Daniel Alvarez's e-portfolio

I was excited to take this class but it wasn’t really what I was expecting. It was co-taught by two professors, which was different and worked well sometimes, but I still prefer a singular professor. Some aspects of the class were interesting, like the books that we read, Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. I really liked both of these books and I enjoyed hearing the discussion about them with my classmates. Maybe it’s just the scientific aspect of the class, but I felt that many of the assignments were useless and pedantic. I felt that some of the English aspects, as well, weren’t utilized as well as they could have been. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t a class that I really enjoyed even though I really love the topic. I was thinking it would be great because I love English and am majoring in it, and I love the environment. Two of my biggest interests, but the class just fell flat for me. It could have been done a lot better and the class would have been more engaged if it was. I was hoping we’d talk about transcendentalism or maybe how our relationship with the environment has shifted as science has progressed, as seen in romantic and Victorian literature. This could’ve been tied in very well to the climate crisis and how our increasing disconnect with nature due to technology is perhaps spurring our unwillingness to make any meaningful strides to mitigate climate change. We talked about climate change and the environment, yes, but not as meaningfully as we could have. The english and environmental science aspects felt, for the most part, like two different halves of the course. Overall, I feel that the class was a good experience and I hope to do more research on the topic in the future.

This was the first essay that I wrote for the course and I thought it was pretty well-written. There are some organizational issues to work on and my professors said that with some work, I should submit the essay to the Longwood undergraduate research Journal, Incite. I may talk to them about this next semester and consider doing that.

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