Filling In

A couple weeks ago, I volunteered to fill in as class blogger for an absentee.  I procrastinated posting the blog-post for several days and unfortunately lost my bag (with my notes, as well as two textbooks) before I could post it.  I only just recovered them this week (and it was a miracle that I was able to get it back at all).  I have decided to post it now because, well, better late than never, I suppose.  I should say that I'm afraid I don't have the date, but it's probably of little consequence at this point. 

So, here's a summary of what we did in class:

• We were reminded about the upcoming conferences and that there would be no class either day the following week
• This is also the day that we signed up for conference times, so if you weren't there, I hope you were able to meet with the teacher
• Note that the conference agenda included the following
• Discussing our prospectuses
• Receiving our research papers
• Meeting in the Sweet Shop
• We then talked about the final project, beginning with our choice of media (suggestions being the ever-popular quilt, Prezzis, videos, pictures, text, etc.  Anything but a PowerPoint, really)

• The media we choose should convey an argument about a community, and is partially about their representation
• Care should be given to select an appropriate and ideal target audience.  Things to focus on are:
• Who are they? 
• What medias appeal to them?
• What do they already know?  
• Why should they care? 
• Ethos, pathos, logos
• Also consider your purpose in selecting everything.  
• We then wrote our prospectuses.  If you weren't there you would have of course needed to prepare one for the Sweet Shop meeting.  The key variables you needed to set for it: 
• Community
• Argument
• Audience
• Media

Welp, that's all.  I wish I'd been able to post this earlier to help those who were absent, and apologize for that.  I hope everyone has a fantastic summer!  It's been one heck of a semester, no?  Hopefully we'll see some of each other again after break.  :)
Ciao! 

Today in class, we are doing a workshop for our final project. We passed around the sign-up sheet for our presentations next week. The presentations next week are for getting more feedback from your peers and Ms. Lang is also going to be giving you feedback via e-mail. We got into groups to help with each others projects. These are the following things that we are doing with our partners:

·     - Two areas of concern in your project

·      -Explain your audible and purpose

·     - Take your partner through the project

·     - Get feedback and write a plan to move forward

    We also e-mailed Ms. Lang our 200-word plan of our project.

   When we were done with our workshop, Ms. Lang let us work on our projects for the remainder of class

Tiffany Nelz 4/16/13

Today the class started off with Ms. Lang passing out the class evaluations so we could say how amazing she was all semester. After passing the forms out she told us that they would be anonymous and she would not see the scores until after the semester was over and we had been graded. The class quickly found out we could only use pencil to fill out the forms but apparently the class doesn't use pencils that often because only a few people had them. Finally people shared and Ms. Lang left the room leaving Garrison to proctor.

When Ms.Lang came back she passed out our folders and we all got our critical responses back that we did throughout the semester. Then she went on to tell us that our final projects where due next week and we will sign up for the day we present on Thursday at our next class. Ms. Lang also went over the rubric for the final project which is online on our class page. Finally we had the rest of the class to work on our projects and next class we will be workshopping more in class. P.S. Finals are around the corner so start studying and work on your final portfolio. 

Michaella Malone 3/28/13

       Class began with Ms. Lang instructing us to reread our final drafts of Paper 2 and make any corrections we found. She had our class use the rubric to score our own papers individually before they were turned in for her to grade. She also wanted us to answer the following questions like What worked well? What needed more work? What did we like about the project? What did we not like? After spending approximately 15-20 minutes reviewing our papers for the last time, we turned them in to our yellow folders and proceeded on with our class lecture.

~PINE POINTE~

www.thesociologicalcinema.com

      Pine Pointe became our main topic of discussion. After Ms. Lang played just a few minutes of the multi-media website in class, students immediately became interested in sharing their opinions about the project. Ms. Lang seemed curious in what we thought this documentary was about. Pine Pointe was a mining town in Canada that vanished. Some students felt the was viewed as "perfect" by the residents who grew up there because their memories there will forever be preserved in their minds. Since they can never go back to what was originally there, the residents of Pine Pointe never had to experience what it was like to see your favorite restaurant turn into a bank. Therefore, the people raised in Pine Pointe savor the memories of their childhood in a more positive light than most people would.
     Ms. Lang asked the class, "What role does nostalgia play?" Many students felt the idea of reminiscing is what drove the whole force behind the project. The use of a yearbook style to show three individuals reflecting on their experience at Pine Pointe also brings a sense of nostalgia. Next Ms. Lang asked the class to name all the media that they encountered while viewing Pine Pointe.

