Instead of focusing on the idealistic facets of this class, I think it might be more sensible for me to root the goals and the mile-markers of this class firmly within the realistic. This class and its curriculum were not created, from how I interpret everything, with idealistic successes in mind, but instead determined how to help students work to become better writers and ultimately, better students.

From what I am gathering from my students during our conferences, they are enjoying the revised curriculum and feel that they are coming to understand how to transfer the knowledge that they are acquiring in this class to their own passions and their own course of study. This is not an idealistic goal; I believe that, because of the midterm conferences, instructors can help identify a student’s interests and link the curriculum back to that focus.

Realistically, this class will provide students with the foundational knowledge of how to communicate within their own fields of study, and also provide them with new platforms through which they can communicate. Instructing students on genre, medium, literacy, and asking them to translate their projects into different forms of media is how these goals will come about.

I believe that the university itself places the idealistic ideas about this course upon us. Not all students will exit this course as accomplished authors; we are not teaching these students to write well, we are not teaching them how to write. Instead, we are providing them with comprehensive knowledge that will in time allow them to understand what makes writing “good”, how to work through mediums to be successful, and hopefully, how to apply what they are learning into their personal lives.