Sweetland+reading1

My Freshman Year

In __My Freshman Year__ by Rebekah Nathan, I found it very interesting and noble of her to decide to enroll in the college that she teaches at. It was interesting from the very beginning. I was surprised to realize how little professors actually know about their university. The fact that she didn’t even know where some of the buildings were was very surprising. From my own experience I can relate to the feeling of being lost in an unfamiliar place, it’s a feeling that almost all new freshman will experience at some point. I also found it interesting that the language of students was so different than professors. Rebekah stated how at some points she had to strain to understand a conversation, as if it was a different language completely. Most people tend to forget or not even realize how different generations actually are. However; there are some similarities between generations that will most likely never change. Such as getting overwhelmed with school work and trying to get involved socially. I like how the professor took her research so seriously that she put herself in the situation of being a college student and tried to see the life of a college student from a different prospective.

Ethnography

In __On Ethnography__ by Heath and Street, it mainly just explains the concepts of ethnography. I did not find this reading piece as interesting as the previous assignment. However, I enjoyed leaning about how ethnographers research different languages, they keep culture in mind, and they talk about written language as well as spoken words. It was interesting to see an ethnographer’s point of view on culture, and how neighboring groups that see themselves as different from each other actually share many habits and behavioral patterns. Culture to them has a verb meaning, they see the actions and decisions of a person often based on their culture and the background they come from. Patterns develop creating muscle memory, such as the way groups work. The characteristics developed soon become referred to as their culture. Learning about an ethnographers view on things may have been a little slow at some points; however, over all there were some interesting points made that I never would have considered prior to the reading.