Dear readers,

After reading what everyone else has said this week, I was a little speechless. I don't know why it all had the tenor to me of a sort of whirlwindy high-school-yearbook-on-graduation-day, but it did. I felt that same maudlin sense of "but what can I write to encompass for posterity how important all of this was?!?!?!"

How can ENL 200 really be ending? I feel like we've just gotten some kind of rhythm going, and if we did this for one more semester we'd emerge as some sort of superhero team. Once we were all trained up, each of our special powers would contribute to our collective ability to save the planet.

EARTH! WATER! WIND! FIRE! ... HEART!

Deep breath. Ok, I'm going to have to pull out of this nostalgic (and slightly premature) nose-dive for now; just know you all are loved. Here is what I learned from re-reading my posts.

(1) I was doing better than I thought I was.

As a recovering perfectionist, I definitely recall a troubling sense of fraudulence each time I pressed the 'submit' button. So I was surprised to re-read my own posts and discover that, on the whole, they weren't as bad as I remembered. Certainly there were "areas for growth," but at the same time (and at risk of looking down, cartoon-like, to see that I've been scurrying along across what I've only just realized is impossibly empty space) I was doing it! We were all doing it, and by 'it' I mean writing things that for the most part read like passable scholarship in this field. Well, with the exception of Rebecca's brilliant emoji post (and the other new media experiments enacted in this blog), but I think that's a promising direction for a new academic frontier.

While a little back-patting is always pleasant, that's not exactly what I learned here. I think the more important part of this realization is that it is possible to do experiments in writing even before you think you have something reasonable to say. You never know what will happen when you decide to mash together this article and this short story until you try, or at least that was my experience. Some of the most tenuous, questionable, and problematic transitions I made (along the lines of "but I’d like to end by using my primary text, chock full of 'thought experiments,' to try to literalize some parts of Flusser’s more abstract reasoning") actually sounded more or less ok in retrospect. Which makes me think I've been devoting way too much mental energy to worrying that some referee might step in and yellow card me for "insufficient self-evidence of connection between ideas." If you can articulate it, there's a good chance you can write it down without penalty.

(2) The best experiments were with other people.

I really liked working through ideas with you all. I especially noticed this in doing the collaborative posts, but also in class and with the online comments. At least for me, the experience of writing something with Cassie and Sophia felt organic, totally engaging, and sort of magical: 1 + 1 suddenly equaled three, and I loved seeing where our thinking ended up from where it started. I hope I'll figure out a way to do more collaborative or semi-collaborative work with my peers, despite co-authoring things apparently not being a great idea.

(3) Okay, I know I'm supposed to mention specific post(s). Come to think of it, I did notice as I was re-reading that a lot of my posts had this kind of an argument:

"This person uses science or some kind of epistemological truth-holder to say x. They are misusing the truth-holding (sciencey, mappy, structuralist, enlightenmenty) discourse as a blunt weapon when really it's a fine instrument, as we can illuminate by putting all this in conversation with my primary text." 

Given that, I was surprised that one of my favorite posts was about how to read Chen's Toxic Animacies and/as science fiction. This post was about sharing through pedagogy, and NOT about poking holes in people's use of science. I'd like to expand my repertoire of generous readings like this one, and not always be grouchily stalking around like a science-security-guard. That said, and in complete contradiction to it, the post that stood out to me most was my first one. Rusty prose aside, my Chakrabarty takedown was actually kind of awesome, and I'll have to find an opportunity to recycle it one day.