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First Year Experience

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The College of Southern Maryland is planning on instituting the First Year Experience Program in fall of 2016. This program is a strategic maneuver that effectively explains and illustrates the academic expectations for all incoming students. In doing so, CSM will clearly define and address the expectations of college work many of their prospective students coming out of high school do not seem to comprehend.
The First Year Experience also known as the Freshman Year Experience or the Freshman Seminar Program is a program at many American colleges and universities designed to help students prepare for the transition from high school to college. Furthermore, the purpose of the First Year Experience is to provide an academic experience that promotes …show more content…
Our teacher did not expect us to just memorize and listen, instead, she helped us analyze each argument and apply concepts that mimic real life situations. For example, we discussed the situation in the book where James’ mother Ruth born into an orthodox Jewish family explains that she has become, in her own words, “dead” to her family as a result of her marriage to Andrew Dennis McBride, James’ African American father . Contrasting her depiction of the hardships she had to endure because of her marriage to a black man was a sobering reality for some of my classmates because they fully understood and can empathize with what James had to endure as a child of an interracial …show more content…
The theme of the book that truly resonated with all of us was the genius of James McBride to chronicle and correlate his struggles with modern day societal struggles, signifying how the struggles in life transcends race, ethnicity and skin color. Consequently, the moral of this story is: life itself is not complicated but the struggle to navigate and control life is truly the source we all struggle with each and every day of our lives. And that is pretty much the insight James McBride successfully shared with humanity in his epic novel. Additionally, the book taught us that it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most responsive to change, which perfectly summarizes James’ beloved mother, Ruth, a white Jewish woman’s conviction and

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