Summer 2006

Metacognitive post for entire quarter

2006-09-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

Remember our course discussion on metacognitive activity and its connection with self-regulated learning? Remember me discussing my emphasis on rhetoric and composition as a means for inquiry and learning (either about one's self or about the world)? This all ties to our final reflective letter. To get a start on it, and to see how your peers view writing and learning, I ask you to post and discuss how your goals for this course have unfolded . On the first day of class, for the writing diagnostic, I asked you in part to write about your goals. You might have maintained the same goals throughout the summer or perhaps they have changed. What goals have you achieved and how are these goals related to your long-term goals--either for your academic career or beyond ?

Unit 3 Reflection

2006-09-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

As we approach the end of the final unit, I ask that you post three items that you have learned this unit that you did not know before. Pose one question that still lingers. Answer the previous person's post. We are a community of writers--Yes!!!

Revised Tuesday agenda

2006-09-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

1. Post blogs individually***:

What were the theses? How do you know?
Did they make their points?
What was your reaction?

***If you want to post in a small group, you may do so

As an individual:

From the Monday midnight post, respond to two people you agree with and two with whom you disagree with and explain (tactfully and collegially) why.

Review APA format. Go to Hacker website and then post one way that the APA format is either the same as or different from MLA or CSE. Try to post something different than your peers.

Post your working thesis.

Post everything by midnight tonight.

I will be checking my emails tonight. Email if you have any questions.

For tomorrow:

Thesis and bibliographies due (use APA format)

Bring in a dictionary tomorrow.

For Lab, Tuesday

2006-09-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS NOT THE BLOG TO WHICH YOU ARE TO RESPOND TO BY MIDNIGHT. RESPOND TO PREVIOUS BLOG BY MIDNIGHT TONIGHT

In order to prepare for lab on Tuesday, please review the following:

In order to:
1. Clarify your understanding of the content and structure of the essay.
2. Work collaboratively with your peers and check your assumptions.
3. Have a scholarly discussion with author and with peers.
4. Have a permanent post where members of your group as well as other classmates can refer to in drafting the paper for the sciences unit. After reading your fabulous summaries, others may feel compelled to include the piece in their own paper, even if this was not their chosen work

I ask that you do the following in groups:

Get in groups and summarize pieces
What were the theses? How do you know?
Did they make their points?
What was your group’s reaction?

(If time permits) As an individual:

From the Monday midnight post, respond to one person you agree or disagree with and explain (tactfully) why. Choose someone other than the person you responded to in the first unit.

Review APA format

Be thinking of a working thesis

Obedience to authority

2006-08-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

As we enter our final unit, the social sciences, I challenge all of you to answer the following questions on Lessing and Ashe. After answering the questions, choose one more additional prompt from the list below (either Milgram/Baumrind/Parker or Zimbardo/Fromme/Brooks).

All:

1. Explore some of the difficulties in applying this "hard information" about humankind that Lessing speaks of. Assume she is correct in claiming that we don't incorporate our knowledge of human nature into the running of our institutions. Why don't we? What are the difficulties of acting on information?

2. Ashe's experiments, conducted in the early 1950s, involved groups of "seven to nine young men, all college students." To what extent do you believe that the results of the experiment would be different today? To what extent might they be different if the subjects had included women, as well as subjects of various ages, from children to middle-aged people to older people? To what extent do you believe that the social class or culture of the subjects might have an impact upon the experimental results? Support your opinions with examples and logical reasoning. (Beware, however, of overgeneralizing, based upon insufficient evidence.)

NOW, choose one other prompt:

1. Milgram/Baumrind/Parker: Reread Milgram paragraphs 29-81, the transcript of the experiment in which Mr. Prozi participated. Appreciating that Prozi was debriefed, that is, was assured that no harm was done to the learner, imagine what Prozi might have been thinking as he drove home after the experiment. Develop your thoughts into a monologue, written in first person, with Prozi at the wheel of his car. Do you agree with Baumrind that the subjects were “entrapped” into committing unworthy acts? Explain. Parker quotes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners , to the effect that, "If you think certain people are evil and it's necessary to do away with them--if you hate them--and then someone orders you to kill them, you're not carrying out the deed only because of the order. You're carrying it out because you think it's right." In other words, people who commit evil acts do so less because theyf eel compelled to obey external authority figures than because they are following their own cnsciences, their own sense of who is the enemy. To what extent do you find that this theory accounts for many of the evil acts in the world?

