What is an Independent Study?

 You may have heard of the term “independent study” before, and may be wondering what it means. An independent study is not, like it may sound, quiet time in your schedule for you to get your homework done. It is an undergraduate- or graduate-level self-designed course in which you create your own syllabus and assignments under the guidance of a professor whom you request to be your advisor. 

Pros:

There are so many pros to doing an independent study. One of the exciting aspects of it is how it is self-designed with guidance from the professor, and since it is self-designed, you can hone in on your interests with the course theme. Sometimes independent studies give the opportunity to create a portfolio paper in a dedicated space that is honed in on those interests. Independent studies allow students to take a class on a topic that may not be offered otherwise.  Through researching specific scholarship of your own interest, this is a great chance to create a portfolio paper you may not have been able to write if the class is not offered. Doing an independent study is a little bit like creating your own class. Through such a level of freedom, you can explore what interests you for a whole semester. 

Sofia: 

I took an independent study on grief in queer young adult literature. Already my favourite area of interest, the independent study allowed for her to explore such a specific topic and how grief in queer literature varies throughout a specific form of children’s literature, that is, adolescent or young adult literature. After already taking a class on queer adolescent literature, I felt drawn to the older end of the spectrum of children’s literature, and focusing on both a specific age group and topic truly shows the range that can occur even in such a specific genre. Focusing in on a small area allows for variances to illuminate the various aspects of queer young adult literature. Learning more about a specific area of children’s literature and its nuance allowed me a chance to explore a narrowed interest that may not have the opportunity to be offered within our program. 

Ashley:

I am currently in the process of completing a two-semester independent study sequence of Asian American literary and cultural studies followed by Asian American children’s literature. The first independent study was beneficial because I learned how to independently go about researching and familiarizing myself with a field that I had never taken a course in. But I soon faced the challenge of reconceptualizing the role of the secondary sources that supplement the main texts. The critical scholarship that had been integrated into previous graduate seminars, in my mind, were important because the instructor deemed them so, but in these independent studies, I chose what was relevant to what I wanted to study. I was guided to understand that even core scholarship such as Immigrant Acts by Lisa Lowe was groundbreaking in its time but should not be conceived of as an unflawed foundation on which to build my current studies. Taking this concept into the second semester of independent study, which is ongoing, I am currently oscillating between attempting to develop a comprehensive familiarity of the children’s literature field and creating an original contribution to the conversation in the form of a final paper.There is no way that I will ever fully understand every article published in this field, and so I must develop a general understanding and then zero in on the scholarship that is most relevant to my thesis. I am moving away from merely criticizing the texts I read to highlighting what is productive in them. While I've gone back to the drawing board many times, the chance to keep exploring has been an enjoyable process. As my advisor would say, none of my reading and research is ever wasted! I feel confident that the threads of the ideas I have come up with will intertwine into a strong contribution to the area of Asian American children’s literature by the end of my M.A. career. 

Cons: 

However, we do want to warn you of some of the difficulties that we’ve faced in our experience with independent studies. As the student with the course concept, you have to find a professor whose research is similar to that which you want to study, or who is willing to guide you through a field that may not be their expertise. Additionally, you have to create your own syllabus, which includes the main texts you will read, what secondary materials can complement those texts, and what assignments you will produce as a result of the course. Some struggles, successes, and advice about that journey can be found in Ashley’s earlier blog post about “A Graduate Student’s First Attempt at Summer Research.” During the course of the semester, you are responsible for keeping up with the syllabus you create, and since your meetings with the professor are one-on-one, there’s no hiding what you didn’t read! You also do not benefit from the contribution of classmates. All of this is compounded in our current virtual learning environment, in which Zoom fatigue is a barrier to lively and generative conversation.  

Our overall experience:

Overall, we can both agree that we had fantastic experiences in our independent studies. It is important to emphasize here that what you put into an independent study is what you will receive. We both experienced a push to become our own scholars and advocate for ourselves and what we wanted from our classes, and therefore our professors knew what to give in our learning experience. Putting in the time and energy produces rigorous conversations (verbal or written) to create an interesting final paper. Independent studies are intellectually challenging, and therefore, incredibly rewarding -- we figured out what contribution we can make to the field of literary studies. 

