-: The opportunities that I had my junior year,
I spent my whole junior year
at the University of Nottingham in England.
There was a wonderful literature professor
named Dr. Switzer who arranged that
and so I was immersed in British literature,
took only literature classes for two semesters.
And then when I came back to Oswego in my senior year,
I had so many literature courses
that I was told I can't take any more English classes,
but I went to my advisor and told him by this time,
this was clearly what I wanted
and I was able to even with this overload of English classes
take some more writing classes.
Oswego was one of the first places
that offered undergraduate writing classes.
You read and we had plenty of literature classes,
but also learning to write.
Dr. Brion was the first place
and I ended up teaching this way myself
where conferencing teaching was essential
for the teaching of writing.
That is, the students work and the professor one-on-one
at a desk going over and boy did he go over every sentence,
where's the comma, where's the semicolon,
why did you say it this way,
why did you choose this detail,
why did you leave out that detail,
how are you building what you're writing,
where is it opening, where is it ending,
a kind of intense writing course
that again I had no idea would be available to me
until I got there.