Author Archives: Tim Dalton

Class 21

Good morning! Today we’ll build on the work from Monday to think about, read about, talk about and start composing effective introductions and (if time) conclusions.

To do this, we’ll build on our prior work (your blog posts and discussions of course but also your work with the Essay 3 Prep Activity) by looking at a section from one of my favorite (and also free) writing textbooks, Amy Guptil’s Writing in College. It’s linked to on our Goals & Plans Doc. The section we’ll look at is “Chapter 7: Intros and Outros“.

As a reminder, your peer edit session of Essay 3 is on Monday, November 22. Please place your full draft in your assigned Google Doc by the start of class on that day. Graded revisions will be due November 29.

Class 20

Welcome to an Essay 3 “work day.” We’re going to build on the activities and discussions from the previous few weeks in book groups to start preparing to draft the longest essay of your semester in ENG 111. The prompt options are on the Essay 3 assignment sheet, elsewhere on this site.

To get us ready for that peer edit draft (which is due in a week), we’ll move through a number of “stations” today. You’ll start small and get bigger, and sometimes you’ll see the same names. Other times you won’t. The joys of Zoom.

We’ll see how many of these stations we get through today. If we do well, Wednesday can be devoted more fully to drafting and to wrap-up discussion of the books. If it’s taking longer than I’d planned, or the activity bears a repeat, we can have part of Wednesday’s class devoted to it.

As a reminder, your blog posts are not due this week until Wednesday. Please try to get replies to those up by peer edit day, Monday 11/22.

See you in a moment!

Class 18

Pairs!

Today: 

  • We’re going to try working in pairs in a few different ways today. First, you’ll move through a few sets of random pairs. You’ll talk for about five minutes in each pair, then come back and out chat waterfall a “big question” or a “small quote” that emerged from your conversation. You might structure your “elevator pitch” this way: 
    • Hey, [friend], I’m reading [BOOK], which is basically about _____. In the pages we read for today, the narrator was becoming a young adult. There was one scene that really stuck with me. [One sentence summary]. The line I keep thinking about is [quote with page number]. It got me thinking about [whatever it got you thinking about]. Were there any moments in your book that spoke to you like that? 
  •  After that “cross-book” talk, we’ll move into our book groups to discuss the particular pages for today. React to them and think about what passages are interesting to you, and what questions are emerging for you. 

Groups!

Research!

Replies!

Class 17

Good morning, folks. It’s day 2 of session 2, just about the halfway point of our book clubs. They’re just flying by, aren’t they? I’m hoping you’re having fun (or at least, listening and/or being prepared).

We’ll take a quick peek at the Essay 3 prompts again. They haven’t changed much but I’m wondering if reviewing them at this point might help us focus some of the comments we’ll make in class today and some of the posts we might write for Monday, Nov 8. The pages we’re looking at for next week are on the Goals and Plans Doc, as well as the schedule and, heck, I’ll put them here, too:

Laymon 117-162 / Diaz 142-247 / Talusan 150-229

Many many thanks to those who have made such great contributions to our big class conversation. Not everyone is, I’m noticing, so please if you haven’t been regularly contributing, let’s get going. This is certainly part of your grade for class.

Class 16

Good morning all. Welcome to session two of our book groups. This week, we’re looking at the following pages: Laymon 63-116 / Diaz 63-142 / Talusan 83-149. Overall, the writers are maturing, becoming young adults and going through the rites of passage:

  • taking on adult responsibilities like making money and caring for others
  • embracing opportunities like going to college or otherwise expanding their minds
  • feeling attraction for others and experiencing the pressure to have sex
  • leaving home, or watching home around them change
  • dealing with adult feelings, ranging from disappointment to jealousy
  • rebelling in a variety of ways and encountering the consequences of those rebellion

These are just a few of the ideas bouncing around in the posts you’ve posted for today. By 8:30am I saw blogs from Zeinab and Jasmin (Fairest), from Angel, Leslie, Maria, and Hamza (just in at the wire) (Ordinary Girls), and from Jose, Elijah, and Nayely (Heavy). If your post is up but I didn’t see it, I’ll circle back to it during our freewrite time.

For starters, I’d like anyone who’s not listed above to spend 10-15 minutes freewriting about one of the above rites of passage. Where in the text does the author go through one of the above kinds of experiences? What are the details around it? What is the language they use to describe it? What are the options available to them? What choices do they make? What do they think of it, looking backwards with the benefit of time?

Class 14

Welcome to Day 1 of our book groups. Thanks to Angel, Leslie, Karen, Adrian, Jasmin, Elijah and everyone else who posted responses to the reading by the start of class. (Those named above posted by 8:30, which is usually when I log on for class and prepare these posts for publishing.) A few bits of business, about a) blog posts and book clubs, b) the impact of this work on your grading contracts, c) Essay 2 (which I’ve finished reading and commenting on), and d) where we’re going with Essay 3.