Independent research has been an irreplaceable opportunity to create a focused, well-researched paper to contribute to our portfolios (one of two culminating project options for English MA students at SDSU). We both grew as scholars, developing self-motivation and time management skills. It can be difficult to study alone and not have fellow classmates to reach out to, so we both agree that we learned to be productive and self-sufficient scholars. We highly encourage undergraduate or graduate students to take an independent study as part of their academic journeys.

Going to Graduate School During a Pandemic

Spring 2020 is the first time I took an online class, but I didn’t sign up for one. We had to move online due to a now global pandemic.  

I am currently in my third of three years of graduate school at San Diego State. I had initially planned on jumping into employment once I graduate, but our current situation has made me rethink that idea. I am now planning on returning to graduate school to pursue a master’s in library and information sciences. This has always been a dream of mine, but the pandemic pushed me to return to school for yet another time. Even though school has been changing and evolving, it has nonetheless been my stability point.

I started hearing about Covid-19 around February or March, although the first case of COVID-19 in San Diego was reported in January of 2020.

I sat in my Aesthetics of Children’s Literature class, listening to students:

“It’s called Covid.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“It’ll be over in a couple weeks.”

March 12^th, 2020 was the last day I was on San Diego State campus. I never knew it might have been the last time I’d be on campus, nor did I know to say early goodbyes to some friends getting ready to graduate and move.

A mandatory statewide stay-at-home order was issued March 19^th, 2020 for California.

It’s been seven months since our school went online. It feels like it’s been forever, but also just a month or so.

For me, and many other students and professors alike, this is a very new experience. The closest experience I have had was Swine Flu from my elementary school days where we still went to school and just washed our hands more. I also heard of the SARS epidemic of the early 2000’s, but being so young and in America I had no firsthand experience.

The events this year all felt like I was watching a movie, a scary one at that. 

Professors had a week off to adapt the next month and a half of their brick and mortar classes into an online modality while some students scrambled for new living situations, or those living at home had to readjust to an overall new school experience.

At the start of the pandemic, I took one typical graduate class which met weekly, and an independent study class that met roughly once a month, so my experience may have been a bit atypical in comparison to other students. Both classes were in-person instruction.

My weekly graduate class became an asynchronous class. An asynchronous class means we do not all meet in a scheduled online meeting. We follow the same syllabus, but all our work was online, and we would share ideas and thoughts via Blackboard discussion posts.

My independent study started to meet through zoom as I tried to collect myself emotionally while trying to kick out a twenty-page paper.

It was a very emotional time for me. Between my new adjustment to working from home and trying to process all the news of Covid I felt pretty overwhelmed. I was scared for my family’s health and simply what changes would be coming in the future.

Fall semester, we had a little more time to adjust to going to school during a pandemic, and professors had a bit more time to revamp their classes over the summer to be online.

I currently have one class meeting synchronously, and one which typically meets asynchronously.

For my asynchronous class it probably can be inferred we don’t meet on Zoom. We have various readings and we post weekly reflections and responses to Blackboard prompts and our fellow classmates.

These Blackboard posts from class simulate for me real conversations I would have in class, and it is incredibly helpful for me as a student to read, respond to, and get responses from my fellow classmates. I have recently discovered I love having most our conversations written where we can go back and continue to reflect on what others have said since it’s all typed out on Blackboard.

For my synchronous class we meet once a week on zoom, similar to an in-person class, but maybe a little bit more awkward at first. There’s a lot of people mistakenly talking over each other or for me or being too anxious to talk simply because it is such a new experience. I definitely was initially very overwhelmed. I see a dozen or so faces staring from my screen, and I feel like they’re all staring at me. I’ve grown used to it, but it’s a bit unsettling sometimes.

Recently in my asynchronous class we met with a scholar on our topic (over zoom) and it felt nice to put a face to all these names I have been responding to for weeks. I felt happy to see some friends and classmates I have dearly missed and also have the opportunity to connect to so many new people. I missed seeing my professor, and as we all laughed and discussed nonsense literature it felt a little bit like I was in a classroom again.

