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Date Posted: 02:31:59 06/10/08 Tue
Author: SS
Subject: *******************FINALREFLECTIVELETTER********************

Noah Eaton
June 7, 2008
English 490


Dear Professor Miller,


Toward the beginning of this course you asked each of us: “How do the different ways of knowing influence our ideas of writing processes and instruction? Do they set up expectations for writing processes and products? Do they suggest particular classroom procedures?”
To be honest, I have concluded that there is no definitive answer to any of these questions. We’ve observed how intuition is widely familiar as a term, yet is obfuscated by the many different definitions it is tagged with by competing scholars and distanced heavily from how ancient communities domineered by poets and oracles defined it. On the other side of the coin, we have learned how inductive and deductive learning under a decisively directed form of knowing is ubiquitous in academic disciplines, yet fails to produce evidence in academia and is, itself, plagued by many variations of definition.
We’ve studied how, despite visual devices being nearly omnipresent in our culture and unmistakably influencing the way we produce ideas routinely, the academic community has exhibited minimal signs of willingness to study and teach visual rhetoric, as with the contextual upholstery of metaphors.
We’ve fathomed how experts unanimously agree developing the cognitive capacities of students so they can be efficient problem-solvers and critical-thinkers is a top priority, yet we have had limited research into studying the ethical and intellectual development of college students.
And, with regard to the topics of the therapeutic benefits, emotion, personality and the concept of the self in writing, all these terms are perceived to have ambiguous leanings and can be deconstructed in many different forms, or sub-categorized considerable lengths.
This is why, beyond having little immersion previously in this field of study, I chose to write a small collection of response papers. I wanted to act out the role of some cultural anthropologist; scrutinizing and evaluating some various texts, then infuse some applied knowledge to what I gather from these works, hoping to ultimately make sense, even if only faintly so, of where these often contradictory ideas and expectations come from, and how they constantly mold who we are.
Your suggestions and encouragement provided the springboard I needed to write my first of the four early on, where I was reading Janet Emig‘s “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing” and after alluding to “Mozartians” and “Beethovians” in the end, I thought: “Is this all we really are? Surely you’re joking!” At that time all I had written was a ¾ page response to it in my journal, and no nerve ending in my gut had really murmured: “You’re onto something here, Noah, this would provide ample material for a full response paper!” But, after espousing my reaction in class, you persuaded me it would be a potentially fascinating response paper topic, so I followed through and this is where the momentum started effervescing.
I feel my final two papers, however, best exemplified what I was going for: applying a more biographical, everyday touch to two dense topics, coupled with my applied knowledge, so I can more convincingly pinpoint, or at least bracket, these vestiges of rhetoric in their diverse attire that interweave human experience, whether it be understanding the trauma of a manic-depressive family artist or the self-discovery of a Finnish native who would later become an American teacher that so happens to be the one who inspired me to start writing religiously.
In the end, I was pleasantly surprised to discern a sort of circularity that winded through all nine weeks of this course, where we essentially ended where we began. We began during week two reading about human instinct/intuition and how many regard it as the “ultimate reality” and truth of ones self, and ended during week ten talking about how we develop and refine ourselves through the writing process. Everything in-between was like making various excursions into different regions of our collective experience, whether they be visions, figurative language, cognition, emotion or personality, and completing that return trip with souvenirs in the form of heightened awareness, deepened relational empathy and widened intellectual curiosity.

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