Blog #1

My name is Emily Moyer. I am a freshman at Kutztown with a major in Special Education/Elementary Education. I graduated from Pennridge High School in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. My parents are both elementary teachers in the Pennridge School District, which is probably a part of why I would like to be a teacher. I also have two older brothers. I used to play volleyball, basketball, and softball, but now am just going to be playing a club team or two at Kutztown probably. I love Kutztown already and that about wraps up my introduction of myself.

It took me a few times to read, Raymond Williams’ essay, “Culture is Ordinary”, before getting a pretty good idea of what he was trying to say. The way he began his essay describing the journey “that in one form or another we have all made” was a good introduction for his point that he is making throughout the essay. He describes the change that has occurred in the things that you see throughout that bus journey, which I did not understand at first. However, I linked it to his point about cultures.
At first, saying culture is ordinary, sounded absurd to me. A culture is a detailed combination of arts, beliefs, institutions, and many other products of human work and thought. And to me, ordinary is used to describe something common, not something with such depth. However, Williams’ argument began to make sense to me. Although every culture has its own ways and meanings, as Williams said, the making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions. Changes are made within each society, based on the human’s experiences.
Each individual has a different perception of their own culture, which made me hesitant to see Raymond Williams’ point, because to each individual they might see something different, making their culture far from ordinary. However, as he talked about the culture growing and changing, how is that different than any other thing in life? Change is one of the most constant things in a human’s life. Change occurs everyday; in the things we see, the relationships we have, the activities we do, etc. Every culture is made up of change, because CHANGE is ordinary. So wouldn’t that make culture ordinary as well?