Hi folks,

I’m Genevieve Millin.

For funsies: I play a lot of ultimate frisbee; I love to read, ride my bike, and hang in my hammock; like most humans I love music and movies especially a) really dumb comedies b) less dumb comedies c) things that make me cry; I have a twin sister which confuses a lot of people; I don’t think I’m supposed to be using this much punctuation like this.

For business: I’m a senior here at CSUC but only about a year and a half into the English Education major. I’ve been working on the Language & Literacy focus and a linguistics minor, but I’ve more recently become very interested in creative writing as well so I’m not quite sure what direction I want to take now. It’s a little harder to make these decisions now feeling like I’m kinda staring down the barrel of perpetual studenthood, but oh well. My ultimate goal is to be a teacher, although the teaching venue still isn’t set in stone– high school, college, none of the above, little bit of everything, etc. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m pretty indecisive. I’m excited for this class though, since I still haven’t had much instruction or experience in the actual teaching of English yet! I know this is going to be a really helpful and eye-opening semester in that regard and maybe, just maybe, I will actually come to some conclusions.

 

Something the Wenger article made me think about was the different ways in which people like to learn & work. As someone who can often be pretty solitary, what seems like a near-constant emphasis on group work and “diving in” to things and whatnot gets a little tiring. It’s not a hard & fast rule of mine, but I appreciate having a quiet space and time to myself to try and figure things out or produce something. It depends on what the activity is, of course, as some are more conducive to a group environment than others but Wenger’s social theory led me to look at it all in a different way. For instance, writing a poem is something I would consider to be more of an individual undertaking, but he mentions it when first stating his “four premises.” As he continued on and gave more detail, it was suddenly easy to see that even if you write a poem by yourself, you then belong to a “community of practice.” These communities are definitely important when forming one’s identity, finding meaning, and talking about a given activity/further honing one’s skills and understanding.