The semester started off to a rocky pace at first for me. I was finding a grasp on the course for myself while also gaining an understanding of my other classes. I had the impression this course was going to heavily involve reading and writing and that would be the main gist of the class. Through the mini collaborations I quickly learned this was not the case. Working together with teammates helped my understanding of course topics as well as how to manage workloads in groups. We gained a deeper understanding of the text as well as our own professor’s style of teaching. Many of the course concepts have applied to my own sense of learning through the class such as apophenia, good faith, and trust. As I navigated the course I started to deepen my understanding of how the course concepts not only relate to the book but to my life as a student.
The first thing we got started on was memorizing course concepts and what they mean. The course concepts are trust, good and bad faith, liquid, liquidity, expulsion, swap(ping), foreclosure, surviving, and apophenia. The ones that have resonated with me the most have to be apophenia, good faith, and trust. When working on mini collaboration one we were focused heavily on King Lear and how liquid(ity) and swap(ping) as language/concepts/plot points as well as how these terms interact when it comes to engaging expulsion in the play.
Act one scene one of King Lear, Lear ask’s his daughters to express their love to him. When his youngest daughter, Cordelia, turn comes up she states she has nothing to say because she loves her father, “as her father”, and not for his money, “Nothing comes from nothing.” Lear replies. King Lear then expelled his daughter from the kingdom and inheritance when she refused to prove to him why she loved him more than her sisters and why she should inherit his riches over them. What I learned from King Lear that applied to my own life were the thoughts of expulsion. This form of expulsion taught and made clear to me how some people are blinded by their power and privilege that they do not see the truth of certain situations. I feel as if this relates to me as a student because as a student of color at Geneseo which is a predominantly white institution I feel as if sometimes others do not understand the struggle that comes along with that. Cordelia was impacted and overlooked because of the differences between her and her family as well as her emotional disconnection to wealth as it was not important to her. To connect myself to Cordelia, at this campus I sometimes feel outshined by peers or overlooked in certain topics due to my demographic background and other students most likely do not take notice of this advantage they have. This can be related to King Lear in the sense that he did not understand Cordelia truly loved him as her father and did not care about his liquidity while his other daughters saw only his wealth. This is my reflection of how I believe expulsion from King Lear can relate to my own life through emotional disconnection to everyone else.
Expulsion is a course concept that I have experienced many times in my life but have never known what it meant. As we watched the “Old Man and the Storm” we saw many more examples of bad faith and expulsion as well as trust. The “Old Man and the Storm” highlighted the 2005 tropical storm called Hurricane Katrina and how many people were displaced from their homes. The government failed to properly establish support programs for people after Hurricane Katrina which left thousands expelled from their homes and even towns. As a reflection of myself I realized how an event such like this relates to myself before my life as a college student. In New York City there is a housing program called NYCHA which stands for New York City Housing Authority. Its primary target is to shelter and house low income individuals and families so that they may have a place to stay with access to water and electricity. Me, my mother, and my little sister lived in Walt Whitman’s NYCHA unit in Fort Greene for fourteen years. So such as how people were shown from the “Old Man and the Storm” being displaced by a natural disaster and slow government response is similar to how Hurricane Sandy affected NYC and its housing programs in 2012. Slow response and failure form the mayor and governor to acknowledge the truth affected the way the state government paid to fix damages caused by the storm. Many people including my family had no access to electricity, no clean water due to flooding from sewage systems, and poorly insulated homes due to damage to brick layers. These problems were too slowly fixed just as we can see how the federal government for natural disaster prevention handled the thousands affected by Hurricane Katrina.
To reflect on the topic of how I felt physically and mentally when engaging “Parable of the Sower” in the context of that which would seem to connect to the 2008 financial crisis,’ ‘foreclosure crisis,’ ‘subprime mortgage crisis,’ or ‘housing crisis?’ I would say yes one hundred percent. When reading Octavia Butler’s novel all I could think about was the beginning of our course. The way Lauren interacts with her world and even the way her world is shaped are all examples of a potential future we could face(of course with a little added drama). The way she wants to branch out her new religion known as Earthseed is a perfect example of people we see today who often try to start their own forms of belief systems such as regular people, celebrities, and politicians. Lauren states, “There is no single thing that broke America. But a combination of things: greed, laziness, and selfishness were major factors. We allowed ourselves to become too dependent on big business. We allowed our government to be bought. We forgot about caring for the Earth, for each other, and for ourselves. And we forgot that some things just can’t be trusted to take care of themselves.” This encapsulates the connection between our world and how the current world is today. Too many people are focused on themselves that they do not bother to examine the world around them as it crumbles apart. Global warming is a big part of the story which is what heavily affected America in the book as well as the world today. Global warming is a current world issue that has and will continue to affect us all.
Another way to reflect upon connections I learned between Parable of the Sower and the 2008 crisis is about the current state of the world we live in and how people do not care until it is too late. Everyone fails to realize the detrimental impact of their failure to be woke in today’s world so long as they are satisfied in their current life. In chapter 3 Lauren states, “People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.” Once everything hits the fan is when people wish everything could return to the way it was. Take covid for example, for nearly three years we wanted everything to go back to the way they were. We did not take the proper action as a country under terrible leadership at the time and we fell apart. We were afraid to leave our homes, many people passed away, the world became polluted with disease, it seemed like the apocalypse.
My final connection to course concepts comes from “A Mercy” by Toni Morrison. The biggest connection I have in my own life as well as to “A Mercy” is Florens sense of apophenia. Apophenia is the habit of forming connections between objects or material that may not have a true deeper meaning. As a student I always make observations in order to try to establish connections between things in order to deepen my understanding, however these things may not actually be connected. My connection to Florens through this is her similarity or observation and critical thinking. In chapter seven when Florens is sent through the forest on her own to find the blacksmith. Another example of being forced to leave(expulsion), as she goes on her own. She notices the changes of light and quiet movement of the animals but lacks the knowledge to interpret those things. This observation of light comes into connection with apophenia because she perceives signs or meanings where there are possibly none to distinguish. This highlights my point because it represents our similarities between the way we observe things and how we interpret those things in order to make connections. This was something I learned about myself stressing over missing small details as a college student. In terms of whether or not all of this matters according to GLOBE‘s insistence that Geneseo students should gain practice in the ability to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time” I would stand by the argument that it does. As a college student venturing into adulthood it is important to apply what we learn in our courses to our own personal lives. Not only does it help us gain insight into who we are as people but it allows us to navigate through the rest of our years at college. We pay thousands of dollars to waste such useful info that could be useful in representing ourselves. Applying everything I learned from this course into my own life has helped me discover more of my identity and has given me a newfound understanding of the type of man I want to become.