Honors 295: Place-as-text Pittsburgh

This was an Honors special topics class that I took during the fall 2019 semester. The material we learned and practiced in the class led up to the class going to and experiencing Pittsburgh during fall break. It was basically a scaled back version of the Yellowstone class that I did in the summer of 2019. The class was a fun experience that helped open up how I see places and what goes on in them. We did most of our work while staying in Pittsburgh. There were only a few assignments that happened before and after we came back from Pittsburgh.

A few of the assignments for the class when we were in Pittsburgh were about writing down our daily observations of the places we went so we could get a feel of the city. At first I tried to just remember most of the things that I found interesting that happened wherever I went and wherever the group I was assigned to were told to go. Then, I decided to write down observations in my notes app on my phone and use those to try to make the writing better. It worked a little bit, but I still was not quite there yet. What I did to make all my observations make more sense by the last essay was that I added pictures to illustrate what I was writing about with my experiences in the city of Pittsburgh. These assignments helped me to be a little more observant and reflective than I was before the class.