Thursday, August 23, 2012

 

Recap for Day 2, Week 1

Tuesday, August 21

We read the letter in class Tuesday. For a freewrite, students wrote a letter to me and handed the letters in. I will return them next Tuesday.

Students then got into groups to discuss the topic "Respect." Homework was to write a summary of the article. I also told students that they could cite, that is, paraphrase or use direct quotes to talk about the work.

Thursday, August 23

Today we looked at summarizing and paraphrasing. We practiced summarizing a sentence from the article: "Humility is a virtue black women--and African Americans generally--are expected to have in excess" (Chideya 28).

Literal paraphrase: Meekness is a quality African American females--and black people overall--are assumed to have in abundance (Chideya 28).

We talked about how literal paraphrases are not appropriate for one's essays, unless one changes the sentence structure too, but that literal paraphrases can help one understand more fully what the passage is about if one can use one's own words.

We had about eight new students today, all enrolled just missed the first meeting. They sat together and read the Chideya article.

After we shared the summaries, students in each of the three groups shared one of the summaries with the class. We appreciated the brave students who allowed the teacher to critique their work (smile).

We jotted down a few points for comment on the student summaries:

1. Does the author include the major ideas or key points in the summary? If not, which ones did he/she leave out? (Don't do the work for the author, but perhaps just ask a question).

2. Supportive details--could include citations (paraphrase and direct quotes)

3. Includes the reference--article and author

The last assignment completed was a discussion of annotation. The essay, How to Mark a Book, discusses this. We previewed the essay by reading the introduction and then topic sentences and the conclusion to get a sense of what the essay is about.

Homework is to read the essay and respond to either 1 or 3 in Topics for Writing or write a summary. The length is 250 words or 1 page. This is a cyber assignment, which means students are to post the essays on the blog.

Don't forget to include a heading. Use the anonymous prompt.

Student Name
Professor Sabir
English 201 A (or B)
Date: Day Month Year (no punctuation). See SPHE page 311.

Note: When you post assignments on the blog they lose their formatting. Make sure you look at the post before publishing. Also, do not type in the comment box, type in MS Word and then copy and paste.

Books
Bring SPHE, Evolution of a Revolutionary, and The Rose that Grew from Concrete, and your dictionary to class next week.

Some students did not give me their summaries and the student comments before they left. If you took yours home by accident, turn in the comments Tuesday. You can email me the summary before then: coasabirenglish201@gmail.com

Comments:
Shuluo Fu
Professor Sabir
English 201A
08/23/2012

Summary( On Respect)
   Farai Cbideya, the author of On Respect, emphasizes an important point about this article, that is: although you are a black woman, you should be yourself and you should be on respect.
   First of all, the author describes the experiences when she moved to Los Angeles, which was associated with racial problems. However, the author shows her attitude to her audience that"should we let the pain of racial slights roll off our backs? Or should we aggressively fight every injustice? The answer is by no means clear", which means that black woman should be get rid of these racial problems by themselves. Afterward, the author recalls her personal incidents in Los Angeles, where she gave an unfair treatment when she went to a college for a speech by a cab. Through the incident, the author tries to tells us a real circumstance for being black today, especially for a black woman. Moreover, the author give a further illustration: the identity should be depend on what they do with our self-esteem, instead of being defined by others' assumption. In order to point out her illustration, she tells her audiences that"identity is a Zen koan, a riddle" and "the worst thing about any group identity is that it becomes fixed, Procrustean".
   After all, wherever a black woman move through the world, they should be theirselves, a kind of self that seeking for freedom, accepting everything included the joy and pain, and standing out in this society even though you are not be appreciated by others. "Seek to keep your light, and illuminate your unique place in the sky " is the most vivid example to describe everything in the author's mind.
 
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