Blog Post #2

The theme for this course seems to be around the topic of race and issues surrounding it in today’s society, which is something I wasn’t anticipating for this English class. Although I thought this was odd at first, I think there is a lot of opportunity and material for us to cover with this topic, and possibly create some great arguments and analysis in our papers. Because race is a touchy subject in today’s society, it seems like an unusual topic for a freshman English class, but nonetheless seems intriguing. My initial thought was that this could be a problematic topic, but I realized that it is an important topic to be discussed, and what better way to do it than through literature analysis. I think it might even be an important topic for first year students, who may not have had much experience discussing race in high school. I have covered race before in school but only in a historical context in classes like US History, so I am interested in taking a different approach to the topic, and learning more about a firsthand account with racial issues in the book we will be reading. I feel as if this will be an enlightening experience for all of us, and will hopefully open my horizons to issues that are often pushed aside in today’s culture, as talked about in the introduction to So You Want To Talk About Race. Not only will this be a powerful learning experience, but in addition I feel as if this will strengthen   my text analysis and ability to comment and build off of an author’s writing. I absolutely wasn’t expecting for race to be one of the themes of this course, but I think it will help improve my composition skills and rhetorical awareness.