Final paper due date

Dear Students,

Please email me your final papers at miriam.atkin@gmail.com by 5pm on December 22nd. Please don't send your papers late. I have a very short time for grading between your due date and my own deadline for turning your grades in.

On a lighter note, have a wonderful vacation full of friends and family IRL and many holiday smiles rather than neutral facial expressions. It was a fantastically enriching experience for me to get to see your own unique perspectives this semester on the texts I know and love well.

Have a happy one,
Miriam

Tomorrow's class

The following students are scheduled to give presentations tomorrow:
Adebola Adegoke
Joellysa Alvarez
Yvette Benson
Hilda Boamah
Shajje Cuevas
Tinisha Edwards
Averio Falette
Judelys Francisco
Rossy Garcia
Isatou Gumaneh
Destiny Jackson
Erick Lascaibar

As I mentioned, the presentations will be five minutes long. Make sure you bring a USB drive containing the PowerPoint document (or comparable program) with you to class.

Attendance is very important for everyone. Make sure you are there to support your fellow students. I will be handing back your rough drafts at the end of class.

See you tomorrow,
Miriam

Dear Students,

On Monday there will be a substitute teacher who will come in to conduct a peer review exercise in response to your rough drafts. You’ll be turning in your rough drafts to him at the end of class. Bring four copies of your rough drafts with you to class on Monday. Please make sure that you arrive to class on time because when students come in late, group work becomes very difficult.

As you're composing your drafts over the weekend, make sure to include a thesis sentence even if you don’t plan to write an introduction until later. In this case, you can simply state your intended thesis sentence at the top of the first page of your draft.

Please note that even though you’re only turning in four pages, you must follow all of the MLA specifications listed on the style sheet and other documents I’ve given you. Before class on Monday, read through the style sheet closely, in order to make sure that you’ve fulfilled the requirements stated there. The only part of the style sheet to disregard for now is the requirement that your paper include an introduction, body and conclusion—we haven’t gotten there yet.

I will see you on Wednesday for the first day of student presentations.

Miriam

CLASS CANCELED TODAY

Dear Students,

I have an emergency and have to cancel class today. Please continue working at home on your rough drafts according to the steps I outlined for you on Monday. Your rough drafts are due next class, on 12/8. On that day, we will do a peer review exercise, which means you will be sharing your rough drafts with your fellow students in small groups. Please make sure to bring 5 hard copies of your drafts with you to class next week.

I've posted to the Box.com site 3 important documents for you to look at. Firstly, there is a handout describing what you need to do for your presentations. The handout also lists who will be presenting on what day. I've ordered it alphabetically. Note that some of you will be presenting next Wednesday (12/10), so it's important that you start preparing your presentations this weekend.

I've also posted an MLA style sheet and a sample MLA paper as references for you to look at while you're composing so that you can make sure you're formatting properly. Again, always refer to Purdue Owl, to check your formatting before you turn in your drafts.

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Miriam

Assignment for Wednesday 12/3

Complete procedure #5 from the "Composing Your Final Paper" handout. Apply this step to two different quotes from your paper. Print a copy and bring it with you to class.

Fun with Technology Day!

Dear Students,

Tomorrow's class and possibly Wednesday's will be set aside for some guided research and drafting work toward your final paper. I'm requesting that everyone bring in their internet devices tomorrow--whatever portable device you use to compose papers--laptops, tablets, etc. I'll have you look up sources in class so that you can run them by me in order to ascertain whether or not they're the right sources for a literary analysis paper. We'll also work on polishing your thesis statements and gathering ideas for your rough draft.

Miriam

About choosing a one-on-one meeting date

Since it seems students cannot edit my post, I will simply bring in a sign-up sheet tomorrow. So please don't worry about choosing a time slot on the blog.

Assignment for Wednesday

Read from Alice Notley's Mystery of Small Houses (posted to Box.com). Conduct a close reading of one poem of your choice, following the same instructions as last time. Post your close reading to the blog by 8pm tomorrow (Tuesday).

Assignment for Monday

For Monday, please read "Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine," a short story by Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, author of Blues People). It is very short--only 5 pages long. Write a regular blog response to the story, to be posted by 8pm Sunday. In your response, please try your best to make connections between the story and the ideas we covered during our last two class sessions.

IMPORTANT CHANGE TO TOMORROW'S ASSIGNMENT

Students,

Please re-download the Low East reading. I just discovered that the file I posted online yesterday was missing a number of poems. I've uploaded the file again and this new one is complete. Please use this new document in class tomorrow.

Because of this mistake, it's fine for you to post your blog response tomorrow before class, rather than by 8pm tonight. That will give you a bit of extra time on the homework.

