Baruch email? (like 30s)

Do you all check this regularly? I’ll be communicating to your Baruch email address, so make sure that is what you check.

Going Over Reading Annotations (5-10 min)

First off: just email me the PDFs. I’m not sure why there are issues with annotations showing up when downloaded from Blackboard. So, rather than try to figure out why, just email them to me if you have not already.

Because I think it is a good habit to get into, I want to push you to do the following when making annotations (and I’ll provide examples):

• restating things in own language
• making connections between different parts of text
• making connections to your own life and interests
• asking questions about parts you’re not sure about
• comment on patterns in text
• note assumptions reader must have for something they are writing to be true

Essentially, I want to push you to get at “how” or “why” questions when you read rather than just lingering on the “what”. Not just what a thing is, but how it works and why it works that way.

Here are some examples of some good annotations I saw:

• “A first draft similar to the support of a building, can only start to build once it is there.”
• “Black english was set up for failure because language is based off of cultural and personal experience. Hence if their experience is despised than their language will never be accepted.”
• “Could black English be a form of passive protest against African-American oppression by making the English language their own?”
• “professional writers like students, can be way to hard on themselves, and give up in the end.”
• “A piece of work is never perfect in the readers eyes as there are millions of different “equations” of completion. A word here and there can change the whole tone of the text and everything must be changed to match.”

Since this is the first time we are doing this assignment, everyone will get feedback from me (may have given you some already, if not, should have it by tonight or early tomorrow) and I gave everyone full credit as long as you made the attempt. If I notice folks aren’t quite doing a great job, I’ll let you know. But the ultimate goal in these assignments is to cultivate and sharpen good reading habits to help you as a reader and a writer.

 

Introduction Presentations (15 min)

We are going to get set up in breakout rooms so you can get to know each other a little bit better. For homework, you had prepared to talk about the following:

• your name (start off with the easy one here)
• your major or what you might be interested in majoring in
• one rule about writing that you remember hearing a lot (or one that just stood out to you) from your years in school or just as a writer in general
• one goal you have for working on your writing this term

In groups, make sure each of you has time to share the above four items. After that, go to 9/1 Rules of Writing Google Doc to share the rules of writing in your group.

Exchange contact information with one another just so you can connect with others if you needed to.

Okay, let’s take a look at the rules for writing list to see what you all came up with. Let’s see how much we agree/disagree with some of these. I’ll save this list and hopefully we can return to it later in the term.

IMPORTANT: make sure you save your writing “goal” from today! We will talk more about writing goals soon.

 

Murray and Revision (15 min)

I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the Donald Murray essay. For textbook readings, when we discuss them over Zoom, it is a good habit to be already logged into our course textbook through VitalSource’s interface, so take a moment to do that now.

Once logged in, I want you to take a couple minutes and respond to the following on a piece of paper, your phone, or somewhere else (might be best to do something that could be easy to copy/paste somewhere):

Writing prompt:

Murray claims that writers “must learn to be their best enemy.” Do you ever see yourself as an “enemy” of your writing? How so? Further, what would it mean to be your own “best enemy” as a writer, in Murray’s terms? How might that relate to revision or not? Do you have any issue with thinking about yourself as an “enemy”?

Spend 3-5 minutes writing about this. I’ll check in.

Instructions for breakout group:

We are going to do a breakout room again, but in pairs (or a trio, depending on number of people we have in class) to share these responses. Also, talk about one notable thing that stands out to you from your reading annotation that was due today. From there, continue to talk about the Murray reading until we regroup. You’ll have 5 minutes or a little more depending on how it goes.

Before the end, decide on one thing that came up in conversation that stood out to you most.

Okay, now that we are finished, we are going to share some one part of each pair/group’s (or at least most pairs/groups) with the larger group.

 

Questions for Second Reading Responses (10 min)

Aside from Learning Modules, another big part of our use of the course website will be blog posts that I call Questions for Second Reading (which I inherit from a textbook called Ways of Reading, which emphasizes returning again and again to readings to also return again and again to our writing).

The first Questions for Second Reading Response is due by the start of next class, to be posted on our course website via Blogs@Baruch (more on that soon).

Log into Blackboard, go to Course Documents, Assignment Prompts, Questions for Second Reading Responses. Download “QSR1” and let’s go over it together.

The idea with these assignments is to engage with texts more deeply, but always with an eye toward larger writing projects. For instance, our Literacy Narrative first draft can definitely take into account your relationship to revising as a writer.

 

Digital Tools, Part 2: Blogs@Baruch (25 min)

I would recommend writing each QSR response in a separate document and then posting to our course website *or* composing it right in our course website while clicking “save draft” at top right FREQUENTLY.

