Homework for Wednesday, October 1st

For Wednesday, please have the Robert Frost poem, "Mending Wall," (p. 426) read, along with the two response essays, "The Deluded Speaker in Frost's 'Mending Wall'," by Jonathan Deutsch (p. 429) and "The Debate in Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall'," by Felicia Alonso (p. 432).

While there is no written assignment due, please take notes on the text and be prepared to discuss them in class. I have uploaded the Questions for Responding document to the Content section of D2L, as well.

Homework for Monday, September 29th

Please read the essay, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," by Ursula Le Guin in our Current Issues textbook. You have a reading response due 2:00pm on Monday (submitted to the dropbox titled Reading Response 3); please be prepare to discuss the essay in class.

The focus of your reading responses should align with the guidelines of the next paper (please see the Summary/Response Assignment sheet for more details), since my feedback for this reading response and the next one will be applicable to the Summary/Response paper.

To clarify what we covered in class, you should be conducting exploratory research of a broad topic that you want to write about and continue researching for the remainder of the course. Ideally, you have narrowed down the broad topic (using the student example from class, which is available for downloading in the Content section of D2L) to a focused research question and are gathering sources related to that topic.

For the Summary/Response paper, you will be selecting one source that you've located and write a short summary of the article, followed by a critical analysis/evaluation to determine whether or not it can/will be useful to your final paper. In class yesterday, I wanted you to compile a list of potential sources for this paper, copy/paste the links to your blog, and practice summarizing the contents from one of the links. I know there was some confusion about this, and I wasn't as clear about these directions as I should have been in class, so I wanted to clarify the directions of the exercise here. If you still have questions about the assignment, please email me as soon as possible.

Homework for Wednesday, September 24th

For Wednesday, please read Chapters 1 (pages 3-11) and Chapter 8 (pages 337-348) in the Current Issues textbook and be prepared to discuss these approaches to writing and analyzing texts. There is no written assignment due; just the reading.

Here are the links to the video and accompanying article that we viewed/referenced in class today:

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Response Article

Also, I have uploaded to the content section the Topic Breakdown that we looked at in class today for you to review at your convenience.

***UPDATE TO WEDNESDAY'S CLASS***

We will not be meeting in the classroom this Wednesday, September 17th, since this week will be devoted to audio feedback/conferences. This will help to ensure that I get feedback emailed to you all by Thursday, so that you have plenty of time to revise your narrative by Monday, September 22nd.

***THERE IS STILL HOMEWORK*** Please review the contents of Chapter 7 in our Current Issues book, and generate a list of topics in a blog post that interest you/that you are passionate about. We will discuss topic breakdowns in class on Monday, when we will reconvene.

If you have any questions, please feel to contact me.

Workshop Notes and Homework for Wednesday, September 17th

For class on Wednesday, we'll be discussing the content from Chapters 2 and 7 in the Current Issues textbook. Please read over the material and be prepared to discuss the concepts that are covered (we won't be looking at the example essays in these chapters).

Just a reminder for the in-class Workshop: be sure to have your workshop feedback posted in response to your peer's post (please see the PN Questions for Consideration document in the Content section of D2L for more details), and make certain to update your blogs with your workshop reflections (1. What revisions do you feel need to be made to your narrative draft? 2. How do your thoughts on your revision compare to the feedback you received from your peer?).

I will be emailing you with audio feedback for your drafts this week. Please be sure to open the file as soon as possible to ensure that it works. If you have difficulties opening the file, please email me as soon as possible so we can remedy the situation. The final draft of your narrative will be due Monday, September 22nd.

Homework for Monday, September 15th

Your only homework for the weekend is to draft a version of your personal narrative essay. Please reference the assignment sheet and the student example--both located in the Content section--for details on what's expected for this assignment. At a minimum, the rough draft of the paper should be half of the page count of the requirement for the final draft. This weekend, I will create discussion boards to which you will post your drafts, and we will discuss workshop guidelines and policies in class on Monday.

A few people have expressed interest in the short video we watched this week, as well as the essay on Happiness vs. Meaning that I briefly referenced. Here are the links to those materials, in case anyone else would like to review them:

David Foster Wallace: "This is Water"
Emily Esfahani Smith: "There's More to Life than Being Happy"

Homework for Wednesday, September 10th

As per the course schedule, the reading for Wednesday is the Justin Cronin essay, "Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner," found on page 203 of the Current Issues textbook. You will need to write a response to the essay, which is due at the beginning of class in the dropbox titled, Reading Response 2. Guidelines for the reading response can be found on assignment sheet in the Content section of D2L.

Also, I have posted the assignment sheet for the Personal Narrative to the Content section of D2L. We will cover this in more detail on Wednesday, but it is available for you to view/download/print if you want to get a head start on composing the rough draft. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email.

Questions for Consideration 9/8

In class tomorrow, we'll be discussing the Stephen Marche essay on Facebook and loneliness. Think about your own experiences with Facebook and social media. How do they compare with some of the anecdotes in this essay? Given that this essay was published a few years back, do the observations and insights the writer makes about Facebook still apply today? In what ways? How does the point-of-view affect your reading of the piece? We will discuss these topics, among others, during class.

Homework for Monday, September 8th

Please be sure to read the Stephen Marche essay, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely," on page 600 of our textbook, and be prepared to discuss its contents in class on Monday. While there is not a formal writing assignment due, I will be posting questions for consideration here (over the weekend) that will guide our discussion. If you need to contact me for anything pertaining to the class or the reading assignment, I can be reached through my school email address: daniel.dewolf@mnsu.edu.