Wednesday, September 30, 2009
LAKOTA WAY ESSAY ASSIGNMENT/CONTEST
2-4 Pages long
12 point font
MLA documentation
In The Lakota Way, Joseph Marshall describes the importance of twelve virtues through his own personal narrative as well as the narratives of friends, family members, historical figures, and cultural and religious beings.
For this essay, choose one of these twelve virtues that has meaning to you as an individual or as a member of your own culture. Compare and contrast this virtue's significance as it is depicted in narratives you have inherited (from your family or culture) from Marshall's depiction.
This essay should be based solely on The Lakota Way and should not contain any other sources. Instead, you should be sure to cite specific examples from the book for supporting evidence using MLA-style documentation.
Remember, if you do not have a typed, complete rough draft in class on the 21st, you do not pass this assignment:
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS, 10/21
FINAL DRAFT DUE, 10/23
12 point font
MLA documentation
In The Lakota Way, Joseph Marshall describes the importance of twelve virtues through his own personal narrative as well as the narratives of friends, family members, historical figures, and cultural and religious beings.
For this essay, choose one of these twelve virtues that has meaning to you as an individual or as a member of your own culture. Compare and contrast this virtue's significance as it is depicted in narratives you have inherited (from your family or culture) from Marshall's depiction.
This essay should be based solely on The Lakota Way and should not contain any other sources. Instead, you should be sure to cite specific examples from the book for supporting evidence using MLA-style documentation.
Remember, if you do not have a typed, complete rough draft in class on the 21st, you do not pass this assignment:
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS, 10/21
FINAL DRAFT DUE, 10/23
Monday, September 28, 2009
JOB MARKET
Gauge your level of confidence versus your level of anxiety regarding your post-collegiate job prospects. Do you believe that the job market will turn around by then? Are you choosing a major based at least partly on the economic crisis?
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Excerpt from Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
Outlier, noun.
out·li·er
\-,li(-#)r\
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment—until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest—Father Pasquale de Nisco—took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto—but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer—this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, ‘You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.
Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said—all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, ‘You can have the town council room.' I said, ‘Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, ‘Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
2.
Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.
If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made—on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community—the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with—has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.
out·li·er
\-,li(-#)r\
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment—until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest—Father Pasquale de Nisco—took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto—but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer—this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, ‘You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.
Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said—all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, ‘You can have the town council room.' I said, ‘Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, ‘Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
2.
Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.
If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made—on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community—the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with—has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.
Red Sky/Normal Sky, Sydney, Australia
These photos have not been tampered with...what do you think about when you look at this?
What should the U.S. do about its borders?
Here's the headline from the latest episode of border violence. What is the good and right thing to do regarding the borders of this or any nation?
----------------
Three shot as border agents fire on vans at port of entry
By Jose Luis Jiménez and Susan Shroder
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
Originally published 4:25 p.m. September 22, 2009, updated 5:25 p.m., September 22, 2009
SAN DIEGO – Three federal agents fired shots Tuesday as three vans filled with illegal immigrants tried to run the border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, and four people were injured, three by gunfire, authorities said.
THEY SAY/I SAY, Graff and Birkenstein's Templates for Improving your Writing:
Why Templates?
1. “As soon as possible you state your position and the one it’s responding to together…think of the two as a unit.” (19)
2. “State your Own Ideas as a Response to Others”
3. These templates are all about mimicking sound writing. Have you ever seen someone do something that you want to do on the basketball court or soccer field, in the pool or in a car, on a skateboard or with a guitar? This is the same thing on paper. You should be mimicking the moves of great writers.
The Most Important Templates:
On the one hand, __________. On the other hand, __________.
Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues __________, she also implies __________.
I agree that __________.
She argues __________, and I agree because __________.
Her argument that __________ is supported by new research showing that __________.
In recent discussions of __________, a controversial issue has been whether __________. On the one hand, some argue that __________. On the other hand, however, others argue that __________.
Introducing Standard Views:
Americans today tend to believe that __________.
Conventional wisdom has it that __________.
My whole life I have heard it said that __________.
Making those Views Something You Say: I have always believed that __________.
When I was a child, I used to think that __________.
Writing a Summary:
She demonstrates that __________.
In fact, they celebrate the fact that __________.
Introducing a Quote:
X insists, “__________.”
As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “__________.”
According to X, “__________.”
In her book, Book Title, X maintains that __________.
X complicates matters further when she writes that __________.
Disagreeing:
I think that X is mistaken because she overlooks __________.
I disagree with X’s view that __________ because, as recent research has shown, __________.
Introducing Your Point of View:
X overlooks what I consider an important point about __________.