Let’s get set up with how to work in course website by exploring Blogs@Baruch a bit more. This module will take us through Blogs@Baruch.

Any issues with getting set up or using Blogs@Baruch?

Any issues with going through this module? This will be the rough form of our asynchronous Learning Modules on Tuesdays.

For homework, I want you to read through your classmates’ introduction posts on Blogs@Baruch and comment on two of them following our commenting guidelines as established in that module.

 

 

Our Mother Tongues and Writing (15 min)

Is writing painful? What makes it painful to you? Why? Is it always painful? (e.g., in school vs. writing to friends vs. writing for work). Take a moment to write down what you think about that on a separate piece of paper or on your device in a word processing document.

Baldwin opens his essay on Black English to say that:

Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other–and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [them].

 

Baldwin, I think, is trying to contextualize the nature of language as concerned with people. As much as some people want it to be true that words can just exist out in the world to share ideas, these words are spoken and written by real, living, breathing people with histories and ancestors and political stakes and so on. Any language or dialect represents a person or people in many ways. Baldwin is locating this truth in perhaps the starkest example of this truth in English language: the contrast between Black English (or, more specifically, African American Vernacular English–AAVE) and White Mainstream English.

Linguist Geneva Smitherman writes that Black English demonstrates a “linguistic push-pull” because it is:

the push toward Americanization of black English counterbalanced by the pull of its Africanization….Both linguistic forms have been necessary for black survival in white America–standard English in attempts to gain access to the social and economic mainstream, black English for community solidarity, deception, and “puttin on ole massa”. (63)

This is an emotional divide. To give up one’s language to take on a different one and to retain another language to remain in a community. This is a question many of you will have to wrestle with as you are educated in college. But, again, in terms of Black English, or AAVE (to get more specific about the U.S. context here), the violence at the center of this “push-pull” really highlights the emotional intensity that is possible at the center of language, as Baldwin puts here (and the passage Smitherman also cites to further explore this “push-pull”):

There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a
speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today.

In the most extreme forms, language can be a matter of survival, as we see in this illustration by Baldwin in reference to the historical legacy of slavery and the evolution of AAVE. But in all forms, language is also who we are. As Smitherman writes elsewhere:

After all, the student’s mother tongue is the language of his/her mother. Dissin a student’s mother tongue can thus be perceived as talkin bout they momma. (8)

White Mainstream English is hard to pin down, but it is something we all feel we are supposed to speak and write with in “professional” or “educational” settings–but that does not mean other languages or dialects that are our “mother tongues” are inferior or not “grammatical” (this is especially messed up because AAVE, New York Latino English, Cajun Vernacular English, Philadelphia English, or other versions of English all have unique grammars that are completely logically sound).

If you think writing is painful, one reason might be is that we were all forced to adapt the languages we loved and grew up around into something else entirely. We were all asked to be someone else. We were asked to give up something about us, and this often happened in writing.

This is something I’m working through and I want your help:

I wonder if the enemy we might have in revision is something else entirely than our own competence as a a good reader of our own writing. An enemy also might be the constraints we face when trying to accommodate an imaginary reader that demands we give up part of ourselves.

How do you keep YOU in language and in writing? How do you keep your history? I hope you ask that question throughout this class and for the rest of your college career (and beyond). Your languages are beautiful, don’t get rid of them.

In this class, we only ask that you become more aware of what you are capable of doing as a writer, to be thoughtful in reflection and revision about how you can do other things (possibly better things), and how you might manage the pain of writing as a pain of labor rather than as a pain levied against your identity and who you are and want to be.

It is up to you, always, for how you use language. But get to know what language is, like Baldwin is trying to explore in his short piece.

 

Literacy Narrative Assignment (5 min)

We are going to explore these kinds of themes in our Literacy Narrative project: what our languages are and how the practice writing, schooling, and other factors in our development into adults have continued to shape how we have adapted those languages to reading and writing over time.

To get the prompt for the first major writing project, go to Blackboard>Course Documents>Assignment Prompts>Major Writing Projects.

Let’s go over this briefly, just so it is on your mind in the early going. The first draft is due September 15. We will return to it in the coming days.

 

Next Time (2-5 min)

-QSR1 due to be posted on our course website by the start of class on 9/3.

-Read Anzaldúa, do Reading Annotation  by start of class on 9/3 (Submit to Blackboard)

-Read your classmates’ introduction short pieces (link above in this lesson plan) and comment on two of them following the commenting guidelines in the Blogs@Baruch module.