Those of you who have arrived in class prepared and with your work complete, you’ll work in pairs and then threes to discuss the reading. I’d suggest you start out by sharing what you posted in the blog. It’s OK to have started with summary but the best discussions will move quickly to responses. These responses will be based in the books.

Blog Posts for Book Clubs

For easy reference, here’s a blog post requirement review

  • You’ll write one post per week to our course blog (due Mondays by 9am)
    • It should have a title, tags, a quote from the text, an image or a link out, and citations
    • It should engage the reading and be between 200 and 350 words (2-3 paragraphs).
  • You’ll also reply to the people in your groups (due Wednesdays by 9am) 
    • These should be thoughtful comments that engage the writer and their ideas
    • They should be 1-2 paragraphs, and should summarize what the writer has said before you respond with your own ideas — this is sometimes called the “known-new” contract

Incomplete Work & Grading Contracts

If you didn’t complete your assignment, a) I will mark it as late, and b) you’ll need to spend some time in class completing it. There will be breakout rooms for this. Please go to the room that corresponds to the book you’ve decided to read. Work turned in later than today’s class will be marked “make-up” and, eventually, “ignored.” Please review our grading contract to recall how this can affect your semester grades.

Essay 2 Comments & Required Revisions

You should check your preferred email address (whatever you indicated that was during the submission of Essay 1). I have sent feedback to everyone who turned in Essay 2. These were, generally, pretty good. A few were really excellent and we’ll look at them with the writer’s permission. Many need a small amount of revision, with the most common reason being a lack of engagement with the peer-reviewed readings.

Essay 3 Topics

While the specific prompts won’t be available until next Monday, after we’ve gotten underway with book clubs, I can say with some certainty the general topic choices you’ll have for this essay. We’re returning to a more traditional format, in this case a 1,000-1,500 word essay. Your choices of topic will be as follows:

  1. The Research Option: Using library sources from Lehman or the NYPL, pose a research question about a social issue that emerges from your reading and discussion of your book. Your essay should define that issue and give it some background using at least two peer-reviewed sources. That background should explain where your book enters into a larger conversation about that issue. And your essay should explore the way that issue shapes the experiences of the writer of this book. Examples abound but could include: immigration; identity; sexuality; gender; race; education; place; family; disability. And many more!

2. The “Struggle” Option: As we articulated the reasons we were choosing these books, many writers described an interest in the “struggles” these writers “overcame” along the way to becoming “successful.” If you pick this option, you’ll engage that idea of a “struggle” story (sometimes also called a “deficit narrative”). In what ways do these stories resist that trope? In what ways do they reinforce it? Were these stories “inspiring”, “depressing” or something in between? How do these terms help us as readers, and how is that a binary that limits our interpretations?

3. The Fly-on-the-Wall Option: Drawing on Alvarez-Alvarez and (to a lesser extent) P & E as models, observe your own group and at least one other group. Use research/data gathering skills like interviews and surveys to make an argument about the benefits and limits of book clubs in a pandemic-influenced college class.

4. The You-Tell-Me Option.

Class 13

Good morning, all! As our “Goals and Plans” Doc indicates, we’re at what very much feels like a midway point in the semester. Today, you turn in the second of your four formal essays. Exactly half, by the numbers.

(Turn it in here, if you haven’t already) If you’re having any issues with file format, hang on and I can help you after class. I fixed a bug in the Form with the multiple choice. English professors and multiple choice questions, we’re kind of strangers.

As fits a mid-way point, we’ll do a bit of looking back and a lot of looking forward. Today’s main activity looks at the draft thesis statements you shared in the chat Monday. We’ll use the same rubric that I’ve used with assessments and that you’ve used in peer editing to analyze these statements. That rubric is two questions: Is this statement arguable? Is this statement structured?

After we do an example in the main room, work in breakouts of 4-5 with this handout. Be ready to explain your discussion when you come back to the main room.

With the balance of class, we’ll do one of two activities. We’ll return to the task we started at the end of class Monday. In that activity, you were looking at the conclusion Carmen Alvarez-Alvarez’s ethnography of book clubs in Spain and trying to pull out its five main ideas in your own words. This artifact is a more urgent one, since book groups start Monday. We’ll do our best to wrap it up today or for homework.

If things go very quickly, we’ll take a look at some of the paragraphs you composed earlier this week. These are really helpful artifacts, too, and if we don’t have time for them today (which seems likely) we’ll look at them as “ice breakers” or “brain breaks” over the course of the book club sessions this month.

Looking forward to class today!

Class 11

Today we’ll peer edit and discuss ways to approach lists as a genre. What can we learn about main idea, organization, and evidence by writing our arguments this way?