Hi Everyone,

Hope you are all doing well.  Here are our assignments for the coming week!  As I’ve said before, prioritize the current week’s work, then go back and complete any assignments you’ve missed along the way!

• Office Hours:  Sign up HERE if you would like to meet with me on Monday (in person or virtually) to discuss your Literacy Narrative, your general progress in the course, or anything else that is on your mind.
• Recommendation Round-Up:  Your main writing assignment this week is to choose something you’d like to recommend to the class.  It could be a tv show, a song, a video, a recipe, an experience, a restaurant, a class…you name it.  The only requirement is that it be something you personally love and can recommend enthusiastically.  In a post on our blog, share your recommendation, and where appropriate, provide a link to the thing you are recommending.  Your recommendation post should be approximately 500 words (one page typed, single spaced) and it must utilize more than one of the “languages” you have at your disposal.. In thinking about how to craft your recommendation, keep in mind that your readers are your peers in this course.  As you experiment with writing this piece, I encourage you to try to access your “authentic” voice as much as possible and to work with the sentence structures and vocabularies that come most naturally to you.   Your goal is not to impress me with your fancy language; it’s to make your classmates want to try out whatever it is that you are recommending.  Your posts must be shared by Tuesday, October 19th.
• Mid-Semester Reflection – We are at the halfway point of our semester.  Please take some time to complete this Mid-Semester Reflection.  This will give you a chance to evaluate your progress thus far and to think about your goals for the remainder of the semester.  Please complete the reflection by Friday, October, 22nd.
• Textual Analysis Essay – Your next formal essay will be a close textual analysis of one of the readings we’ve done for the course.  We will be discussing the assignment in detail on Wednesday, but in the meantime, please identify the reading you would be most interested in re-visiting for this assignment.  It could be any of the readings you’ve been assigned thus far  (including Jamila Lyiscott’s TED talk).  Before Wednesday’s class, please print-out the text you’ve decided to write about and re-read it, highlighting important passages and making notes in the margins. ( I have linked to a transcript of Lyiscott’s TED talk under the “texts” tab above, in case any of you choose that as your text.).   Once you’ve done that, I have created a shared document for us to record our preliminary thoughts about our text. You can find that document HERE.  Please scroll down to the first available blank page and record your responses to the questions you find there.  Complete this form by 11:30 am on Wednesday, October 20th, so that I can read your responses before class.   Bring a hard copy of the text you’ve selected with you to class on Wednesday!