Final Impressions

It's that time of the year. Finals are here and the class has just about ended. My final impressions of Colloquium are good. I never thought that I would enjoy the field trips as much as I did. I also felt they were handled well, with our teacher having us write up on them during the field trip and after in these blogs. It helped me relive the experience and actually take a step back and look into them more and see them for what they really were, learning opportunities. I also really liked the fact that they incorporated service learning in this course as well. I'm sure it introduced service learning to some of the students who were new to the university, as well as it helped others who needed the hours in general. I also liked the fact that when we presented our projects to our teacher, she wanted us to be creative with them and not simply show a powerpoint. I felt this was good because I'm sure it forced a lot of students to think outside the box, because I know it did for me. In terms of changes to the course, I would probably shorten the amount of papers written to about two or three, but definitely not four papers. These journal blogs were also good but I would recommend having one due a week as opposed to having five or six all due by a certain time. I think having a journal entry due once a week or twice a week would be good and keep the students on track. The one thing I didn't really like, was the Colloquium Test that we had to take before the class and at the end of the class. I think a simple survey at the end of class would have been just fine because I feel like we just wasted our time on that exam. Many of the questions were asked repeatedly and I just think that they could have gotten information from us on the class and our opinions towards the environment in a different way. I felt we got graded on our readings during the quizzes and we shouldn't get graded on all the readings at the end of the year. In terms of readings, I really enjoyed reading A Land Remembered. At first I thought the book was going to be extremely boring to read, but it was actually interesting. It was also very easy to read which made me enjoy it that much more. I also liked some of the readings from Louv and Dewey because they made me think about how nature isn't getting a lot of attention from us these days. It also made me look at how my attention span has drifted from when I was a kid and when I use to go out running and playing outside every day. I especially enjoyed Dewey's take on Education and how much experiencing things really educates us because that was a main theme in this class I felt, especially with all the field trips that we took. In the future, I would suggest the same field trips, but definitely include something along the lines of canoeing again because that was fun since we were out there in nature, but not just walking around. I also liked the sustainable meal because I felt that was fun and it brought our class together a little bit since we were all just sitting around and eating and drinking together and it wasn't a stressful environment. There's not much that I would change about the course, in terms of removing assignments, however I would change some things with the project we had for the wiki page. I think there should definitely be more time given for the project and at least more time in class to work on the page when everyone is together in groups because for my group personally it was very hard getting people to come together and commit to meeting. I would either make that change, or just have groups present on their chapter in power point form as opposed to making a wiki page because making that page was rather difficult. All in all, I enjoyed the class and I will definitely miss it.