I have social anxiety which especially comes out when I talk in class. I have gotten more comfortable speaking up, but on Zoom I almost felt set back at first. I had to relearn how to speak up. I even take notes slightly differently with my class on one side of my screen and my notes on the other side. In class I feel like there are dozens of eyes when I look up because, well, there are. In some classes, our every word is recorded, which although very beneficial, is terrifying for me to think of when it’s already hard enough to talk in a standard class.

Something interesting about doing online school is the change in social queues. In person, I can pick up more moods in the class or when someone is about to talk, but online these social queues, like a small tilt of the head or other minute expressions, are muddled and confusing. I can’t pick up a minute gesture as easily, and it can be easy to misinterpret what someone is saying without being able to see body language.

Another difficult part of doing school online is staying motivated. Staying at a desk and not leaving my house for days on end can be difficult. I try my best to take breaks and change up my environment a little by not staying at my desk or taking a quick drive to run an errand, but I can really only do so much during a pandemic.

I get distracted by duties at home and new noises I didn’t hear at school like a garbage truck or one of the ten barking dogs I live by (or my own dog). The most distracting part though, is the quiet.

At my campus office, I hear the shuffling of feet, students laughing, cars driving by. I hear professors stopping by to say hello. Visitors asking for directions are a thing of my past.

It’s quiet now at home. We don’t live by a major intersection. I can open my windows and hear nothing. The quiet can be distracting, even overwhelming.

It can be lonely doing online school. Some days I can sit for hours on end at my home desk doing homework. I do homework, log on to my online class in the afternoon, log off, and then continue homework until I go to bed. When I wake up, it’s the same cycle all over again.

It definitely is difficult to be so self-motivated when we can’t easily interact with fellow peers. We aren’t used to doing work asynchronously, and it definitely is an adjustment to motivate yourself even more than usual in graduate school. Without talking to classmates about their process, and simply being physically surrounded by people from the same program, at times I tend to feel a bit alone and thrown into the deep end.

I think it should be kept in mind that this is an unknown scenario, even months into online school.

Students and teachers alike are worried about not only staying on top of schoolwork, but some have to worry about employment, a new schoolwork environment, childcare for children or siblings, on top of the health of ourselves and our loved ones. Some members of SDSU lost loved ones and had to still write a paper or teach a class. Some students were displaced from their campus housing and had to move home, or find a new place to live.

Although I have not had to deal with these scary realities I mention, through these months, I think mental health has become a real priority for me, and I think it should for my fellow graduate students who are staying at home for such long periods of time. Like many other graduate students I know, I can work for hours on end with no breaks, forgetting to eat, drink water, or even get up and stretch. Not needing to leave to go to school definitely exacerbates this habit.

Although this is common behavior to discuss in school, this is not healthy.

Last semester, after we started distance learning, I would work for hours on end to complete a paper. I barely remembered to eat sometimes, and this hyper-focus was detrimental to my mental health. I cried, I felt lonely, I felt anxious. I learned the hard way that this is not how I personally should be doing school. I had to learn how to do school at home, including the most basic things like when to get up and go outside or just take a walk around the house for a break from my schoolwork.  

We’re adapting to a new way of doing school, but it’s still incredibly difficult. I’m overwhelmed by the news when I already have school to focus on. I’m clearly learning a new normal.

However, I’m not alone. I’m not the only student in a pandemic.

I need to remember to (virtually) reach out to my friends and those I work with, and I encourage other students to do that as well, and it’s important to remember to simply be kind to yourself in such a strange time.

It’s a hard semester, but I have learned a lot about myself and about school and how we can change and adapt in the face of a difficult situation.

I’m not completely sure what will happen in the Spring semester. I think that if the pandemic requires us to be online in future semesters, it will slowly get easier with time. I know Spring semester will be online, and I hope and expect I can get a little more used to online classes. I truly feel like I will become better adjusted given time. 

