All posts by JSylvor

Peer Review – Personal Narrative

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Over the next few days, you will be reading and giving feedback to your peers’ personal narrative drafts.  Each of you will be reviewing two of your classmates’ essays and working in groups of three to revise your essays.  Your groups are as follows:

Group #1:  Geselle, Kaylen, Abdu

Group #2: Samantha, Gianni, Nicole

Group #3: Melanie, Mokhitobon, Sydney

Group #4: Lorraine, Danna, Brian

Group #5: Destiny, Lelani, Mindy

You will be using this Peer Review Form to guide the process.  Please read the instructions carefully, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions.  The sooner you get your peer review done, the better.  To receive credit for this assignment, please complete your peer review by midnight on Friday, February 19th. This will give your classmates time to incorporate some of your feedback before we meet again on Monday, Feb. 22nd.

Chang-Rae Lee, “Coming Home Again”

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Please respond to any two of the following questions about “Coming Home Again.”  Your responses should be posted by Thursday, February 18th.  Compose your answers in complete sentences, and where appropriate, use specific examples from the text to illustrate your response.  Your responses can be shared as “comments” on this post.

1.What meaning does cooking take on for the author during his mother’s illness?

2. Choose a line in the essay that you find particularly moving or illuminating.  What makes it so effective?

3. What role do food and cooking play in the life of the mother?

4. How does Chang-Rae Lee handle time in this essay?  Give an example to illustrate your response.

5. What important things do we and/or the narrator learn about his mother through this essay?

6.  How do you understand the meaning of the essay’s title, “Coming Home Again”?

7. Was there anything in Lee’s essay that resonated for you personally? How might you connect your own experience to the one that Lee explores here?

8. What is the significance of the final story Lee reflects on in this essay about his parents’ dropping him off at boarding school as a teenager?

 

 

Assignments – Week #3

assignments

— Remember that we will NOT be having our regular class on Monday, Feb.15th.  The college is closed in honor of Presidents’ Day.

–Your most important work this week is drafting your Personal Narratives.  Your drafts should be shared with me via Google Docs by midnight on Tuesday, Feb. 16th.

— I will be available on Friday and Monday afternoons for those of you who want to meet with me to discuss your essay.  If you would like to make an appointment with me, please either message me on slack or email me at [email protected].

–By Sunday, February 14th, please post a “progress report” to the channel #essays in our Slack workspace.  Your progress report should include the following:

I am writing about ______________________________.

So far I have ___________________________________.

My next steps are ______________________________.

I’m most concerned about ___________________________.

–In a separate post, I have shared some questions about Chang-Rae Lee’s essay, “Coming Home Again.”  Please respond to any two questions by Thursday, February 18th.

Project #1:  Personal Narrative

essays

Length: 3-4 pages, double-spaced

Drafts Due: Tuesday, February 16th

Essays Due: Thursday, February 25th

For this first essay of the semester, you will be sharing a story that explores some aspect of your life or identity through the lens of food.  You may want to recount a very specific incident, as Gabrielle Hamilton does in “Killing Dinner”; you may want to use food as the thread in exploring a broader, more expansive narrative, as Chang-Rae Lee does in “Coming Home Again”; or perhaps you want to connect your food story to issues of family or cultural history, as Toni Morrison does in “The Day and Its Splendid Parts.”

As you develop your ideas, think about what will make this essay engaging and meaningful for you and for your reader.  A successful essay will not just describe an experience vividly; it will connect the food experience being shared to more complex issues of identity, relationships, or personal history.  To use a food metaphor, you want your essay to be “meaty” – not superficial.  How can the reader understand you more deeply after reading your essay?  How can you use food as a gateway to thinking about some of the more complicated aspects of your personal story?  

*You are welcome to use the food memory you shared on the blog as a jumping off point for thinking about this essay, but keep in mind that you would need to connect that memory to some of the larger issues referred to above.

 

Submission Instructions:

Drafts:  You will turn in your draft as a Google Doc by placing it in our shared folder, called ENG 2150 SP21.  Here is the link to access the folder.  Please give your file the title:  “Your Name Personal Narrative Draft” before placing it in the folder.

 

Finished Essays:  Your finished essay will also be submitted as a Google Doc, but it will be shared only with me.  In order to do this and to keep all your formal essays together, please create a folder called: “Your Name English 2150 SP21,” share the folder with me ([email protected]), and place your finished paper inside.  

Assignments – Week #2

assignments

–Please read Gabrielle Hamilton’s essay “Killing Dinner” before class on Monday.  You can find her essay under the “Texts” tab at the top of the blog.

-Before our class on Monday, February 8th,  please share a post on the blog in which you do the following:

  • Identify and define one word from Hamilton’s essay that you had to look up.
  • Copy one passage from the essay that struck you as important or interesting.  This could be a single sentence or a group of sentences.  Provide your analysis of this passage.  This might include addressing the author’s stylistic choices ( word choice, figurative language, imagery, etc…), thinking about how she has chosen to organize this essay, and reflecting on the meaning and implication of the passage you’ve chosen.  What questions do you have about the passage you’ve selected?
  • Offer one discussion question that you’d like to raise about this essay.

–Please read your classmates’  “food memories” posted to the blog.  Select three posts you’d like to respond to.  For each, write a response that acknowledges two or three things that you particularly liked about their post,  shares a thought or experience of your own that connects to the one the author has described, and asks two questions that might help the author develop the piece more fully or think about it in a different way.  Your comments should be posted by Friday, February 12th.

–For Wednesday, February 10th, please read Chang-Rae Lee’s “Coming Home Again,” and have the text available to you during our zoom session at 12:30.

 

Assignments – Week #1

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  • Please complete this brief technology audit.  This will help me be sure that each of you can participate fully in all aspects of our course.  Due by Friday, February 5th.
  • Use this link to join our Slack workspace.  For your first post to Slack, simply share a picture of something that you (or another member of your household) are eating this week.  No need for a  clever caption, fancy foods, or perfect photos – just document a real-life meal.  Due by Friday, February 5th.
  • Before our class session on Wednesday, February 3rd, please read Toni Morrison’s short essay, “The Day and Its Splendid Parts”.   You can link to the reading using the “Texts” tab at the top of our blog.  Be ready to discuss this piece during Wednesday’s Zoom call.
  • Create your first blog post!  Using Toni Morrison’s essay as your jumping off point, describe a food-centered memory.  Like Morrison’s essay, your post could describe an experience of a meal in a special location (perhaps outdoors, like Morrison’s), a family experience centered around food, or a food related ritual (something you, your family, or your community does over and over again, as a tradition).   It could be something very special, like Morrison’s family reunion, or something very ordinary, like your daily breakfast.   Feel free to add a photo or other illustration.   Think about how to use descriptive language to make your memory come alive.   Your post should be at least 300 words and should be shared to our blog by Sunday, February 7th.

Welcome!

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I’m glad you found your way here!  Welcome to English 2150: Writing II – Setting the Table.  This blog will be the hub or center of our activity during this semester of distance learning.  This is where I will be posting assignments, you will be sharing work, and we all will be in conversation about the issues we’re exploring in this course.  Whether you are a pro at blogging or completely new to blogs, we will all (myself included!) get more comfortable with this platform as the semester progresses.

Our first “live” Zoom meeting will happen at 12:30pm on Monday, February 1st.  Use the link posted below to access the meeting:

https://baruch.zoom.us/j/88155451973

Looking forward to meeting you and to working together this semester!!

Warmly,

Professor Jennifer Sylvor

Pronouns: she/her