I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls __________.
My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter of __________.
These conclusions will have significant applications in __________ as well as in __________.
1. “As soon as possible you state your position and the one it’s responding to together…think of the two as a unit.” (19)
2. “State your Own Ideas as a Response to Others”
3. These templates are all about mimicking sound writing. Have you ever seen someone do something that you want to do on the basketball court or soccer field, in the pool or in a car, on a skateboard or with a guitar? This is the same thing on paper. You should be mimicking the moves of great writers.
The Most Important Templates:
On the one hand, __________. On the other hand, __________.
Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues __________, she also implies __________.
I agree that __________.
She argues __________, and I agree because __________.
Her argument that __________ is supported by new research showing that __________.
In recent discussions of __________, a controversial issue has been whether __________. On the one hand, some argue that __________. On the other hand, however, others argue that __________.
Introducing Standard Views:
Americans today tend to believe that __________.
Conventional wisdom has it that __________.
My whole life I have heard it said that __________.
Making those Views Something You Say: I have always believed that __________.
When I was a child, I used to think that __________.
Writing a Summary:
She demonstrates that __________.
In fact, they celebrate the fact that __________.
Introducing a Quote:
X insists, “__________.”
As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “__________.”
According to X, “__________.”
In her book, Book Title, X maintains that __________.
X complicates matters further when she writes that __________.
Disagreeing:
I think that X is mistaken because she overlooks __________.
I disagree with X’s view that __________ because, as recent research has shown, __________.
Introducing Your Point of View:
X overlooks what I consider an important point about __________.
I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls __________.
My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter of __________.
These conclusions will have significant applications in __________ as well as in __________.
Friday, September 18, 2009
MY WRITING GROUP IS SO CREATIVE!!!
You have five minutes to write a story. Everyone has to contribute, and someone has to type it into this space.
RESTAURANT REVIEW ASSIGNMENT DETAILS
For this assignment you need to go research a restaurant (meaning, eat there and take notes) and write a review of your experience. Your review should be creative, specific, and enticing. You should use your writing to make your reader taste, see, and smell the food you ate. In other words, be descriptive. If possible, go with someone else so that you can experience (and even taste?) various dishes. However, try to avoid writing about restaurants that you think others in class might choose. If you choose a chain restaurant, be sure to tell your reader which one it is—i.e. not just “McDonalds” but “the McDonalds at the corner of Coffee and Hageman.” Also, if you choose to do a review of a chain, like Der Wienerschnitzel, you had better do something to make your review stand out.
You may follow one of the samples we examine in class, create your own rating system, or follow any creative instincts that allow you to effectively convey the information on this restaurant.
Your review must comment on the ambiance, the food, and the service.
Your review should be between 700 and 1000 words. (approximately 2 pages)
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS ON 9/28
If you do not have a complete, typed rough draft at the start of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
Final Draft Due on 9/30
You may follow one of the samples we examine in class, create your own rating system, or follow any creative instincts that allow you to effectively convey the information on this restaurant.
Your review must comment on the ambiance, the food, and the service.
Your review should be between 700 and 1000 words. (approximately 2 pages)
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS ON 9/28
If you do not have a complete, typed rough draft at the start of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
Final Draft Due on 9/30
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Restaurant Review
What makes a good restaurant review?
How do you judge a restaurant when you are out and about and eating?
Monday, September 14, 2009
SIGNED STATEMENT FOR SYLLABUS
I read and understand all of the policies of the syllabus and composition standards.
Signed ___________________________
DUE ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
Signed ___________________________
DUE ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
Sunday, September 13, 2009
DEPARTMENTAL COMPOSITION STANDARDS
California State University, Bakersfield
Composition Standards
English 100: Critical Thinking and Writing
Prerequisite: A total English Placement Test score between 142 and 154 OR a grade of C- or higher in English 80 or 90.
To advance to English 110, students must earn a grade of C- or higher in English 100.
To be eligible for a C- in English 100, students must earn a C- or higher on at least one in-class writing assignment and a C- average on all other course assignments.
Course Description: Study of rhetorical patterns as critical thinking strategies to help students develop effective college-level writing skills. Frequent short papers in a variety of essay modes are assigned, and the fundamentals of grammar, usage, punctuation, and spelling are reviewed as necessary. Tutoring is required with this course.
