College Seminar (105-7-20)
Topic
I Guess This Is Growing Up: The Transition to Coll
Instructors
Meaghan Morrissa Fritz
847/467-6162
555 Clark St, #238
Meeting Info
Parkes Hall 212: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM
Overview of class
Welcome to Northwestern! Over the next ten weeks, first-year students all over campus will experience a flood of transitions as they adjust to college life. You'll experience exciting (and scary!) social transitions. Many of you might experience some degree of spatial transition, too, arriving to live on campus away, however far, from where you graduated high school. There are financial transitions, family transitions, and cultural transitions to contend with. In your courses this fall, many of you will experience academic transitions from high-school to college-level expectations of critical thinking, reading, and writing. As a student enrolled in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, you'll begin experiencing the interdisciplinarity of a liberal arts education right away, juggling multiple courses across varied disciplines starting in Week 1!
This course aims to ease some of the transitions that you will experience at Northwestern as college students and as humans by defining, exploring, discussing, and reflecting on your own experiences, academic and otherwise, this quarter. To ground these conversations, we will spend the quarter reading and discussing Barbara Kingsolver's coming-of-age novel, Demon Copperhead, a work that embodies the exciting interdisciplinary overlaps of a liberal arts education. Through our exploration of Demon Copperhead, we will work together to cultivate productive study habits and to hone your critical thinking, reading, writing, and research skills for Northwestern classes. Our class will also serve as a social support system, as we work generously with one another through seminar discussion and a routine exchange of writing.
Content Warning: Demon Copperhead is a beautiful coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of a narrator who is a survivor of nearly inconceivable loss. Although the story is oftentimes playful, funny, and romantic, it also touches on many sensitive and painful topics including: scenes of graphic drug use, addiction, and overdose; the U.S. foster care system; the opioid epidemic; homelessness; economic precarity; parental death; and grief.
Class Materials (Required)
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead. ISBN-13: 978-0063251922 ($32.50)
Class Attributes
WCAS College Seminar