Very sorry about the mix-up,
Miriam

Blog assignment for Wednesday

Please read all the poems from the Low East handout for Wednesday. Choose one poem and conduct a close reading of that poem in your blog response, to be posted by 8pm Tuesday. If there are references to specific people, places, or events in the poems, please look them up online and try to determine what they are.

Include in your blog post the following elements:

1. Point out characteristics of the poem that you see reflected in Henderson's other poems. In other words, mention similarities having to do with sound, vocab, theme, etc. between the poem you've chosen and the rest of the poems in the handout.
2. Examine the poem's sounds (rhythm; moments of assonance, consonance or rhyme; the overall musicality of the poem; the effects, emotional or otherwise, of the poem's sound) 
3. Examine the poem's structure (What different forms does it use?--poetic stanzas, dialogue, prose paragraphs, etc. What is the effect of using these specific forms in the poem?)
4. Examine the poem's topics (What's Henderson writing about?)
5. Give your own analysis (Why is the topic important to Henderson? What are it's social/political/philosophical implications? How do the sounds, structure and topic all work together to illuminate a particular idea or set of ideas?) 

Assignment for Monday

For Monday, please read from Blues People and adhere to the follow instructions for your blog response, to be posted by Sunday at 8:
Summarize Baraka's history of the development of Afro-American music. Try to discuss all the different changes and talk about the various social conditions that caused those changes. Your response should meet the standard word count, about 350 words, so give as much detail in your summary as you can.

Reading for Monday

Please read the chapters from Blues People, by Amiri Baraka, that I've added to Box.com. I will post instructions for your blog response soon.

Blog assignment for Monday

Please post a blog response of at least 350 words to Welcome to Our Hillbrow by 8pm on Sunday. I would like your writing to partially focus on the question of perspective or point-of-view in the text. Think about how the narrative point-of-view is mingled with characters' points-of-view: there is the perspective of the author himself (Phaswane Mpe), the perspective of the author in the novel (Refentse), the perspective from heaven, the perspective of rural people (from Tiragalong) on city people (inhabitants of Johannesburg), the perspective of South Africans on non-South Africans. Use examples from the text to discuss all these various perspectives and how they interact with one another.

A correction for tomorrow's assignment

Dear Students,

I think it would be easier if you all emailed me your papers tomorrow before class rather than printing them out. This way we can project them and all look at the work together.

So please email me your writing by 11:45 tomorrow morning. This way I have some time to download them before class begins.

See you tomorrow,
Miriam

Writing assignment for Wednesday

Please come up with one idea for a piece of writing and compose two different pieces based on that same idea. Each piece should imitate the style of one of the authors we've read this semester.

The topic you come up with to ground these two pieces can be a particular story you want to tell, or some kind of philosophical idea you want to explore, or perhaps a social issue you'd like to investigate.

Please bring a copy of your writing to class on Wednesday.

For tomorrow

Dear Students,

I'm sorry I've taken so long to post this announcement. At this point it's just a reminder to finish up Ghosts for tomorrow and post a regular reading response by 8pm tonight.

Also, it is very important that you bring the text with you to class tomorrow. We will be looking closely at various sections.

See you tomorrow,
Miriam

A request for tomorrow

Dear Students,

After discussing Tao Lin, I would like us to continue tomorrow with the MLA citation practice that we began last week. Please, if you have the paragraph that your group composed, can you type it out and email it to me? This way we wouldn't have to waste class time on writing the paragraphs out on the chalkboard.

Thank you!
Miriam

Work for Monday

Please complete Shoplifting from American Apparel. Follow the usual reading response instructions and post to the blog by 8pm on Sunday. One thing I'd like you to make sure to cover in your response is: investigate the relationship between Shoplifting from American Apparel and the texts we covered on Wednesday by Warhol and Mohammad. Try to bring into your response some of the ideas that were raised in class.

Also, I'd like to stress the importance of making sure to complete the reading. The blog posts for last class were not as good as usual and it is apparent to me that the reason for this is that people are not doing the reading, or at least not doing it carefully. Because your class participation grade accounts for a sizable amount of your overall grade, if it becomes clear to me that you're not doing the reading, this will significantly affect your grade. If you're not responsive in class and if you write a short and overly-general blog post, I assume you haven't done the reading. Also, if you don't bring the printout with you to class it gives the appearance that you haven't done the reading. Please stay on top of these things!

Reminder for tomorrow

Please make sure to bring in tomorrow the paragraphs you composed with your groups last Wednesday. We will hopefully make time to go over them together in class.