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(2016
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2016 (index to #3 samples) #3: Web Highlights |
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Tom
Britt
22
March 2016
The Missing Link
In my approach to the web highlights assignment, I felt it best to find a
common thread linking the midterms I would examine. With that in mind, I chose
the midterms of Sarah Robin Roelse (2014), Jill Norris (2012), and Bethany Ellis
(2010). All three women presented similar, yet varying, views on origin stories
and their importance to the weavings of cultural fibers, how they impact
American society’s values.
To start, I found it refreshing that Roelse was upfront with her own
personal bias regarding creation stories. She, herself, is a staunch believer in
evolution, but she is able to respect the beliefs of those who disagree with her
and even find a degree of fascination within the theology of others’ conflicting
dogmas. Interestingly, she compounds the Christian stories of creation from the
Bible with those of the Native Americans, drawing similarities and differences
between them. It is her ability to recognize the intertextual common threads
that made her essay an engrossing read for me. Her most intriguing point came
when she wrote “every day that we live is an origin story, because it gives us
the opportunity to create or be something new,” which reinforces her point that
where we come from inevitably influences where we are going.
Norris, on the other hand, is more preoccupied with how origin stories
help us understand how we have gotten to where we are than how they can guide us
in our futures. I found her writing style to be a bit choppy and discordant,
making it difficult to follow the progression of her ideas. It was also
disheartening to me that she clung to European influences, citing only
Christopher Columbus and the Declaration of Independence in her essay,
completing leaving out a substantial part of America’s own origin story: the
Native Americans. I suppose it is clear from her writing which America she
thinks we should be teaching.
Finally, Ellis, though her span of sources cited is greater than
Norris’s, still references only white males in her writing, including Columbus,
Jonathan Edwards, and Thomas Jefferson. Again, the integral Native Americans are
left out completely as if they never had their land taken from them or gave us
the wonderful captivity narrative. While she makes the interesting point that “our
origin stories matter because they guide us in our interpretation of what
America should be and why She is the nation She is today,” I cannot forgive that
the original Americans are left out of the mix entirely.
All in all, even though all three ladies wrote over similar topics, it
was interesting to see the different approaches each took and who they felt
inclined to include in the process. Only Roelse, refreshingly, included a word
about America’s original inhabitants and that, in my opinion, gave her the
strongest and most encompassing essay.
