Now Read This

An essay from Newsweek by Michelle Obama.

The Jamie Oliver TED talk, which we watched in class.

A response from Daniel Engber in the online mag Slate.

A website and petition from myfoodmychoice.org.

Here’s a blog post by Richmond Ramsey about how certain kinds of eating habits have become politicized, and the costs of that way of thinking.

A long-form essay by Michael Pollan, “Unhappy Meals.”

Please respond to the Michael Pollan essay in a separate RN entry. Respond to the others collectively, in a 300-400 word entry titled, “Food and Health.”

The topic over the last week has been “Education.” We started off watching Ken Robinson’s talk about “changing educational paradigms” (see previous post for video), then read Price’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” and Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers,” which we discussed Monday and Tuesday, respectively.

For Thursday, I’ve asked students to read Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me,” and Kyoko Mori’s “School,” also from The Language of Composition. On Friday, we’ll have our first In-Class Essay of the term; for that, you’ll be expected to respond to a prompt using evidence from the six readings in that same book. Those readings can be found in Lang of Comp, from pages 150-163 (including Rockwell’s painting).

On Thursday, we watched this video in class. It’s by educational researcher Sir Ken Robinson, and it opens our discussion of education:

If you missed class on Monday, I gave a lecture on Michel de Montaigne and handed out four of his essays. They are, if you want to get started on them before coming to class, “Of Idleness,” “Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions,” “Of Smells,” and “Of Practice” (links to full text by Gutenberg.org).

Here’s a picture of Montaigne. Here’s a picture of his crib.

Don’t forget, folks, we start blogging steadily this week. That means you need to have at least three posts, for a total of at least 1200 words by midnight Sunday night (or Monday morning, if you like). See the link above for more details…

A short one, by Oliver Sacks.

For anybody still out there and willing to take a second, I’m curious to know what people thought of our experiment using Google Docs this term.

Anything else in the class you want to talk about at all–blogs, our AP test prep, particular readings–I’d be interested in hearing any and all of it.

Leave your comments below…

When trying to come up with this theme (which wasn’t easy), I wanted something that would allow the essays to be tied together, but would still provide the maximum possible flexibility for individual students. Obviously, we learn things all the time in every facet of life, so there are a lot of directions you could go with this:

• When have you been wrong? Tell a story about a time when something defied your expectations. Everything you believe made you think things were going to go one way, and they went another.
• Who has taught you something? Tell about a person who you’ve learned from. Not necessarily a teacher or parent; it could be a friend, a little brother or sister, even a stranger or celebrity. If you want to stretch it in an amusing or strange way, you could go with an animal or an inanimate object.
• How can you apply what you’ve learned? Maybe you have some goals for the next year, since you have one more year before you leave high school, its related teams and activities, groups of friends, and (for many people) home. What do you want to do before you go? How can you tie that in to what you’ve learned so far?
• When have you learned an unintended lesson? It doesn’t have to be the opposite of what’s intended (though it could be), but it should be unexpected and unforeseeable.

As far as tone goes, you can do about anything you want: make it funny, make it nostalgic, make it serious as it gets. As long as it’s nonfiction and ties to the theme, you’re good. I’ll play a few examples for you on Tuesday (including one I recorded myself), that could fit into this theme.

Finally, don’t freak out about this assignment. We’re looking for something in the neighborhood of 1,000 – 1,400 words on paper, and we’re hurrying through, so it’s not going to be perfect. But if you have two people working on it, you have twice the brainpower to remember the important things: choosing interesting and appropriate words; varying syntax; keeping a consistent tone. In most of these essays, using anecdotes or longer narratives to make your points, using description or key details to make the stories memorable, would make sense. My hope is that you’ll have a little fun with it.

Stop blogging!

At some point I’ll ask you to write one last post, but for now you are done. For the sake of clarity, let me inform you that as of Monday, May 17, you should have fifteen (15) blog posts since and including April 12.

Also, the requirements for the Spring Term Portfolio can be accessed above, on the menu bar.

I’d like you to use your reading notebook while you’re preparing for your author study. I’m writing this on 5/6, and you have until 5/21 to complete your reading, so let’s say a total of SEVEN ENTRIES dedicated to your author and his/her work.

For each piece of writing you respond to in your RNB, make sure you’re focusing on facets of your author’s work that will be useful in the final presentation, rather than just general reactions. For example:

• what does this piece help illustrate about the author’s style? what does it show about how s/he approached a topic?
• how important is this piece to the author’s complete body of work? was it especially significant in some way? how? why?
• who does it sound like the author is writing to, and for what purpose? what strategies does s/he employ to achieve that purpose?
• what are the most memorable parts of this piece? are there opportunities here to use an excerpt in the presentation?

Don’t just answer these questions; use these, and questions like them, as a starting point.

Now, I’m going to keep the “page length” requirement at a page, but some of you need to do more than that. It’s fairly obvious when I’m checking notebooks who’s skirting around the requirement by starting their entries three lines down, ending them three lines from the bottom, writing in large handwriting and giving themselves a healthy margin on left and right. I’m not promising you full credit if that’s the way you go about these entries. Leave no doubt.