Presentations 4

Please add your presentation to the Fictions of the Sixties page, above right.

Seven Measures of Learning, part 2

End-of-Year ePortfolio

As an aid in thinking about your education, the college has created a rubric of seven essential skills. These are cross-disciplinary in nature, representing methods that are taught and employed in most if not all of your courses in college.

1. Written and oral communication
2. Gathering, analyzing, and documenting information
3. Awareness of specific historical, literary, and cultural contexts
4. Rhetorical and aesthetic conventions
5. Critical Thinking and perspective-taking
6. Integrative and applied learning
7. Quantitative methods

We discussed these 7 skills in lecture a week ago, but here’s a refresher course to explain in more detail.

For class, download and fill out this worksheet, designed to help you brainstorm which of the many assignments you’ve done this year best exemplifies your mastery in each of these seven categories of learning.

Presentations 3

Please add your presentation to the Fictions of the Sixties page, above right.

Presentations 2

Those who completed their presentation last class need to complete the HW for 12.1 for today’s class. Please add it to the comment section, below

Please add your presentation to the Fictions of the Sixties page, above right.

Seven Measures of Learning, part 1

End-of-Year ePortfolio

Today’s lecture will cover your final ePortfolio assignment, due near the end of Finals.

We’re coming up on the end of freshman year, so it’s time you got your e-Portfolio in order: there’s a series of ePort assignments listed at right under “Homework.” Besides uploading samples of your work from this course to the Rhetoric 102 folder, you also need to create a special section titled, “Interdisciplinary Reflections.” The college is asking freshmen and sophomores to use this space to reflect on what they’ve learned at Boston University.

As an aid in thinking about your education, the college has created a rubric of seven essential skills. These are cross-disciplinary in nature, representing methods that are taught and employed in most if not all of your courses in college.

1. Written and oral communication
2. Gathering, analyzing, and documenting information
3. Awareness of specific historical, literary, and cultural contexts
4. Rhetorical and aesthetic conventions
5. Critical Thinking and perspective-taking
6. Integrative and applied learning
7. Quantitative methods

No HW today.

Presentations 1

A Start on the Essay

Those scheduled to do a presentation can wait to complete this HW until section 12.2.

Write one or two paragraphs offering close analysis of a particular scene from your book or movie. Don’t fuss to much with orienting us at the start; don’t give a summary of the story or anything like that. Open the first ¶ with “In one particularly _______ scene, ….,” characterizing the scene in a way that focuses attention on the issue or mood that you plan to discuss in your essay.

Your analysis should aim in the first ¶ to characterize the scene (the what), and then in the second ¶ to deepen our understanding of that mood or issue (the why or how).

Turn in this HW assignment using the Comment feature, below.

There will be no draft for this final essay, though you’re welcome to visit me during office hours to discuss your work.

Presentations

Please add your presentation to the Fictions of the Sixties page, above right.

Essay Proposal

To be turned in via the comment section, below:

1. Describe your central text briefly, providing an unfamiliar reader with a basic grasp of the story—not so much the plot as the type of story.
   • What sort of things happen in this text?
   • What is this film or novel about?
   • You may want to call attention to a key puzzle which your essay proposes to resolve.
2. Present an interpretative starting point
   • You may want to call attention to the text’s apparent meaning when read without regard to its historical context.
   • Present a secondary source interpretation that your argument responds to (builds on, qualifies, challenges, etc.)
3. Describe the particular slice of contemporary history in terms of which you propose to re-examine the central text.
   • You can start general, but by the end of this paragraph you should focus your reader’s attention on the particular details which you feel have the greatest impact on our understanding of the central text.
4. Identify two or three scenes or passages your essay will discuss.
   • Briefly analyze (or begin to analyze) one of these scenes or passages to illustrate how you will interpret the text with reference to the historical context
5. Briefly describe your proposed essay’s “payoff”
   • How will your analysis of these scenes or passages coupled with consideration of this historical context change your readers’ understanding of the meaning or significance of your central text?

Alternatively

You can choose to run your “text in context” analysis in reverse, seeking to discover some key insight about the culture of the period through a close analysis of your central text. If this is what you propose to do, follow the instructions given above, but emphasize how your analysis of the central text functions to challenge or complicate prior scholarship on 1950s American culture and society.

Demo Presentation

I’m planning to demo a text-in-context presentation, as a sample of what I’m looking for in the upcoming set of in-class presentations.

Also to be covered: the end-of-semester ePortfolio assignment.

Essay Structure

Re-read Louis Menand, “Cat People: What Dr. Seuss Really Taught Us,” with an eye to the way he structures the essay. Identify the 2 or 3 or 4 main sections of the essay and come to class with a brief outline summarizing what each section does. I’m particularly interested in how analysis of the main text motivates discussion of the historical context, as well as what leads him back to Dr. Seuss’s book.

I’ll be checking your summary outlines at the start of class as a HW assignment.

Notes from History

Using the skills you learned during the first half of the semester, find at least two scholarly accounts of your chosen slice of Cold War culture (two secondary sources) and several illustrative primary sources. To clarify: I’m not looking for secondary sources on your central text; I’m looking for sources that speak to the slice from history from the previous assignment that you’ve chosen to focus on.

For HW, write a brief factual summary of what you learned, listing the secondary and primary sources you found. Paste this into the Comment Section below, and attach one of your primary sources to the comment. Come to class ready to present what you’ve learned about the context and why you think it’s relevant or enlightening for your central text.

Note that in writing your essay you will need to ground historical claims by reference either to an authority (a secondary source) or evidence (primary source instances). So be thorough in digging up sources.