that I had never taken a class with the type of people in the room.  Most of my classes have been in the Biochem department.  Other than that, I have taken classes in the history and political science departments, which have some overlap.  Outside of that, the classes I have taken have been GenEds, and I didn’t interact with the people in them for the most part.  All of a sudden, I was sitting in a room populated, for the most part, by English majors.

Not only that, I had to get to know the people in the class.  There were discussions every class.  We took multiple viewpoints to come to a consensus and learn about topics I had never thought much about, let alone studied.  I came to like this class more than a lot of what I have taken at UMass.  It was interesting to have a class centered on people and interaction rather than a lecture and note taking.  I started out taking a lot of notes lest something appear on a test that I hadn’t written down.  I ended up not taking notes and listening most of the time.  I felt that I got more out of the class that way.

The course content itself was more interesting than I thought it would be.  There was a lot of theoretical discussion about how everyday things were affecting the way we understand and interact with other people.  That was fun for me.  It had never occurred to me that social media and the accompanied mindset changed how we deal with one another.  People spend a lot of time taking pictures at parties rather than just partying, in the traditional sense.

Our discussions about our relationship with big business as consumers were interesting.  They made me look at products and companies differently.  Now, I look at new ideas and products and immediately ask questions.  Who owns this company?  How are they going to make money?  Is this something I really need?  Could there be negatives associated with using this?  I would only decide how I felt about a new product after I could answer all of these questions to a satisfactory degree.  Once I got to that point, it started to sound a lot more like the type of inquiry I was used to hearing in a science class.  That blurring of the lines was the vest part of my experience in English 302.