List of media:
-music videos
-photo album
-music
-badge-moving
-text
-clicking
-government documents
-interviews

www.lifetimecollective.com

         Overall, some of the students simply "hated it" and found it to be broad/overwhelming, while others enjoyed the collaboration of all the media used, especially the music because it set the mood of the whole project. After discussing the mystery of Pine Pointe, Ms. Lang shows us the similarity of Pine Pointe to our next class assignment, Project 3. Ms. Lang read to us the what the project entails and the due dates, which all this information can be found on the class website. We must 1) choose a community 2) have a purpose/argument 3) find the audience. For instance, Ms. Lang suggested creating a coloring book as your project if your projected audience was little kids. Since we ran out of time, we will continue to talk about brainstorming and our portfolios during our next class!

REMEMBER: HW IS CRITICAL RESPONSE 8

Erica Albanese

Class Thursday March 21, 2013

We began class by talking about our papers, specifically the introduction and conclusion. Ms. Lang chose five students who had good drafts to stand up in front of the class and discuss what they are doing it on and how they got there. We each had to ask one of the five people a question about their paper.

Ms. Lang then told us, despite our belief, that it actually IS possible to write a ten page paper. She strongly suggests using the Reading and Writing center, which I did and helped me tremendously.

The introduction of your paper should include a thesis and a hook. A hook can be a fact, a quote, a question, really anything that will draw a reader in and make them want to read more.

The conclusion should be a summary that “ties up lose ends” or restates the thesis. It should include a “so what?” Why does what you wrote matter? How does it effect the future? What does it all mean?

The next thing we did in class was get into five different groups and list in order the ten most important things in the paper to us. We then collaborated as a class to help create the rubric for this paper.

Homework: ESSAY DUE 3/26!!!

I chose to focus mainly just on what we did in class that day. I decided to do that this way anyone who was absent has any easy way too look back and see what we did that day. I did it this way because I feel like that is most helpful. The other media I chose to use were the pictures above. I chose this because I thought it would help make it a little funny and just give a good visual effect. My role as class blogger did not so much change my perspective of the class room but more so it just made me notice small details and remember things that I wouldn’t have remembered or noticed had I not been the class blogger.

Solomon Kravitz 3/7/13

http://www.quickmeme.com/spring-break/?upcoming

To start off class my group presented on the curious researcher, our chapter mainly focused on strategies for editing and finalizing your research paper. It turns out peer editing is only helpful if the right questions are asked.Other Strategies include:

• Highlighting quotes
• Cutting up the draft into paragraphs, and relate them to the thesis individually
• Reading the draft out aloud, to check fluency

Also I personally talked about how the book says that the sentence wording should be easy to read and not sound dry. I read out several examples of bad sentences learning that the book only has examples talking about college drug use and oral sex tendencies. For our activity we decided to ask the class to highlight all their quotes and non-quotes in different colors.

After this activity Ms Lang shared her own essay on Game of thrones with us, and we all realized that she writes in much larger paragraphs then us all. After this Ms. Lang was very nice and let us go early wishing us all a happy spring break!

http://weknowmemes.com/2012/05/impin-aint-easy/

Shannon Grill-3/5/2013

Today we started class by doing a self-evaluation. We filled out a form and rated ourselves on our class participation and left comments explaining our reasoning behind the score we gave our selves. We could also supply Ms. Lang with ideas on how to improve our individual participation.

After we all finished our evaluations, group four presented on chapter four of the Curious Researcher and taught us what to keep in our mind while writing our first draft. The first part of the presentation focused mainly on thesis statements. They discussed how to structure them and what should be included in them. They then went into discussing how to cite sources and the different ways to handle quotes. Some ways of handling are by:

            -Grafting

            -Sandwiching

            -Billboarding

            -Splicing

So when writing our first draft we should:

            -Focus on your thesis or research question

            -Vary your sources

            -Remember your audience

            -Write with your notes

            -Be open to surprises

Instead of doing the group’s project, which we will do later, Ms. Lang had us review what thesis statements are.

First, we must keep in mind that:

-Titles are italicized and capitalized while journal articles are put into quotations

-Just because it is in a database doesn’t mean it is scholarly

-And just because it is published anywhere doesn’t mean it is credible

We then watched a young girl rap about thesis statements. It was funny and annoying.

Remember that a thesis is not a:

-Statement of fact

-Opinion

-Statements of belief or faith

After reviewing what a thesis was, Ms. Lang had us do an activity. First we were required to write about our research topic and write at least five sentences. Then we passed it to the person to our left. Next we read what our neighbor wrote and summarized it in three sentences and then once again passed it to the left. Finally we read the next paper and summarized the three lines into one sentence. From this one sentence we could now create a thesis statement.

Homework:

Chapter 5 of the Curious Researcher

First Draft of our second paper (2 copies)

            Half Draft (5 pages)

                        Should have:

                        -Thesis

                        -Analysis

                        -Research

                        -Citations

                        Should not have:

                        -Conclusion

                        -Firm Structure