Goal 3: ENGL 201
During my first semester as a freshman at Longwood, I was enrolled in ENGL 201, or World Literature. It was easily the hardest class of my first semester because we dealt with texts I was not familiar with, from eras and a region of the world I had never read about before.
In this class, we read texts such as the Enuma Elish, Gilgamesh, the Hebrew Old Testament, the Iliad, Medea, Lysistrata, the Aeneid, Metamorphoses, the Hebrew New Testament, the Qur’an, the Mahabharata, Dante’s Inferno, and more.
While some of these texts were interesting, others were very hard for me to grasp, partially because of the dialect used and partially because of the length of each text. Some nights, we had very long readings of 30+ pages, in addition to other classes we were taking.
During the semester, we also had two content papers and a third optional paper to increase our overall grade. Students had a lot of leeway with papers in this class; all we had to do was connect it to a reading we’d completed so far and have a plausible, concise thesis.
The assessments included one question every other class that asked about the reading we were assigned the class before. We were given a few minutes to write as much as we could, and the teacher would collect them to grade for correctness.
We also had a midterm and a final that were each 20% of our overall grade. For both, students were given a list of quotes and we had to list:
- The text that the quote came from.
- The author (if known).
- What book, canto, or section it was from (if applicable).
- The quote’s significance.
In addition to this, during the final, we were given a prompt to comprise a short essay for that day in class, with 20-30 minutes of preparation beforehand.
Our last paper for the class was a Research Paper that could be built around one of our previous content papers, or built completely from scratch. I opted to build on one of my previous papers, specifically my third paper on The Heptameron: Story 8.
The overall paper was seven pages, including a references page, and provided a more in-depth study of the story than my third paper was allowed to, at only two pages.
Below, I have included a sample of my Final Research Paper, which I received an 84% on:
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