Exit Interview

My very last writing assignment in my Social Sciences English course from last quarter was to write a “Self Assessment” paper stating what I had like/disliked/learned/discovered/etc. in the class.

I couldn’t really deal with any more writing at the time, so I kept it short and bitter. And very honest, because I already had my grade for my final paper.

Below the fold you’ll find this Self Assessment. Surprisingly, the Professor gave me a 3.75 out of 4.0. I’m pretty sure it was my criticism of Peer Reviews. He didn’t like that he had to make them part of the class either.

Btw: The week mentioned in the last paragraph was Boomershoot. Had to fib a bit. But I made it up in long nights of catch-up writing before leaving and after getting home.

My main goal in taking this course was to enhance my researching and documentation skills. I believe that I have achieved that goal because of the multiple new resources I was introduced to via this course. As examples, I had never used Google Scholar or the GRCC Academic Search database prior to this course. My only reservation using these databases was that a number of them required money to review their data. After requesting a few of the items for my research article and realizing that the abstracts were not quite accurate as to the contents I came to the conclusion that one could easily go broke attempting to find exactly what one was looking for. I later concluded what should have been obvious at the outset: That I only needed pieces of the articles to add to my article.

This leads me to having to explain my “attitudes towards social science.” I am afraid that I cannot say very much has changed in that regard. As mentioned above, in order to be “original” all one has to do is pick and choose which “facts” from the previous research of others one wants to use in their article. If a source says three things and a writer only agrees with and needs two of them, then those are the two the writer takes away and includes in their article. It would then take another writer another article and another stack of “facts” to get the disagreement/correction into the public. That is, if that second writer could find a place to get the disagreement/correction “peer reviewed”.

This is why I still find the social sciences disturbingly biased towards one political ideology as before, and perhaps even more so (Tierney, J, 2011). I suppose that I should probably find more than one source for this claim, but an honest individual will know this in his conscience to be true. However, I believe that I can also use one of our required texts as my second source. Re-reading America (Columbo, G, Cullen, R, & Lisle, B, 2010) has to have been one of the most dishonorable items I have ever read. While I did not disagree with a good deal of what was contained within the book, the repetition of single sided opinions contained within the covers of the book does nothing to deny ammunition to those who would make the claim of “indoctrination”. I find it seriously difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that any respectable person would believe the book to be “balanced” in any commonly understood definition of the word. The sole “conservative” author listed in the book is a known bigot and is widely regarded as an overpaid media whore. That is hardly reasonable or evenhanded.

But enough about that. I found the course to be well put together and the methodology of how we assembled our articles an excellent path to learning what is expected of a social science writer. While I found some of the requirements tedious, such as the overly complicated format of the citation (there should be a course covering just the various APA citation rules), that is a reflection of the social sciences and not the course itself.

My only actual complaint is the same one I had within my ENG101 and ENG110 courses: The peer reviews and the lack of participation from my classmates. Being dyslexic to the point of illiteracy I uniquely know the help that having a fellow writer review your work can bring. I have come to the point where I would prefer the peer reviews be handled as a type of extra credit assignment instead of a standard portion of the class.
Even with that one complaint, I am still quite happy that I took this course and am thankful to you for putting up with my foibles, errors and the week I was required to be absent during the quarter.