Discovering Ideas

Introduction to All the Rest

Welcome! This, as the title says, is an introduction. Furthermore, it's an introduction to a college class.  But the class will be basically what you make it.  So rather than me starting by introducing what the class will be like, let's start by you introducing what you will be like to the class, so to speak.

For right now, just assume hypothetically that you were free to do whatever you chose this semester. What would you like to accomplish this semester? What could you do in this class that would help you to achieve your own personal goals? What would you like to learn about or get better at? What are you interested in that you would like to explore further? What are your learning goals this semester? I am not asking you to tell me, by the way, what my goals for you are, or what you think your goals should be. I'm not asking you what you think you are supposed to adopt as goals.  I am asking for the truth about your own mind. I promise not to hold it against you.   What would you really like to accomplish? What do you think would be valuable and important to you?

I'll give you a warning first.  It's not easy to think about this question with an open mind.  Many students, in fact most of us as students, become conditioned to think about school in terms of what others expect of us.  I'm asking you to think about school in terms of what you want for yourself.  The easiest way to answer a question like this is to not really answer it, to make one of two evasive maneuvers.  The first is to do what I suggested above you not do: tell me what you think I want to hear.  This often comes across as something like "I'd like to improve my writing skills this semester so that I can become a better student."  The reason that is (usually) an evasion is that it isn't really about what you want to do.  If you really do want to improve your writing skills, why?  What do you plan to write about, or who do you plan to write to?  What are your larger hopes that improving your writing skills are linked to?  Why do you think they're linked?  Unless you get into these questions, you aren't really writing about your own goals, just the "assigned" goals that you think come with the class.  You're reporting the kinds of expectations you believe schooling brings with it, but not really saying anything about yourself.  The second evasion is to report your own goals or hopes, but while ignoring the class as a real part of your experience.  This kind of answer can be something like, "I want to get a good grade so I can get my degree."  Of course you do, but that's a result you'd like to see from the class, not something you'd like to accomplish in the class.  It doesn't say anything about what you'd really like to do, only about what you want to happen after you've done it.  It's a good thing, not a bad thing, that you want to get a good grade in the class.  But we can assume that.  It doesn't tell us anything about what you want to achieve for yourself while getting the good grade.  

One reason it's hard to think about the goals you want to achieve in a college class is that you probably expect the goals of most classes to be set for you.  You aren't used to taking responsibility for goal setting in a classroom environment, and for good reason. 

And so you may not have any goals for the class; you may not be used to thinking about classes in that way.  In fact, you may not be used to thinking about college that way.  You might have to shake up your thinking a bit to really get some ideas of what you want college to accomplish for you.  So I know that what I'm asking you to do is difficult.  I'm not expecting you to spend hours on it.  But I hope you'll break the ice on thinking about difficult questions.  It'll be good practice for the rest of the semester.

So, to summarize, the question I'm posing to you is this: what goals would you like to achieve, how would you like to change, this semester, in this class?  I take it for granted that the goals will be larger than the class, but they should overlap it.

Please send your response to this question by e-mail: <jtagg@palomar.edu>.

After, not before, you write your response to the above question, finish reading this introduction.

Discovering Ideas
Palomar College
jtagg@palomar.edu
This page was last edited: 01/05/09