Individualized Education

When I first logged onto this course in BOLT, I was really surprised to hear that we would be writing blogs regularly.  I could not understand why we would be blogging in a technical writing course, because I spent most of my time in high school and even some of college getting assignments that had so many directions to follow.  I was questioning what an assignment with only a general direction is meant to accomplish.  I have had a class or two that had assignments like this one before, and I never thought too much about their purpose.  After some time, I concluded that these open assignments are designed so that we college students can take our education down the exact path that we want to take.  Additionally, ever since I enrolled in this course, I could not help thinking about how I will have to write technically at a future job.  How will I know that I am writing correctly?

By studying, reading, or in this case writing what we want to write about within reason gives us free range to explore a topic that we want to talk about.  We are already emotionally invested in the topic if we want to talk about it, and the odds are that this will make us much more likely to just go out of our way to research the topic when it may not even be required.  This method of learning can most likely be applied to just about any assignment.  I thought to myself about the amount of learning that could be driven to possibly spark a new interest just by reading or writing about what I want to. The more that I was forced to use this method for approaching assignments, the more likely that I found myself learning things that other people around me did not learn about as much.  As time went on, I saw first-hand that my college education was becoming personalized.

At this point in my education, it is hard for me to sit down and not think about how the studying and assignments that I do today will help me down the road in a couple of years.  When I think about technical writing, all I can think about is writing reports for different soils, rocks, and situations out in the field.  I do worry about messing up because I feel like it is easy to do, and I really do not want to mess up in front of an employer who is not forgiving.  The worst thing I can imagine is my future employer thinking that I am incompetent because of a mistake that I made.  I think that the people that I am surrounded by will ultimately be the most important for this situation.  My friends and family constantly tell me about how smart that they think I am.  When I exit this course, I hope that I will see that my writing skills will be improved enough for me to believe my friends and family.  I am hoping that by the end of my college career, I will have retained most of the knowledge that was being thrown at me so that if I do make a mistake, it will hopefully be a mistake that is insignificant.  What if the mistake I make is significant, but it is not an academic mistake but an audience mistake?

This past weekend I found out from first-hand experience that knowing your audience is crucial.  I am not 21 yet, but I found myself having a small drinking party this past weekend.  I was very distracted from the majority of the people that were at the party for most of the night because I had a friend who kept pulling me aside to have conversations by ourselves.  It is safe to assume that I did not hear about a large majority of the conversations that happened outside of the ones my friend and I had because of this.  Two of my friends were drunk to the point where they were making comments to some of the girls that were at my apartment that were not even close to being acceptable.  The next morning, I felt awful about this taking place at my apartment and especially since I did not even know until the next morning.  I knew that I had to confront my friends, but I knew it wouldn’t be affective at all if the conversation turned into an interrogation.  I had to present an extremely sensitive subject in a way that would not offend my audience or in this case, my friends.  I feel like this could happen to me in the future because there could be environmental or geological hazards that a client does not want to hear anything about.  As a geologist, I would be obligated to bring up the topic because of the harmful hazard.  In this situation, I would need to present the problem in such a way that the client does not get offended but also will take immediate action.

One of the biggest things that I came to realize in just writing this assignment is that curiosity about the point in education, acquired knowledge in education, and learning how to address the audience while still becoming competent about what I am studying.  Deep down, I think that people do want to help to better the environment, but they cannot be scolded for not knowing what to do.  As a geologist, it will be my job to determine how we can encourage people to take action in such a task.  Thank you for reading and have a good night.

Jacob