Today in the computer lab I gave a preparatory lecture on documentary film in order to establish some concepts and vocabulary, to situate it within the sphere of advocacy, and to introduce some things that the students should be on the look out for when we screen the film that will be the text that they will analyze for paper 2. We looked at the reference resource composed by one of our 106 instructors who teaches the 'Documenting Reality' syllabus approach: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ebayer/introtodoc.html. Tomorrow and Friday we will be screening the film 'Children Underground.'

Here's that handout. It was my attempt at breaking down how we might go about breaking down / analyzing a text. Sugggestions? Is this even helpful or just more confusing?
-A

Okay, I haven't posted in a few days, so here's the rundown of the last week: Friday and Tuesday we worked on thesis statements, which their first papers completly lacked. I gave a lecture on theses on Fri and Tues in the comp. lab we looked at a couple of good reference sites that show some great examples of weak vs. strong thesis statements, how to hone and revise theses, etc. I'll include the links. We also looked at some sample intros from scholarly articles and I had them try to locate where the thesis was in the intro, if it was strong, etc. This also introduced them to academic rhetoric. I also handed out the two texts that the students will be doing rhetorical analyses of for their second response, due this Fri. I'll attach the docs. One is an excerpt from Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat called 'A Question of Identity' and the second is Borges' 'Funes, the Memorious.' Today we were also supposed to talk about Joy Harjo's poem 'Remember' but my first lecture on rhetorical analysis, which the students seemed to think was pretty boring, took up the whole period. I wrote what I thought to be a pretty good handout on rhetical analysis that I will have to attach later. The selection of these three texts does have some logic: the first, a clincal / creative non-fiction text is about a form of amnesia that is stuck in a loop of about two miuntes. It's about radical forgetting and the role that memory, a type of narrative, a cognitive text, plays in the construction of idenity, and further, reality. The second, a piece of short fiction, is about a guy who has a disorder, a sickness brought on by brian trauma that makes it impossible for him to forget, i.e. radical remembering. The Harjo text is, for one thing, about cultural memory. My goal is, first, to put what we've talked about in terms of rhet. analysis into practice, second to use three differnt genres / modes of rhetoric to approach a complex of related concepts, that is, the role of memory and forgetting on--at the micro level--the formation of a personal text, an identity, and--at the macro level--the role of memory and forgetting in the writing of history and culture, our country's mnemonic text / narrative. Does this make sense? -A

Over the last three class periods my class has been presenting their portrait playlist projects. Everyone did a wonderful job--on the pres.'s at least. Warning: I told them that their presentations only had to be five to seven minutes and it still took 3 full days, so from now on I'm going to have to schedule these accordingly (I'd only planned for two days with maybe a _little_ spill over). They had the option, as you can see on the guidlines that I posted, to do a visual project as opposed to a paper. No one abused this, they all (more or less) put a lot of work into them and did some very creative stuff.

I'm also handing out the excellent 'Peer Evaluation Tips and Guidelines' handout from our course database.

Here's a peer review worksheet that I 'borrowed' from http://www.wku.edu/3kinds/jrpepew.html and http://www.english.udel.edu/kharbot/write/peerediting.html. Am I allowed to do that? Anyway, this will be part of students' portfolios and will be turned in with final drafts so that I can see how well / poorly they responded to suggestions.

I'm attaching a freewrite assignment I'm giving the youngins this morning. It's in response to the article "Split at the Root: A Essay on Jewish Identity" taken from _Blood, Bread, and Poetry_. This will serve as both quiz and discussion stimulater. I'll be scanning this article and posting it later. Hook me up w/ some comments/suggestions if you have any.

Hope this upload works, sorry if I screw it up...