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The openness and encouragement of exploration and conversation that exists in our classroom and online are, to me, this class's distinguishing characteristics. I (as is evident from how late this post is) have some growing still to do to take full advantage of this, but it's a fantastic environment that makes it possible for this growth to take place. I feel like this class is very well suited to thinking/working instead of formula-memorization (for writing and thinking). The class format is also pushing me to learn from others in the class as much as I learn from the material we study, which is a new idea in my education and seems pretty wonderful.

At times I have some difficulty telling "where we're going" (if that idea applies in this class) with the material we study, or what I'm "supposed" to do with it, which can be frustrating and make me wish for more theory to direct my thoughts (or build them off of). To a large degree, I think this means I need to stretch my brain to think about our topics with less imposed direction, since we often have looked into theory when it was useful.