2. Zimbardo/Fromme/Brooks: Zimbardo suggests that we might “choose to remain prisoners because being passive and dependent frees us from the need to act and be responsible for our actions” (paragraph 62). Do you agree? What are the burdens of being disobedient? Fromm writes: “If man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary).” Explain Fromm’s meaning here. Explain, as well, the implication that to be fully human one must have the freedom to both obey and disobey. Brooks writes that as a result of educational reforms during the 1980s and 1990s, "the emphasis [in top schools] is on testing accountability, and order." Later, he says that "schools are much more efficient and productive places [than they were a decade or so earlier], geared more than ever toward projecting children into the stratosphere of success. Authority and accountability have replaced experimentation and flexibility." To what extent does your own experience bear out this contention (or not)?

Science Unit Wrap Up

2006-08-28T18:45:00.000-07:00

Kanpai! Kudos on a job well done in the science unit. It is time to say sayonara to the sciences and konichiwa to the social sciences. As we did when we ended the humanities unit, I ask that you list three concepts, ideas, skills, etc. that you learned from this unit that you did not know before. Try to list different items than those your peers have already listed. Also, pose one question that still remains. Again, try to pose a different question than one that has already been asked. Finally, I challenge you to answer the question of the poster immediately before you. The last poster answers the first poster.

For Lab today

2006-08-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

In lab today, I am asking that you get together with the other folks who read the same article, summarize it, and determine the following:

1. What is the thesis and how do you know?
2. How does the author go about defending/arguing the point?
3. Is it effective? As a group, how did you react?
4. Pose at least one question to the author that you would like answered.
5. Later today, if time permits, individually imagine "your" author that you read having a discussion with a different author in this unit and post it.

The purpose of this activity is to:

1. Clarify your understanding of the content and structure of the essay.
2. Work collaboratively with your peers and check your assumptions.
3. Have a scholarly discussion with author and with peers.
4. Have a permanent post where members of your group as well as other classmates can refer to in drafting the paper for the sciences unit. After reading your fabulous summaries, others may feel compelled to include the piece in their own paper, even if this was not their chosen work.
5. Have the beginnings of an annotated bibliography.

The Weight debate: science unit

2006-08-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

Everyone:

1. Scan the footnotes of Caloric Imbalance…from Journal of the American Medical Association. For what sorts of statements do the authors cite sources? Generally, how dependable do you find the information in this editorial?

2. Write a paragraph summarizing what for you are the CDC key findings in one of the two tables.

3.How does NAAFA summarize the stereotypes of fat people? What stereotypes about fat people have you encountered in your experience?

Next, answer one of the following, based on your reading chosen in class:

4. Gibbs and others have remarked on the importance of preventing obesity by working with children and adolescents. Think of various kids you know—siblings, cousins, neighbors, and friends. How agreeable would they be (or have they been) to anti-obesity messages? Do you see them easily cutting back on, let alone giving up, fast food? Could you, personally, make that kind of sacrifice in the name of slenderness? The medical community is now calling for a War on Fat, reminiscent of the War on Tobacco. Adopting strategies for anti-smoking campaigns, activists have considered suing food companies for creating unhealthy, “addictive” products. They have also discussed taxing junk food both to make it less affordable and to create funds for combating obesity. Compare and contrast these two wars. Draw on the readings and consider the roles of individual choice and willpower in eating and in smoking.

5. What assumptions does Critser make about the origins of overeating? In considering this question, you might think about the roles of individual power, genes, parental and institutional authority, and a child’s autonomy. If, as several of the authors in this chapter report, diets are ineffective for the great majority of dieters, then one could conclude that dieters themselves are not to blame for their failure to lose weight. If there is no one to blame, if we can’t point to the dieter’s lack of willpower, how should we think about the problems of being overweight and obese? What evidence do you see that we as a culture are prepared to approach the problem without laying blame (focus on blame-making or who takes for should take responsibility for the problems of being overweight or obese?

6. What role has NAAFA played in helping Worley think and feel differently about herself? Write an explanatory synthesis that presents the ways in which fat people are made to feel inadequate by the culture at large.

7. Seid argues that in the 20^th century the world of fashion has focused not only on clothes but on the body, the result being that a woman who wants to dress fashionably must attend to the body beneath the clothes as well as to the clothes themselves. How consciously are you aware of having to “manipulate” yourself—that is your body—in order to be fashionably correct? For cultural reasons, women and men may feel the need to lose weight. But the scientific reality is that many should lose weight to maintain good health. Compare and contrast the argument that being overweight or obese is a socially constructed problem with the argument that excess weight is a medical condition. Recall that comparison and contrasts should lead to a central claim (thesis) that can help you form a synthesis of sources.

8. Respond to Schwartz’s extreme assertion that weight loss regimes are a species of “murder” by organized medicine and the larger society. Schwartz remarks that far people are unhappy largely due to the pressures that the larger culture places on them to go on diets that inevitably fail. Medical specialists observe that most dieters are doomed to regain the weight they lose. Given such overwhelming agreement on the prospects for successful dieting, what is an overweight person to do? Formulate a brief argument drawing on selections from this chapter. Define the problem, and formulate a sensible response.