Course Goals
At the end of ten weeks, students in English 100 should be able to do the following:
1. read and write literally, interpretively, and analytically or critically;
2. recognize the differences among thesis statements, topic sentences/main ideas, and supporting details/evidence;
3. understand how the thesis statement, topic sentences, and supporting details work together;
4. recognize a writer’s tone and how it informs a text’s statements; this includes analyzing diction and syntax;
5. begin to recognize how a writer’s choices affect and inform the text;
6. summarize the main and supporting points contained in an article or essay on a particular topic;
7. write essays that are logically organized, well developed, coherent, and mechanically sound;
8. recognize bias in readings;
9. synthesize ideas from various sources;
10. incorporate quotation, summary, and paraphrase, using in-text documentation;
11. use a handbook;
12. recognize plagiarism;
13. revise and edit their own writing using standard, edited American English.
If time permits, instructors should incorporate, but are not limited to, the following goals:
1. identify a text’s ethos, logos, and pathos appeals;
2. introduce rhetorical strategies as appropriate;
3. detect logical fallacies;
4. understand how evidence can prove a statement true (i.e., claim, support, and warrant in Toulmin logic).
Minimum Reading Requirements
All of the writing assignments should move from reading to writing.
Sustained Silent Reading (SSR): Fifteen minutes of each class period should be dedicated to guided reading of a full-length book at least once a week. Students should choose their own books; instructors should read with them. Informal written responses to the readings, such as journal entries, should be a part of this exercise. Reading strategies––such as think aloud, chunking, annotating, highlighting, key words, T charts, and “Say, Mean, Matter”––should be used to teach the following:
• identifying main idea, both stated and unstated;
• identifying supporting details;
• identifying patterns of organization;
• distinguishing between fact and opinion;
• determining tone, mood, and bias;
• detecting errors in reasoning;
• determining underlying assumptions.
Minimum Writing Requirements
A diagnostic prompt is available and can be accessed from the online Composition Handbook.
Three one-paragraph summaries of readings.
One three-to-four-page documented synthesis (may be informative or argumentative) using three to four sources provided by the instructor. Using familiar sources helps the instructor and the students readily identify and address issues of plagiarism. You may ask students to get one to two sources on their own, but this assignment should focus on students’ ability to synthesize and document information, not research it.
Three to five two-to-three-page essays, at least two, but no more than three, of which must be written in class and at least one of which is an argument.
The Common Essay: The Common Essay is an in-class exam given to English 100 and/or110 students mid-quarter. The Common Essay serves a dual purpose: to insure that all composition instructors are normed with one another in reference to grading and to provide students with a contest opportunity. The norming and grading process may vary depending on the number of faculty involved.
Instructors may choose to count the Common Essay as either one of two mandatory in-class essays, as a replacement grade for one of the two in-class essays, or simply as a writing experience that counts towards participation or homework percentages. Instructors should indicate on their syllabus how they intend to factor the Common Essay grade into the course grade.
Instructors will receive a detailed Common Essay package, including the essay prompt and further instructions, from the Common Essay Coordinator.
Writing Workshops
Required: A MyWritingLab online workshop is required for this course. The workshop consists of the following 10 topics that students work on outside of class at their convenience:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
This requirement is 10% of the overall course grade. To receive full credit, students must master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To demonstrate mastery, students must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each topic.
Instructors may deviate from the order and schedule of topics for individual students and/or for the class as a whole, so long as students are required to master the given ten topics throughout the quarter. For example, an instructor may require that all topics be completed earlier than the last week of class or that students work on fragments before parallelism or that an individual student work on a specific topic, and so on.
Instructors may use their own discretion when calculating grades for students who fail to master all ten topics or fail to master them by the deadline so long as these students are not given full credit.
Instructors who deviate from the schedule will have to self-monitor students’ progress by requiring students bring in their “student detail” page from the MyWritingLab site for each topic.
Instructors should also use the OASIS Referral Forms to require students who need additional help to get individual, drop-in tutoring.
Students who are registering to MyWritingLab for the first time need to register and create a user profile using the code packaged with their Ouick Access textbook and a course identification number provided to instructors by a MyWritingLab spokesperson. However, some students may have already registered to the site in a previous class. In this case, students can use their previous code so long as the code has not expired. Codes expire approximately one year after activation. Students who still have an active code simply need to login, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
Instructors should schedule class time the first or second week of classes to help students register to the site. Instructors will also need to provide Brooke Hughes and/or Randi Brummett with an approved class roster by the third week of classes. Indicate on the roster any students who have switched classes, dropped, or added your class.
Instructors will then receive weekly updates indicating each student’s progress, and instructors should actively monitor and promote the lab to encourage maximum participation.
Note: To avoid double enrolling students in the MyWritingLab, please inform students that they should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. Probationary students instead may choose Advancing Academic Confidence (General Studies 157), Improving Academic Fitness (General Studies 102), or My Reading Lab (Humanities 277.2/477.2).
