Hi Everyone,
I want to remind you that you’ll be presenting your revision projects tomorrow from 9:55-12ish. Make sure to bring or email me your one-page (about 300 words) reflection tomorrow as well.
See you then! I’ll bring snacks. Looking forward to it.
Hi Everyone,
I had a great time sitting in the grass with you all today.
Here’s the plan for next week:
Monday
Writing reflection activities/summing up the semester
Wednesday
Revision Project Presentations from 9:55-12:05. So, to be clear, you will all be presenting your revision projects on Wednesday. And we will not meet on Thursday as I had originally planned. So please be sure to finish your revision project and be prepared to present it to the class on Wednesday.
Finally, I’ll most likely get your essays back to you by tomorrow or early Friday. Until then, good luck working on your revision projects. See you soon.
Hi Everyone,
Click here for the excerpt from Whitman. Please print this out, read it, and annotate it as you see fit. Then, write a response to this prompt (and bring your response to class):
Whitman does not concretely answer the child’s question “What is the grass?” but instead responds to the child with a series of educated guesses (“I guess it must be…I guess it is…it seems to me” and so on). Why do you think he choses to provide guesses instead of final answers?
We’ll meet in class at the usual time on Wednesday. We’ll talk for a few minutes and then walk to the park to discuss the poem in small groups (while we are sitting on grass-the only way to read this poem).
Finally, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that it might be best if the whole class does their presentations next Wednesday. Then we simply wouldn’t have to meet on Thursday (the final exam period). This means that we’ll have to add about 15 minutes of class time on Wednesday. Let’s discuss this option in class on Wednesday to make sure everyone can come a little bit early and stay a little bit late. See you then!
Hi Everyone,
Remember that your final essay is due tomorrow by 11:59pm. See the previous blog post for instructions on turning it in.
We’re going to brainstorm some ideas about your revision project on Monday by watching and discussing a few short TED Talks and listening to a few short clips from the Freakonomics Radio Hour. I’ll introduce these to you in class but if you want, you can get a head start here:
Also, if you want to see more of the NY Times OP-DOCS, take a look here.
Start thinking hard about your ideas for your revision project. We’re going to work hard on Monday to make sure that by the end of class, everyone has a strong idea about what they’re doing. Good luck finishing your essays!
Hi Everyone,
Please keeping working hard on your essays. You’re so close! Remember that it is due on this Friday at 11:59pm. Click here to access the Dropbox folder for submitting your essays.
In addition, I’ve posted the revision project assignment here. I’ll bring hard copies to class and we’ll spend most of our time on Wednesday brainstorming about this project.
So there’s no homework for Wednesday. Just keep working on your essays. See you on Wednesday.
Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re getting some good, productive work done on your essays! For our Monday meeting, please read and bring to class “So What? Who Cares?” from They Say/I Say (available here). You don’t have to print it. Just bring it. After you’ve read it, please write a brief response to this prompt: why does my topic/why do my ideas/my claims matter? Who else would be interested in what I’m saying? Why?
That’s it. Keep working on your essays and send me questions if you have them.
Hi All,
Remember to bring to our next class:
1) Your partner’s draft, with whatever annotations you provided
2) A completed peer review form (pdf version available here – I can’t upload word docs to the blog so you’ll have to convert the pdf version to a word doc or google doc)
Also, I want to clarify that you should feel free to use first person (“I”) as much as you want to you in your research paper. See you on Wednesday!
Hi Everyone,
As I mentioned today, your only homework for Monday is to complete a draft of your research essay, print it, and bring it to class. Do everything you can to write as complete a draft as possible. Once you get into the flow, just write. You’ll have almost two weeks to revise your draft, which is plenty of time to shape your draft into a final essay you’ll be proud of. Don’t worry too much about page length/word count. Just write as much as you can.
Remember that we will not be doing peer review in class on Monday. You’ll just be trading drafts and talking to each other about your drafts. Then, for homework, each of you will read your partners’ draft and return it to them with comments on Wednesday.
Finally, please make sure to download or print Harold Evans’s “The Sentence Clinic” (available here) and bring it to class (either in digital form or printed out). We’re going to go over some of his advice about editing in class on Monday.
Good luck with your writing. Write me with any questions at all.
Hi Everyone,
For our next meeting, please print, read, and annotate Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”(here) and then read her first draft (here). Please make sure to read the “final” draft before reading the first draft. After you’ve read both versions, write a brief reflection about what you found interesting about the changes she made. What were some good choices she made? Did she leave anything out in the final draft that you think she should have included? We’ll talk about your reflections and more generally about the poem in class.
In addition, please pick one paragraph from your exploratory essay that you think should be included in your research paper. Print this paragraph and bring it to class (you can just copy and paste it into a blank document). You’ll spend some time in class closely analyzing this paragraph.
That’s it! And keep working on your essays.
Hi Everyone,
Thanks to everyone who made it to class today. For our next meeting, please:
-Write a précis of a source you are using in your research essay. You can write this précis about any type of source, like a video/movie, an interview, an academic article, a chapter in a book, a song, or whatever else you plan to use. Click here for your guidelines (it is the exact same exercise you did for your exploratory research essay). Bring it to class so we can discuss it. It is only for you, not for me. So use this exercise as a tool to help your writing process.
-Print, read, and bring to class Strunk and White’s “Elements of Composition” (available here). As you read:
A) Identify 1 rule that you agree with and write a brief explanation about why you agree
B) Identify 1 rule that you disagree with/don’t like and write a brief explanation about why you disagree with/don’t like
In the meantime, keep working on your essays. The more you get done now, the easier it will be to finish strong at the end of the semester.
See you next Monday.