9. In Why the Fries Taste Good, were you at all disappointed—amused? Pleased?—to learn how the products you eat get their “natural smoke flavor?” More broadly, on completing this section, do you have any sense that the processed food you eat is inauthentic? Explain. Were you at all aware of the science put to work in the service of appealing to your taste buds and sense of smell? With such sophisticated resources backing the fast food industry, creating the complex taste and “mouthfeel” of a French fry, is there any sense in which you think the fast food industry is making the individual eater’s attempt to maintain a healthy weight especially difficult? More broadly, observe the tug-of-war taking place over the American consumer of food: on the one hand, the food industry is helping scientists create delectable products that scream “Eat me!” while the fashion magazines scream “Be Skinny!” In an explanatory synthesis that draws on the selections in this chapter, discuss this tug-of-war. Who is being fought over? What are the forces arrayed on each side of the fight? Who is winning? (look at the tables from the CDC and Koplan and Dietz)

10. What evidence can you find (for example in the tone of his writing, in the questions he poses, or in his choice of subject matter) that Gawande is a physician? How extreme do you find the surgery? Do you understand why morbidly obese people would elect to undergo the operation? Do you understand why “moderately obese” people would do so? Write a synthesis in which you discuss the various cultural pressures to be thin and the various remedies available to achieve this goal. If you have no strongly held views, write an explanatory synthesis governed by a carefully constructed thesis.

Reflection on humanities unit

2006-08-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

John Dewey, an educational guru, writes that without reflection there is no learning. To that end, I ask you to write three things that you learned in this class so far that you did not know before day one. Try to list different ones than your peers if possible.

Next, write one question that is still lingering, a concept, skill, idea, etc. that isn't 100% crystal clear. Again, if possible, come up with something that hasn't been posted already.

Finally, I challenge you to answer the question posed by the person immediately before you. The person who posts first will answer the question of the person who posts last. Remember, the greatest learning occurs when you explain something to others. Of course, after all the answers have been posted, I'll be happy to offer follow up responses to specific questions if requested.

Group summaries/reactions to analyses

2006-08-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

Please as a group post the following to your chosen analysis of Cinderella:

Bettleheim
Morrison
Schectman

1. What is the author's thesis?
2. How was the analysis/argument structured?
3. What was your reaction? Was it effective/convincing, a stretch?

Please post all group members' names

Blog #3: Critique of Cinderella

2006-08-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

Blog #3 Critique of fairytales

Choose one:

1. What is the process by which a good mother can turn into a wicked stepmother? See paragraph 10—especially Schectman’s analyst’s notes—for a starting point. How can a good mother and wicked stepmother co-exist in one person?

2. A critic of Bettleheim’s position, Jack Zipes, argues that Bettleheim distorts fairytale literature by insisting that the tales have therapeutic value and speak to children almost as a psychoanalyst might. Ultimately, claims Zipes, Bettleheim’s analysis corrupts the story of “Cinderella” and closes down possibilities for interpretation. What is your view of Bettleheim’s psychoanalytic approach to fairytales?

3. Morrison suggests an opposition between women’s ambition and their “nurturing sensibilities.” First, what are “nurturing sensibilities?” Are they learned (from fairytales for instance)? Are they inborn? What is the difference between ambition and nurturing sensibilities? How might this difference manifest itself in the workplace? In the Perrault version of Cinderella? In the Grimm version?

2006-08-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

Blog #2 Fairytales

Wow--great class today everyone!!!

In addition to your chosen fairy tale, please read Part I of fairy tales on ERES (It is only a few pages) and answer the following:

Based on Thompson's explanation of the qualities of oral folktales, what do you feel is gained by increasing replacement of this form of art and entertainment by TV? What do you suppose underlies the apparent human need to tell stories, given that storytelling is practiced in every culture known?

Next, summarize your chosen fairy tale so the rest of the class can get the gist of what it was about (how it differes from what we normally think of as Cinderella) and also post your response/reaction etc.

Also, read your peers' responses to Blog #1 (Elbow) and be prepared to post a response to two or more of them.

See you tomorrow in Phelps 1529.

Blog #1 Elbow

2006-07-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

Writing has long been considered a means of thinking or discovering one's own position about a given topic or idea. Compositionist Peter Elbow has often been a proponent for using writing as a means of thinking, and he is known for encouraging free writing activities as a way of clarifying ones' ideas. In “Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking By Teaching Writing,” he discusses two types of writing and likens these to two different types of thinking. Throughout the essay he makes an argument that you may or may not agree with, based on your own experience and on the support he offers for his claims.

Consider your own experiences with the two types of thinking Elbow describes and evaluate the validity of his claims. Using personal experience and textual evidence from his essay as support, develop a position regarding his argument.