The year that I have spent in the CAP program has been quite the journey. All the instructors were very friendly and inviting. It made the transition from high school to university much less anxiety inducing since I was nervous about the spike in difficulty. To say the least, I had learned a lot this year
My time in ASTU has been very fun. In fact, it was so much more tolerable than high school English class. All my high school English classes combined pale in comparison to ASTU. I think what contributes to that is the fact that most of the stuff we learned in English class was repeated every year which became dull and uninteresting. However, in ASTU, right from day one, we started to learn about some cool topics; we learned new terminology such as modals; we looked at scholarly papers and journal articles; we wrote proposals and literary analysis instead of the boring five paragraph essay; we even learned how to correctly make a bibliography. Back in high school I was just told leave the bibliography making to easy-bib, so when easy bib cited something wrong I didn’t understand, nor did I care enough to understand what was wrong.
Looking at some of the texts and videos we’ve been watching, such as American Sniper, I’ve been taught to look at what other scholars have been saying about what they think is important. This was already such a huge upgrade from the old high school system. One specific scholar we looked at was Judith Butler and her idea of ‘grievability’. Using such lens to look at texts in different ways was pretty novel. That’s something I’d expect to come out of a history class, although this IS ‘global citizens’ so it would make sense. In fact, all the class in the CAP program can be tied to one another. In Soci class, we talked about Neo-liberalism, a term that was discussed in Poli Sci class last semester. This first year in the CAP program has really taught me how to look at texts more critically. I had watched the movie ‘Downfall’ last year for a history class, and looking back on it, I think of the scenes much more differently like recognizing that ‘oh this scene relates to Butler’s idea of grievability’.
The CAP program really does help with the introduction to university life. However, I do wish that high school would do a better job of preparing students for high school. During ASTU classes sometimes I wondered of what was spoken was even English, such as ‘modals’. That was the very first time I had even heard of that word and I thought to myself ‘wow that sounds complicated’. I do appreciate the work the instructors put into teaching the classes and the effort to help us become ‘true scholars’.