The Outcomes

In every college course the students are presented with a syllabus that should state the outcomes of the course at hand. The outcomes are what you should take from the class or in other words what you learn. My English 150 course at Longwood University taught by Dr. Lettner-Rust has five outcomes listed on the syllabus. These outcomes are the skills that are taught to us, the students, to improve our writing. The outcomes are listed below.

Course Outcomes

·         Understand and adapt to rhetorical and contextual differences in tasks involving reading, writing, speaking, and listening

·         Engage in academic inquiry using and evaluating a variety of sources, incorporating and documenting source material appropriately, and avoiding plagiarism

·         Develop flexible processes for engaging in academic inquiry

·         Develop knowledge of conventions for different kinds of texts and demonstrate substantial control of the conventions of edited American English

·         Reflect on and make judgments about their own texts and writing processes

The assignment for today is to apply these outcomes to the papers we have written in the English 150 course.

Understand and adapt to rhetorical and contextual differences in tasks involving reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The outcome presented is applied to our most recent paper, our Literary Analysis. This assignment contained two poems that was read and analysed as a class discussion, by the students. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth and "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane are two very similar yet very different poems. During the class discussion each student had their chance to analyse the poems in their opinion as well as listening to the different interpretations other students expressed. We compared and contrasted the meanings of the two poems in our paper. You will find in the paper below of how the presented outcome helped me in writing this paper.

Jacqueline Blair

Lettner-Rust/ English 150

10/18/10

Lit Analysis Essay

                  At times when peace was desired, two poems occur that expressed an escape from the

violence. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth was written during the

French Revolution. William Wordsworth used stanzas of rhyme to relate his way of coping with

the revolution. "Beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze" is

Wordsworth's personification of how nature brought him peace, which is continued in line 18(5,

6). "What wealth the show to me had brought" shows William's joy that is received from nature.

             "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane was written during the Vietnam War in the sixties.

Unlike William Wordsworth, "White Rabbit" shows escape by drugs instead of nature as stated

"one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small"(1,2). In lines 13 and 14 the statement

"when men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go" refers to the government telling

citizens what they should do. This statement was placed in this poem to show the reasoning of

why Jefferson Airplane needed an escape from the realities of the world at that time. As well as

lines 13 and 14, lines 7 and 8 express the opinion of Jefferson Airplane on the governments

reasoning on entering the Vietnam War when stating "and if you go chasing rabbits and you

know you're going to fall"(7, 8). "When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead and the

white knight is talking backwards and the red queen's "off with her head" remember what the

dormouse said; "keep your head" (19-24). This statement is the ending to the "White Rabbit"

poem; the meaning behind it is even when the government has lost all logic reasoning everyone

needs a way of staying sane, which is their excuse for taking drugs.

            No matter the circumstance, whether it be war or revolution, those subjected to the

situation will try and find a way to deal with it. Some coping methods might be more risky than

others but there will always be some way to cope.