2-1-2021 Lesson Plan

Quick Hello (2-3 min)

My name is Dan Libertz and I’ve been teaching/tutoring reading and writing since 2007. I’m excited to get to know all of you both virtually over Discord and also in your writing.

Quickly, let me show you how the website works and how we will go through lessons for synchronous meetings like this one and asynchronous meetings like we will eventually have on Wednesdays.

Since we are all on Discord, let’s just get right into that in case it is unfamiliar for anyone!

 

Discord, let’s just do that now (5-10 min)

It says "Discord" and there is the Discord logo

So, here we are, all on Discord If you can, look at this lesson plan and the Discord screen simultaneously by playing with minimization to fit both on your screen.

A question, some initial ground rules, and a quick tutorial before we start.

To start, who has used Discord yet? Let’s do a quick poll right in Discord. Make sure you are in our text channel for today (# feb-1-2021) to see the poll. Instructions will be there.

As you noticed, today I moved you all into our voice channel under “Lessons” on the left menu bar. When we meet as a full class, always join that channel so you see and hear me as well as participate.

You should also be in the text channel for that day. Just join the date of the class so you can also have the option to participate via typing and also to do some activities that will require using the text channel (like the poll we just did).

You probably also notice the other categories besides Lessons.

There is also, at the top, “Resources.” I will put announcements there (will usually also email announcements–other than the one announcement I currently have on Blackboard, I won’t be posting announcements there). I only can write in the announcements text channel, but you can read everything there. Aside from announcements, there is a text channel for any questions. This is a great place to ask any questions, especially ones you think others in the class would benefit from. For any questions that are more private that you wouldn’t others to see, feel free to email it to me instead. Finally, there is a voice channel for my office hours with you. Please feel free to join here for my scheduled office hours (see the syllabus) or when we have a schedule one-on-one meeting.

The final category is “Writing Groups.” We will get into this more in a week or so, but each of you will be assigned to a writing group to work with one another on various writing projects. You will use your designated text and voice channel for that work.

Discord is pretty intuitive. It has similar features to most messaging platforms (e.g., can use emojis, can @ other users). The voice channel might take some time to get familiar with (especially bouncing back and forth between text channel and video/voice), but it shouldn’t take too much time. For getting started, Discord has a great tutorial page; you could start with their “Discord Basics” page, for instance: Beginner’s Guide to Discord – Discord

A final note (for now) on Discord:

I would recommend changing your privacy settings. Here are three things to disable:

Go to settings and disable:

  • “Use data to improve Discord”
  • “Use data to customize my Discord”
  • “Allow Discord to track screen reader usage”

Since Discord has a free version, they make money off of selling your data to various companies. Discord, like other freemium platforms, is not always clear about what they do with your data. So, a good idea is to just disable things that mention collecting data like these three settings.

 

 

 

Attendance and Quick Intros (10 min)

Let me just go around and get your names. When I call out your name, I’ll follow up with the following:

  • What do you preferred to be called? (e.g., I prefer Dan, Professor Libertz, or Dr. Libertz)
  • What are your pronouns? (e.g., my pronouns are he/him)

For folks who already had a Discord account or who used a nickname when just starting their account for this class, I’ll want to mark down your real name so I can align it with the user name you have for your Discord account.

 

How do you make rice? (15-20 min)

There’s a lot of ways to start a writing course, we are going to start with rice.

Take a few minutes, and on a piece of paper, on a word processing document on your computer, on your phone, wherever you are most comfortable writing–tell me all the information you can about how you, your family, or the wider cultural background you identify with prepare rice.

Take 2-3 minutes to do this (I’ll check in to let you know when we are close to that time limit).

Let’s take some time to share in small groups. I have breakout rooms assigned. In your breakout rooms, introduce yourself (again… gonna be a while before everyone knows who everyone is!)

This is a variation of an activity by Dr. Amber Spry, assistant professor of Politics & African + African American Studies at Brandeis University. The idea is that nearly the whole world eats rice (caveat, of course: some people don’t like it, some people might have an allergy or intolerance…still, pretty much all cultures do something with rice even if individuals might not like it or can’t eat it).

Seems simple enough. But we prepare A LOT of different ways. Dr. Spry is relating this to how our backgrounds and identities shape how we see the world. Cooking rice is not as simple as cooking rice. When we encounter rice, we encounter it in a very specific way and context – our backgrounds shape this seemingly “universal” food.

I want to relate this to reading and writing. What do you think? Is there any relation there? I don’t have an answer here, but it struck me as a similar kind of thing that I want to try to work out. Some questions I have:

  • How does the person we are, the cultures and places we come from…how does that influence what our expectations are when reading? When writing? When encountering a word, a paragraph, an idea…and so on?
  • How does our relationship to language influence how we encounter writing and reading in school, work, and for entertainment/enjoyment? What are some early memories you have of how language was enjoyable to you? (e.g., stories told in your family, jokes and wordplay with cousins). Does that impact how you approach reading and writing? In what ways?
  • If we all don’t make rice the same way, you better believe we all don’t use language the same way. How can this be a strength? How can this be something important to be aware of as you read and write? Can you think of any examples of when the way you use language had a notably positive or negative impact in a situation?

Take some time to do some writing in response to some, but not all, of these questions. Maybe about 5 minutes. Then we will reconvene and talk.

 

Intro to Course and Syllabus (10-15 min)

This course is about language, rhetoric, and writing. We will learn about all three of these things primarily through writing a bunch of stuff, but we will all use a variety of methods to do so (we will “prepare” our writing in different ways). You are already an expert in each one of these topics. You have been using rhetoric the longest, followed by language, followed by writing–but you have been using all of them for the vast majority of your life.

