DOW / English 245: Electronic, Hypertext, Multimedia, Literature (Fall 2019) 

This year, I’m in this class called Hypertext, fourth or fifth time taking a class with Shanna Salinas. Not Shaina. Not Shauna. Shanna. 

The first time I was in DOW was to make a pitch about the writing center and hand out bookmarks to the first year seminar group. 

The second time is in this class. The class has no windows. Chairs are structured without mobility to control where the students are facing: the front of the classroom and the whiteboard. It’s an English class where we read texts, analyze them, and talk about our different or similar interpretations of the text. 

The books and texts are weird. In many of the texts, I gotta turn the book in all sorts of directions: up, down, to the side, diagonal. Sometimes the text is moving and flying (literally) off the page. It’s not even a perfect up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-ABAB combo. Most of the time, I am waiting to find the beat and rhythm to move to but it never comes. I end up just finding out that Chopsticks is not a sweet rom-com, but about a young woman who has a mental illness and imagines an entire relationship. Sad. 

Back to the classroom, the point of English literature is to have discussions. (At least one of the points of English literature). But in Dow, the architecture tells me that the teacher, the master of knowledge, spoon feeds you equations and problems, only to tell you the answer at the end of class. 

In our class, no listens to each other. The professor poses a question and people’s hands are raised before she even finishes her fucking sentence and by the time two people have talked, the question is out the door, nowhere in sight. 

Like what’s the point of class, if we are not listening to each other. 

Is it the fault of the students or the architecture of the classroom? Or that the texts are hardly making sense and people need to ask all their questions? 

Anyway, I have no idea. But everytime I’m about to respond to someone’s thought provoking comment, three people have already said new things and I forgot what I wanted to say. At first, I’d only listen because what’s the point of talking if other people’s ideas are out there. 

But then I realized that some of the ideas were not so thought out. Sometimes it felt like people were just reacting to the books like it was the last episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. So, I’ve stopped listening too.