I graduate in seven months, and I think graduation will be odd. If online, which I expect will happen, we won’t have that space to say goodbye to one another. There’s an inherent positive, buzzing energy during in-person graduation ceremonies within the students, but I don’t know if this will be the case when I graduate. I am curious if it will even feel like I graduated if it’s all through a video. Will I get that rush I physically felt when I was handed my undergraduate diploma? I don’t know if it will even hit me that I graduated without my classmates around me. 

It’s all pretty uncertain. I’m grateful I can go to a school that allows us to do classes safely from our own homes, but it’s scary to be unsure about what is coming next. 

-SS

“Du nót ri-eo cao-bồi:” The Beauty of Language in Butterfly Yellow

 Thanhha Lại’s Butterfly Yellow (2019) clearly stands out among Asian American texts for its delightful play with both the Vietnamese and English language.

The main character, Hằng, is a native Vietnamese speaker who journeys to the United States to find her airlifted younger brother. She ends up carpooling with LeeRoy, a wannabe cowboy raised by professors, who can understand her accented English pronunciation. Lại wields both languages to her advantage in this novel, utilizing the Vietnamese alphabet to capture a distinctly Vietnamese pronunciation of English words. Unlike in English, every Vietnamese word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. The diacritical marks above vowels indicate changes in tone – follow those, and one cannot mispronounce.

Images from http://mylanguages.org/vietnamese_alphabet.php

Lại’s choice to write out English words using Vietnamese diacritical marks does more than just educate a linguistic outsider. It poses a unique puzzle to the readership that is fluent in both languages, a readership often unacknowledged in texts that aim to educate ignorant readers about the “authentic” experience of refugee children. This implementation of language encourages readers who know how to read diacritical marks to sound out each syllable, then translate the resulting sound into a word in the English lexicon. Readers are given clues: spaces separate words and dashes indicate which sounds belong together in a single word.

For example, the main character Hằng says, “Thanh kìu” (60) – “Thank you.” 

Using the chart above, try to decipher “Ai phai bờ-ró-đờ” (52)!

If readers cannot solve the riddle or do not know how to read Vietnamese, Lại smoothly uses the English-speaking listener, LeeRoy, to repeat the words in English spelling so that the meaning is revealed whether or not one has the linguistic knowledge.

Despite the accented pronunciation, this writing choice demonstrates that Hằng knows much more English than refugees are given credit for; her father taught English in Việt Nam and passed on his expertise to his daughter. Hằng even diagrams sentences in English, arguing with LeeRoy as to how sentences should be parsed. At the novel’s climax, Vietnamese, English, Spanish, and French are all sung, becoming a moment of unbounded connection between Hằng, the native Vietnamese speaker, her brother David, who had forgotten the language, and LeeRoy, the native English speaker. This novel shows that language is not an assimilation barrier but a multifaceted means to form relationships despite cultural differences.

Works Cited

Lại, Thanhhà. Butterfly Yellow. Harper, 2019.

A Grad Student's Experience Writing a Limerick

Senior year of college, we had to write sonnets for my poetry class. I read my sonnet and professor asked, “you don’t get meter, do you?”

I was a little embarrassed, but he was kind of right. I was told it’s just instinctual, it’s how you speak, some of it is the exact rhythm of a beating heart. Nonetheless, all the “da da da da da das” of people sounding out the rhythm just blurred together for me.  

Fast forward two years, I had to write a poem in meter for my graduate school class this semester, and my stomach dropped. I had to write a limerick, specifically. The class is called “Edward Gorey and Nonsense”, so, appropriately, the way to write a limerick makes less sense to me than pure nonsense poetry on the sense to nonsense scale.

While Dr. Thomas kept throwing out limericks through Twitter like he was spitting out sunflower seeds, I was still stuck on starting the first line.

Why is the hardest part of this class about nonsense the one poem with strict rules and guidelines to follow?

First, what’s a limerick?

A limerick is an often humorous, short poem popularized by Edward Lear. It is made up of five lines with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA. The third and fourth lines are often shorter than the other three. Limericks are typically in anapestic meter, meaning it has two unstressed syllables for every stressed syllable.  

You may have heard of the phrase, “There once was as man from Nantucket”. This is the opening line of many limericks (and jokes) and is in anapestic meter.

