Check-in (30-45 minutes)

Choose one of two options below:

1. Draw a picture that represents how teaching has been going for you over the last week. Be as creative as you want to be and have some fun with it. If you feel the need to use some words, limit yourself as much as possible (e.g., like 5-10 words). Have fun with it, and if the best you can do is just scribbling something that comes anywhere close to saying something about your experience, that is more than fine.
2. Write a newspaper headline that describes an aspect of how teaching has been going over the last week. Try to make it engaging/funny/memorable in the way that headlines typically are by using word play, puns, alliteration, or other figurative language or attention to rhythm. Have fun with it, and if the best you can do is just writing a phrase or sentence that comes anywhere close to saying something about your experience, that is more than fine.

Pedagogue Assignment (10-15 minutes)

Let’s take a look at this assignment where you will lead a discussion about a podcast episode about the teaching of writing.

Here is the assignment form with more information as well as the place to sign up.

Teaching Analysis (15-20 minutes)

Lisa and I will talk through some things we focus on when teaching analysis.

Here is one analysis activity from Lisa Blankenship.

Here is an example of an activity Dan does:

Doing a rhetorical analysis may sound complicated, but is really just thinking about any text (a speech, an advertisement, a film, an essay, an email, an annual sales report, a TikTok video) as a series of choices and what is meaningful about those choices compared to other choices.

You want to look at the parts of a text to help you make a larger claim about the whole of the text.

The first thing to do is to observe. Let’s do that together with this advertisement from Moms Demand Action:

Image to analyze:

Might be hard to see text on this image, so here it is:

Text says at top: One child is holding something that’s been banned in America to protect them. Guess which one (in red)

At bottom it reads: “We ban the game dodgeball because it’s viewed as being too violent? Why not assault weapons?

Then there is the website listed, Momsdemandaction.org, and then the Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America logo to right bottom.

Question 1: What do you notice? What is here?

Question 2: Of all the things you notice, what is potentially significant about each choice in image or word? How does it contribute to some meaning or argument? (Let’s do as many as you can)

Question 3: Based on what we know here in what we see and some brief research we can do, what is important context to consider when thinking about the answers to Question 2?

This is the kind of stuff you do in any rhetorical analysis. A more specific version might be something more guided from a certain perspective, which is what the Rhetorical Analysis assignment will ask of you. Let’s move on to go over that. Tuesday’s (September 14) assignments will delve into rhetorical analysis a bit more.

**I also will usually assign a short writing activity where students look at a model rhetorical analysis (like in JTC) and label paragraphs for the kind of work it is doing and another short assignment where they write like 500 words with a guided prompt that asks them to close read a reading for homework, something that sort of mirrors the larger analysis assignment as sort of a “practice” run.**

Workshopping Analysis Prompts (30-45 minutes)

Let’s take a look at the analysis prompts you submitted for today.

Like with the Literacy Narrative prompts, will take about 10-15 minutes to read through them and then give some feedback.

Close Out

-Did our check-in/model of activities to see how things are going. Then we focused on some low stakes entries into analysis writing, followed by workshopping your prompts.

-Next week we will talk about style and grammar. There are a few readings, a brief discussion post, and we are asking you to sign up for your day to facilitate the podcast discussion. See schedule under Week 7 (October 6).