BOBCAT TRACKS for alumni and friends
Write on! “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it,” observes Holden Caulfield, the teenage narrator and bittersweet protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. English classes often turn students into pals through the writing involved. Generating one’s own expository assignments, personal essays, and creative pieces and critiquing drafts from peers involve taking chances. Alumna Rachele Alpine Mielke indicates as much on the next page: perpetuating the supportive challenge and back-and-forth vibe from her English seminar at OHIO with the high school English students she teaches. The photos on this page, too, suggest the collaborative nature and intimate exchange inherent in English courses. A solitary act and communal experience, writing. Words matter, friend.
LEFT: Lindsey Fischer, a second-year master's student in creative writing, fiction, and an instructor of freshman composition, leads a class discussion on writing and rhetoric in October. TOP RIGHT: Fischer grades papers while her students complete an in-class freewriting activity. Photos by Ellee Achten, BSJ ’14, MA ’17 BOTTOM RIGHT: Senior finance major Tianjiao Wang (holding iBook) and junior management information systems major Juanxi Mo use an iBook for their freshman composition course for international students in summer 2014. The class, overseen by the English Language Improvement Program, concentrates on business writing and partners students with local businesses on projects.
—Editor Peter Szatmary
Photo by Lydia Deakin, BSVC ’12, MA ’15
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