  • Rhetoric is a way we use symbols to make knowledge, coordinate activity, express ourselves, and influence others. You have been doing that since you’ve been a baby–you used crying, smiles, gestures, among other symbols before you started to master language. Being intentional with symbols is being rhetorical.
  • Language is something you acquired after and with rhetoric, and can be used to serve rhetoric. We use words in various combinations to think, communicate, and make art (i.e., make knowledge, coordinate, influence). Being intentional with language is being rhetorical.
  • Writing is a symbolic mode. Speech, image, audio, video, and other modes use rhetoric, but writing has had huge staying power for the last 1,000 years. Arguably, we write more now than we ever have (think about texting, social media, and the wide availability of sending documents via digital tools). Writing, though, can also include other modes–you might write before you give a speech, you might incorporate design and images into a document you write, and so on.

Like I said: you are experts in this. But writing is a lifelong thing to learn, and we are going to further develop that expertise in a college setting where making knowledge and self-expression is at a premium. As I note on the home page, part of this development of expertise is being at home with the chaos of choice–there’s lots of legos out there! Being a writer is coping with those infinite possibilities.

Okay, the syllabus.

You can access our syllabus on our website (see menu at the top) and on Blackboard as a pdf.

 

 

Reading and Writing (5 min)

I see reading and writing as tightly integrated to one another. The more attention you make toward reading, the better your writing gets. The more attention you pay to writing, the better your reading gets. It is hard to write without reading other material or your or by reading and rereading your own writing. It is hard to fully unleash your abilities as a reader without using writing as a tool to think with.

This is why we are going to spend time developing a habit of integrating our writing into our reading process. Just like with writing, how we read and our own histories (and the histories of who we are reading and what that text is part of) influence the meanings we make of texts. So, never forget as you read (and as you write) how your history, the history of the writer you read, and various aspects of the context surrounding the text you are reading/writing all help construct meanings you and others make of the text.

Many studies in educational research has shown the value of reading actively in terms of recall but also in terms of learning complex ideas. This is why, for each reading in this class, you will complete a Reading Annotation assignment. We are going to talk more about that, but before we do, we have to get to know the interface of our course textbook.

 

Course Textbook and Making Digital Annotations (10 min)

Before we go over how do do the reading annotations, I want to go over the textbook interface since you’ll be doing most of your reading annotations on that. As stated on the syllabus, you can purchase our course textbook one of two ways:

I want to quickly go over the how to use the textbook before getting into more detail about how to annotate in the textbook.

First, you’ll need to set up your username and password. When you purchase the textbook, VitalSource should walk you through that.

After you log in to VitalSource, the textbook should appear on “My Bookshelf” in the top of the menu. Click there.

Once you have already started reading, you will be in the habit of clicking the “Continue Reading” button to access the textbook.

The side menu on the left will be what helps you navigate the textbook. It looks like this:

Side menu on VitalSource textbook interface

The “home” icon in the first position takes you back to your library. This isn’t that helpful unless you have other textbooks through VitalSource.

Below the home icon is an icon with three dots on left and three lines on right is the table of contents for our textbook. This is useful, as it helps you navigate to different sections and chapters.

Just below the table of contents icon is a “magnifying glass” which is a search tool. You can type in words there to find something you might be looking for in the textbook.

Below the search icon is the “Notebook” function. We will talk more about this later when we get to annotating, but this function retains all of the notes and highlights you make in the book.

The image of the “beaker” is Labs…this is a bunch of features VitalSource is still testing out. Right now, I see abilities to use emojis (I know you can try this out in your annotations), definitions, scratch pad to take quite notes, and night display (to help your eyes). You can turn on these features or just use the outright, depending on what it is. Something to play around with if you want to.

The next icon we can’t access because we don’t have any figures in the textbook.

Finally, the last icon is Flashcards. You can make a “deck” of words with definitions or notes on the back to read through and review. This could potentially be helpful to get more comfortable with some key terms in our course that you might have trouble remembering. This was probably designed with test taking in mind, which we won’t be doing, but I could still see it as being useful if you want to try it out.

Then there is the bottom menu:

 

 

To the far left is Settings. Aside from aspects regarding sharing and annotating, I’m not sure there is much here to work with, but there could be as we use the textbook more.

After that, there’s a spot to show what page you are on, an option to “bookmark” the page, and a long bar to show progress you are making in terms of location in the textbook.

The five icons on the right are as follows:

  • a printer to print
  • a capital and lower case a (Aa) that helps you zoom in or out
  • a “volume” icon that is actually to read the text aloud to you
  • a highlighter to do a quick highlight
  • a quote mark to cite what you are reading (it only seems to cite the textbook and not the chapter you are reading, so I wouldn’t use this unless you just want to get most of the citation automated…we are gonna go over other resources for automatic citation later on)
  • a page with a paperclip looking thing which creates a quick URL link for you to copy for the page you are on in the textbook.
Making Digital Annotations

The following document gives instructions on how to complete two different kinds of reading annotations: Double Entry Journal and Direct Fire Highlighting. Let’s take a look.

 

Next Time (2-5 min)

–Complete Learning Module 1. Make sure you have everything downloaded/accessible that we talked about this class: our course textbook, Microsoft Office through Baruch, Adobe Reader (or make sure you have some way to save files as .pdf files and annotate/highlight .pdf files).

–Read the Murray piece in our textbook. “The Maker’s Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts” by Donald Murray, p. 27-30.

–Complete Reading Response. If doing Direct Fire Highlights for 2/3, share the link to public highlights with me (email me at [email protected]). If doing Double Entry Notebook, submit to Blackboard by 12pm on 2/3