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!