On Durst

I'm beginning to wonder if the initial expectations of the profiled students in this sample entry-level composition class were shaped most strongly by the name of the class. (And, furthermore, if there is anything problematic with their assumptions...). Supposing that no syllabi were distributed prior to the first day of class, and that these students don't have in-depth conversations with older individuals about the course goals of college composition at this particular university, isn't the name of the course the only clue as to what the course contents will be?

As an undergraduate, I enrolled in a course titled "Art History I: 1700-Present" simply to fulfill a humanities credit. It was a 100-level course. I knew no one interested in this field. I had ignored the visual arts since being forced to fabricate cottonball snowmen in elementary school because I quite plainly do not understand the visual arts. My experience with high school history course was taught by the football coach and focused on regurgitation of dry facts. So, my estimation of the course was that I'd be regurgitating names and dates of visual artifacts ascribed value for reasons unbeknownst to me. Now, the class was (thankfully) massively different than this initial guess of mine: we discussed the impact of art on society and vice-versa. Certainly there was memorization involved, but the point is that this class broke very strongly with what I knew about these fields (art + history) from my secondary education.

As a student it took a whole two class periods to adapt to this new idea of "art history."

Furthermore: my expectations for a variety of college classes were much different than the actual course content. My American Modernism seminar all but skipped the Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald I expected would dominate and instead focused quite heavily on Stein, H.D., and Djuna Barnes. I took a San Francisco Renaissance Poets seminar thinking that was another name for "Beat Poetry"-- but soon learned of Snyder, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, and maybe a half-dozen other poets I had never paid attention to. I don't think that these (to use Durst's word) "divergent" expectations negatively affected my classroom experience. Maybe I bitched briefly about the lack of Ginsberg over lunch once or twice, but ultimately I'm glad these courses were different than my first impressions during registration.

Okay now I've drifted too far...

What I mean to say is, Durst dedicates an entire chapter here to dissecting these first-day essays by composition students. I am unsure as to what he notes as the lasting consequence of these "divergent" expectations. The course is a "composition" course, and so students approach it with the definition they have of "composition": putting things together, arranging, creating. The colloquial definition, I would argue, focuses on structure (and this mirrors the concerns of the students in these essays).

Perhaps it is useful to think of the purpose of the course as reworking the students' definitions. They come in thinking of composition, writing, and college itself as simple, one-dimensional concepts. They (hopefully) leave with a new understanding. Broader, even open-ended definitions.

Regrading the above examples I give of my impressions with various undergraduate courses: Clearly I did not know very much about art history or modernist authors or postwar avant-garde poetry. Had I left these classes having learned nothing about the subject, then the tuition would have been a waste.

Somewhere in this post I was making a point. All apologies.