Jenny McDonald
Priest 2
2/4/10
Great Books
For a lot of classes at school, the question of “when am I ever going to use this later in life” often comes up. In math and science, it’s knowledge needed only for your education, or if you choose one of those fields when you grow up. In my previous English class, I got into an argument with my 6th grade teacher because I didn’t understand why I needed to learn how to diagram sentences, where you separated the subject, the verbs, and all the different phrases. When I’m 50, I will never be reading and think, “hmm I think I’m going to diagram a sentence!” However, this class is different. My great books class continues to prod at the way I think and the way that I feel about certain things.
The novel Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, is a novel that has made me think about many things happening in the world around me that I have never noticed before. What would I be willing to do for my security? This boy that we are reading about is a teenager like the rest of us, and I found myself constantly putting myself in his situation while reading the novel. I found myself wondering what I would be thinking of when I returned to my parents after being captured for five days. While I was reading the beginning of this novel, I thought that it was completely set in the future because of all the advanced and complicated technology that was used, which I later found out is all real and used today.
This isn’t literature as what we think of it. All of our in-class discussions can change the way we think as well as teach us new things. When we read and study and analyze these novels and essays we get the big ideas out of them. These ideas are all relatable to real life. When we studied A Social Me by William James, we all realized that we do care what others think of us and how we act around people. Why Americans are so Often Restless by Alexis de Tocqueville portrayed my family’s dreams to always want to have more than everyone else, not because we need it, but simply because it is put out there for us to reach. This literature class isn’t just stories about enchanted lands long ago that don’t relate to the world that we live in, everything that we learn about and study has some way of linking directly to our lives, whether it is through ideas or actual tangible similarities.