The earliest published version of this popularized poem appeared in 1902 in the Princeton Tiger written by Prof. Dayton Voorhees: (Life)

There once was a man from Nantucket

Who kept all his cash in a bucket.

But his daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with a man

And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

I was quite delighted by this poem with the playing of rhymes and the song-like nature of the poem.

I quite enjoyed the rhymes especially, as I am sure is the reason many people are drawn to limericks.

After lots of reading and watching videos, I hoped I was ready. I was able to come up with two limericks for the assignment. Here’s one:

There was once a girl hailed from Ann Arbor

Who searched high and low for just one harbor

She found the lakes and rivers a plenty.

Boats and bones and skulls fill up the jetty

As she throws one more, this time a barber?

So I perhaps obviously styled this after the traditional limerick of “there once was a man from…” I have heard “a man from Peru/Nantucket” poem/joke many times when I was growing up, even in cartoons (I distinctly remember it from a Spongebob episode).

I tried to put this poem in anapestic pentameter, and to what I understand, I think I succeeded, but it sounds a little off.

I’m doing my best to try to understand meter, but I am still not quite there yet.

Roethke’s Some Remarks on Rhythm commented on many limericks having “the rhythms of children” (Roethke, 65), so I tried to make the poem sound musical and playful, not just in the rhyming, but hopefully in a little bit of the rhythm.

Since the class focuses partially on Edward Gorey, I flipped through some of his works to get inspired. I love the dark nature of his works and really wanted to capture that and the atmosphere of many contemporaries who draw inspiration from him.

I was inspired by the River Styx from Greek mythology. I also was inspired by the idea from Asimov and Ciardi’s Limericks – Too Gross: or Two Dozen Dirty Dozen Stanzas of contrasting a rhythmic limerick to create darker or raunchier ideas behind the poetry. The girl in the poem is going on a search for a harbor, which seems all nice and fun, perhaps evoking a young girl having fun in the summer, and then you learn she is getting rid of a body. To me that seems a little bit Gorey (or gory-yes bad joke), and creepy as it sounds I kind of like the storyline. I also did ten syllables per line (pentameter) of possibly anapests.

Here’s the second limerick I wrote:

Let’s go to Kalamazoo, to visit

The world’s largest shoe. A child once quipped

It looks better from much farther away.

It smells like some poo, she said in quite disdain.

And all they can say is “oh no, oh shit”.

I’m going to be honest. I have no idea what meter this is in, if it is even in any meter. I don’t think it is, the first line definitely is not. I again was struggling with meter, but I was playing a lot with sounds and rhyming externally as well as internally. This poem is obviously quite a bit goofier than the other poem which makes it fun to me. I played with enjambment quite a bit in this poem and just with “storyline” I guess in general. I also wanted it to be a bit more nonsensical even though I didn’t quite achieve that to the point which I hoped.

I felt like for this one I was really channeling my inner goofiness and laughing at poop jokes and with a touch of a nonsensical storyline to follow.

I noticed a big part of my struggle in both of these poems was starting, and trying to get over an anxiety I have of it being “right” or good or “perfect” or not “stupid”.

Am I now suddenly skilled at limericks? Not really. But honestly, the hardest part of writing these was starting. I obsessively worried about being in meter, if it sounded stupid, if my lines were too short or too long, and I was just self-conscious.

I can be a very self-conscious writer. I question myself; I agonize over sentences or words until it all just sends me in a spiral.

Through it all though, the biggest barrier to writing a limerick was myself. It got easier when I simply just wrote a limerick and tried my best. I didn’t think about others reading it, or it being posted on our class blog until I posted my submission for class.

We can sit and stare at blank pages for hours, but when it all comes down to it, it’s all just words and what we make of them. I hope to return to limericks in the future in the hopes of getting to understand the genre more.

-SS

Citations:

Asimov, Isaac, and John Ciardi. Limericks: Too Gross. W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.

Isham, Mrs. William B. Life, 1903, books.google.com/books?id=p80aAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA274#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Roethke, Theodore. “Some Remarks on Rhythm.” Poetry, vol. 97, no. 1, 1960, pp. 63–74.