Author: JSylvor

1. On Wednesday, we will be discussing “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien. This short story was published as part of a larger collection of loosely linked short stories called The Things They Carried. In preparation for Wednesday’s class, please read “On the Rainy River” (which you can find under the “Texts” tab above) and share three questions about the story in a comment on this post no later than 12pm on Wed. Your questions may be about things that confused you in the story, moral or ethical questions raised by the text, issues in the text that require further discussion, or anything else that occurs to you as you read and think about this story. Please have the story with you in class, either as a printout or on a screen.
2. Please read the instructions for your next formal essay, the Literary Analysis. You can find this under the “Essays” tab above. We will be discussing this assignment on Wed, so please come to class ready with any questions you might have about it.

As I explained at the beginning of the semester, both at the middle of the semester and at the semester’s end, you will be asked to reflect on your own effort and participation in our course. Please set aside some time to respond thoughtfully to your Mid-Semester Reflection. Your reflection can be completed anytime between Wednesday, October 18th and Sunday, October 22nd.

• Building on our work together on Wednesday, please choose one moment from “Fiesta, 1980” that illustrates something important about one of the characters or about a relationship between two characters and describe that moment in a comment on this post.  Your comment should include a description of what happens in the example you’ve selected and an explanation of what you think it reveals about the character or characters involved.  Please post your comment by 12pm on Monday.
• On Wednesday, we will begin discussing “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by Z.Z. Packer. You can find the story under the “Texts” tab above.

• Please read the short story “Fiesta, 1980” by Junot Diaz. You can find it under the “Texts” tab at the top of the blog. Please make sure that you have the story with you in class on Wednesday.

If you were NOT in class on Tuesday, October 10th, you also need to do the following:

• Write a “Dear Reader” letter, reflecting on your experience with the Literacy Narrative. You can find the instructions HERE. Please place your finished letter in the folder that contains your Literacy Narrative. I will read your letter before reading your essay (and will wait to receive your letter before grading the essay.)

• Read “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid (available under “Texts” tab above) and respond in writing to these QUESTIONS about the text. Please submit your responses via email no later than Friday, October 13th.

• Your Literacy Narratives are due on Friday, October 6th by midnight. If I haven’t received your essay by Saturday morning, there should be an email in my inbox explaining the delay.
• In order to submit your essay, create a Google Docs folder with the title “Your Name English 2100” and share it with me at [email protected], then place your finished essay in the folder.
• Your essay should have a title that piques the reader’s interest and gives him/her a sense of what your essay is about.
• Your finished essay should look VERY different from your draft. In moving from the draft to the finished version of the essay, you should be engaging in real revision, not simply “cleaning up” or “refining” the draft.
• Baruch is closed on Monday, October 9th. On Tuesday, October 10th, we will be following a Monday schedule, so our class will be meeting at our regular time.
• Now that we have access to blogs@baruch again, if you missed your blog posting date, please share your post as soon as you’re able!
• Feel free to reach out via email if you have questions about any of this!

I am really looking forward to reading your essays!! Have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you on Tuesday!

• No class on Monday, September 25th – College is closed.
• Literacy Narrative Drafts due in class on Wednesday, September 27th.
• Bring THREE copies of your draft with you to class on Wednesday.
• Remember that your draft should choose a specific aspect of your own identity or personal story to focus on and that it must include some detailed anecdotal narrative, rather than simply offering general observations about your relationship to learning/language/school/literacy.
• Feel free to reach out via email if you have any questions about this assigment.

• Literacy Narrative – Pre-Write: This assignment is explained in a separate post. It needs to be completed and placed in our shared folder by Monday, September 18th.
• Gloria Anzaldua, ” How to Tame a Wild Tongue” This text is in Join the Conversation. You can find the assignment with instructions for your annotation on Perusall.com. Please note that, although the annotations aren’t due until Wednesday morning, September 20th, we will begin discussing this text on Monday, so make sure that you have either a printout of the text or the ability to access it electronically for Monday’s class.

Due: Monday, September 18th by 9:00 am

Once you have completed your Pre-Write, please give your file the name: Your Name – Literacy Pre-Write and place it in this Google Doc Folder.

Use this assignment as an opportunity to start gathering your thoughts and ideas for your upcoming Literacy Narrative.  This is not expected to be a tightly organized, focused piece of work.  Instead, it is a chance to write freely, without fixed expectations, in an effort to excavate (dig up) some of your own literacy-related memories, family language stories, and thoughts and feelings about language, school, reading, and writing.  Read this post through carefully, spend a few minutes thinking about the possibilities, open a document on your screen, and spend 30-60 minutes simply writing. (If this seems like a LOT, you could break it up into a few shorter blocks.)

Don’t think of this as a draft of your formal Literacy Narrative; instead think of it as a way to get in touch of your own ideas and associations around this broad topic. Here are some questions you might want to use as entry points into this writing.  I would suggest choosing one as your starting point and then seeing where it takes you.  Of course, if none of these ideas speaks to you, you are free to move in your own direction, provided you stick to our theme of literacy, which we understand broadly as our relationship to language and learning.

For this Pre-Writing stage, don’t worry about polishing your language or sounding “academic”; concentrate on the ideas, memories, and experiences you are trying to evoke and explore and let your writing proceed as naturally and freely as you can. Use the list below to spark your thinking:

–What is your family’s “language story”?  How might you tell it?

–Describe a pivotal school experience.  How did it shape your sense of yourself as a student, a learner, a reader, a writer, a wielder of language, etc.  This could be a positive experience or it could be a painful or difficult experience.

–How has language defined you in relation to power? Can you think of a time when you were either empowered by language or disempowered?

–Choose the reading that spoke to you most deeply.  Start crafting your own version of (or response to) that essay.  For example, maybe you were moved by Malcolm X’s story, so you would like to reflect on an experience you’ve had of self-directed learning or of learning that took place against a backdrop of constraint. Or maybe you were inspired by the parent-child relationship in “Mother Tongue” and want to think about your own mother tongue. Or perhaps, like Sherman Alexie, there is a “master text” that resonates for you as a model for your own literacy experience.

–What is a text (this could be written, or it could be something visual like a movie or television show) that is important to you and your personal history?  Describe its role in your development.

–How has your life required you to move between different languages? This could be literal bilingualism, or it could be simply shifting between various forms of English or between different non-verbal languages, as we move between family, friends, work, school, and our on-line communities.  What is at stake in these different linguistic spaces?  What does this shifting between languages mean to you?

–Who have the “gatekeepers” been in your literacy story?  Is there a person who looms large for you – either because he/she/they brought you closer to fulfilling your own identity as a wielder of language, or because he/she/they blocked your path and impeded your progress?

• Please read and annotate Anne Lamott’s essay “Shitty First Drafts”. You can find this assignment and the link to the essay on Perusall. Please add a minimum of three notes to Lamott’s essay. These could be reactions, questions, definitions, or alternate strategies.
• Also read George Dila, “Rethinking the Shitty First Draft”, which you can find here on the blog, under the “Texts” tab above. In a comment on this post, please share your reactions to these two essays. Which approach more closely aligns with your own draft-writing style?How has that served you? Which essay did you find more convincing? Why? Your response should be 200-300 words and should be posted to the blog by 12:00 on Wednesday.

Just a reminder that your assignment for Monday is to read Richard Rodriguez, Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood (excerpt) and Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me.” You can find these readings under the “Texts” tab here on the blog. Please bring hard copies of the readings (printouts) with you to class and be prepared to discuss them.