Learning Curves

Written by: Sydney Linders

Major: English: Practical Writing

Location: Manchester, United Kingdom

While at Manchester, I took all literature and writing classes. I’ve been taking classes like these since starting college as a Freshman, but the ones at MMU came with a lot of learning curves. Each of the classes were one-part lecture, two-part discussion, creating a mixture of both that I feel is missing in American classes. Too often I feel classes are either one or the other and it was nice to get both. There were a lot of mentioned historical events that I wasn’t familiar with—especially in my Shakespeare class. In the same class in America, I have no doubt that a whole portion of the class period would be taken up with an explanation of what historical events inspired the play in question, but not so in this class, most events were taken as fact. I had to surreptitiously google quite a bit about the English Civil War in particular to keep up. I guess I’d never really thought about stuff like that in America. Like there was one time where my tutor mentioned old money versus new money in the upper classes and referred to a book that wasn’t the Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald. I wasn’t aware such a book even existed. Beyond that, my peers were as much of a fascination as the subject matter. In my American Spaces class, I was The American. Such a position entitled me to the soapbox more often than not, but it was interesting to see what people thought about my country. It’s a bit unnerving to witness such an unflinching gaze and allowed me to see a lot of things with new eyes. This whole trip forced me to be American for the first time in my life. I’ve always been American, obviously, but always in the context of “we” (“We the People” and all that). For the first time, I was an American, all on my own. And all of the connotations of that was interesting, especially in a country that I had assumed was much the same as my own.

Categories: Writing, Learning, Manchester