CarrierLit&SocReadings1

__ My Freshman Year ( pages 1 - 40 ) __ When I first began reading //My Freshman Year//, I thought it would be rather interesting and I would be able to somewhat relate because I just finished my own freshman year of college. Even with the age difference, I was curious to see if certain things I found to be interesting, boring, or even entertaining, were things the author, Rebekah Nathan, would find interesting as well.__ ﻿ __ As I was reading, I couldn't help but agree with her descriptions of the outer part of the doors and the types of decorations students put up. As I walk down my hall, I notice different doors used more personal pictures for decorations, while others, like the CA for example, uses the bulletin board in the hallways to describe her life, and activities beneficial to the students. The entire time reading the first part of this book I kept thinking of how brave the Nathan was for going back to college as a student at the very college she taught. By far the most astonishing fact the Nathan revealed is even though she had taught at AnyU for multiple years, she barely knew how to get around the campus, or where anything was once she was outside of her specific building or classroom. I wonder if professors are the same way at Bloomsburg, or any other University for that matter? I know that as a teenager going away to college for the first time can be scary and overwhelming, but it must have been a whole new experience for her to observe and go through. I was also impressed she decided to take on class work as well, on top of her ethnographic project. Even with the author being at a different point in her life, she seemed to be able to relate to the students in her hallway and dorm, just as regular students would. If I were those students, I would have seen her as much more of a parental image.

__On Ethnography ( pages 1 - 26 )__ //On Ethnography// would in no way be a book I would just pick off of the shelf to read. I don't find it as easy to read as //My Freshman Year//, but I do still find it interesting. The book takes the definition of culture and twists it a different way than I'm used to. Culture is considered to be a verb in this book. At first I wasn't quite sure what to make of this. A verb is something you do, or at least that's what I always defined it as. Defining culture as a verb instead of a noun does make sense. A verb makes the definition become, as described by the book, "unbounded", and not "a fixed thing", which is a noun. Culture can constantly change from one year to the next, or between 500 years. What else I found interesting was how much is actually noticed by an ethnographer. Someone may come into a classroom for two minutes, not really doing anything, and yet an ethnographer would notice them and their affect on the classroom and the people in it. Just from reading this much of the book I have come to the conclusion that I am not an observant enough person to be an ethnographer on any scale.