Enlish (Most people spell that "English") (cough) (profound embarrassment) 1301 Lessons, 3 - 13 September 2012

English 1301

M. Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Angryverbs.blogspot.com
Angelina College

 

Weeks 2 & 3, 3 September – 13 September 2012

 

This is a rough outline; contents may settle during shipping and handling.

 

1.   Roll call – always be on time; early is better.

2.   When arriving on campus, never allow your intellect to drain out into a little plastic box or in staring vacantly at a wall.  Whether in the student commons, the not-a-library, or in the classroom, open your notebook and review your work from last week, write to the assigned journal topic, and read this sheet – which surely you downloaded from angryverbs.blogspot.com or from Blackboard – as preparation for this week’s work.  Exchange greetings, information, and intelligent conversations with your fellow scholars.  And I’m not being ironic about the use of the term “scholars” - you are in college, after all.  Don’t wait for your future; make your future.

 

C.S. Lewis on study (http://cs80.wordpress.com/about/cs-lewis-the-weight-of-glory/cs-lewis-learning-in-war-time/):

 

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.

 

3.   Administrivia

A.   Have you re-checked your enrollment status?

4.   Long-term projects

A.   Have you read at least a few of the assigned pages in your Bedford?

5.   Journal writing.  Before each class a topic will be scrawled painfully on the board.  Tuesday’s topic is: “What story did your father or mother tell over and over that, while you for years thought it tiresome, now makes good sense?”

6.   “Summer Rituals,” by Ray Bradbury, an excerpt from Dandelion Wine.  Note that “Summer Rituals,” as the title of a short piece, is in quotation marks, while Dandelion Wine, the title of a book, is italicized.  Now, then, wasn’t that an easy grammar lesson!

A.   We will read, close-read, and re-read this piece as a DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY (those of you possessing superior thinking skills will already have inferred that soon you’re going to write one yourself).  As the term progresses I will talk less and less about a reading assignment, but for now you’ll have to listen to me babble tiresomely…um…give you a brilliant exposition on how to read academically.

B.   Always read the prefatory materials.  Do they tell you anything about the author of the essay?  About whoever wrote the preface?

C.   As Robin Williams said in Dead Poets’ Society (The title of a film is italicized – another easy grammar lesson), the work before you isn’t the Bible – write on it, mark on it, scribble thoughts in the margins.

D.   We will plough / plow through the bits after the essay: “Understanding Details,” Analyzing Meaning,” “Rhetorical Strategies,” and “Preparing to Write.”  These mental exercises are not intended to crush your spirit or occupy a few hours while you wait for release into what some are pleased to call real life; they help prepare you for professional reading and writing in your other course work at Angelina College, at university, and in your career, and for more understanding in your artistic and literary experiences in your personal life.

7.   Writing assignment: descriptive essay.  Handout.  Instructor talks too much.  Bring a rough draft to class on 17/18 September at the beginning of class for a grade.  “My printer broke,” “My computer broke,” “I don’t own a computer,” “My friend is in the library printing out his paper,” and any other excuse is a zero – this rough draft is being assigned more than two weeks before it is due.  “Rough draft” means that the paper is typed / computed completely and neatly in the MLA essay format, though it will feature many corrections by hand.

8.   Research paper topics will assigned during class.  You may swap topics with each other or with the remaining topics in the hat / box / hollowed-out corpse of a vampire.  If you are going to choose your own topic from your major, write on a full sheet of paper your name, your topic, and your thesis statement (which, for our purposes, is always the first sentence of a research paper) for instructor approval; if my name isn’t on it, it won’t be accepted.  Simply write the thesis; don’t preface it with such useless filler as “In this paper I am going to demonstrate that…”

9.   Later in our week or weeks we will almost surely have some writing lab time in the not-a-library.  “Writing lab time” translates as, well, writing lab time, not as skip out early time or vegetate in the student commons time or text-message my bff time.  After writing lab we will gather back in the classroom for roll-call before we all go away.