.
You are responsible for completing 10 MyWritingLab topics in conjunction with your English 100 class. This requirement is worth 10% of your overall English 100 grade. To receive full credit, you must master at least one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To master a topic, you must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each of the following MyWritingLab topics:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
You will be held responsible for these new skills every week in your writing. Since this is an online workshop, you can work on these topics outside of class at your convenience, so long as you master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics. This means that if you wait until the end of the quarter to complete all ten topics, you will not receive full credit and your essay grades may suffer.
You will need a MyWritingLab workbook, which you can purchase from Reprographics; your access code, which is packaged with your Quick Access text; and the following course identification number:
Course ID#--####
A time will be scheduled during your first or second week of class to help you register to the site and create your user profile, and you will need your MyWritingLab code and course identification number to do this. If you have already registered to the site in a previous class, you do not need to register and create a new user profile. Instead, you will need to login to the site, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
For additional information on MyWritingLab, view the power points at the following Web sites:
How to register for MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/updated mwlreg.ppt
How to switch classes in in MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwlswitchclass.ppt
How to get around MWL for English100
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwleng100.ppt
Note: If you exhaust a topic before mastering it, let your instructor know, and he or she will have it “unlocked” for you.
Note: To avoid double enrollment in MyWritingLab, students should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. If you are enrolled in Humanities 277.1, please let your instructor know immediately.
Note: Instructors should contact Brooke Hughes (bhughes@csub.edu) or Randi Brummett (rbrummett@csub.edu) for help registering students to the site or for problems or questions regarding codes, exhausted topics, or any other concerns. When reporting an exhausted topic, instructors need to provide the students name, class, and instructor.
Composition Standards
English 100: Critical Thinking and Writing
Prerequisite: A total English Placement Test score between 142 and 154 OR a grade of C- or higher in English 80 or 90.
To advance to English 110, students must earn a grade of C- or higher in English 100.
To be eligible for a C- in English 100, students must earn a C- or higher on at least one in-class writing assignment and a C- average on all other course assignments.
Course Description: Study of rhetorical patterns as critical thinking strategies to help students develop effective college-level writing skills. Frequent short papers in a variety of essay modes are assigned, and the fundamentals of grammar, usage, punctuation, and spelling are reviewed as necessary. Tutoring is required with this course.
Course Goals
At the end of ten weeks, students in English 100 should be able to do the following:
1. read and write literally, interpretively, and analytically or critically;
2. recognize the differences among thesis statements, topic sentences/main ideas, and supporting details/evidence;
3. understand how the thesis statement, topic sentences, and supporting details work together;
4. recognize a writer’s tone and how it informs a text’s statements; this includes analyzing diction and syntax;
5. begin to recognize how a writer’s choices affect and inform the text;
6. summarize the main and supporting points contained in an article or essay on a particular topic;
7. write essays that are logically organized, well developed, coherent, and mechanically sound;
8. recognize bias in readings;
9. synthesize ideas from various sources;
10. incorporate quotation, summary, and paraphrase, using in-text documentation;
11. use a handbook;
12. recognize plagiarism;
13. revise and edit their own writing using standard, edited American English.
If time permits, instructors should incorporate, but are not limited to, the following goals:
1. identify a text’s ethos, logos, and pathos appeals;
2. introduce rhetorical strategies as appropriate;
3. detect logical fallacies;
4. understand how evidence can prove a statement true (i.e., claim, support, and warrant in Toulmin logic).
Minimum Reading Requirements
All of the writing assignments should move from reading to writing.
Sustained Silent Reading (SSR): Fifteen minutes of each class period should be dedicated to guided reading of a full-length book at least once a week. Students should choose their own books; instructors should read with them. Informal written responses to the readings, such as journal entries, should be a part of this exercise. Reading strategies––such as think aloud, chunking, annotating, highlighting, key words, T charts, and “Say, Mean, Matter”––should be used to teach the following:
• identifying main idea, both stated and unstated;
• identifying supporting details;
• identifying patterns of organization;
• distinguishing between fact and opinion;
• determining tone, mood, and bias;
• detecting errors in reasoning;
• determining underlying assumptions.
Minimum Writing Requirements
A diagnostic prompt is available and can be accessed from the online Composition Handbook.
Three one-paragraph summaries of readings.
One three-to-four-page documented synthesis (may be informative or argumentative) using three to four sources provided by the instructor. Using familiar sources helps the instructor and the students readily identify and address issues of plagiarism. You may ask students to get one to two sources on their own, but this assignment should focus on students’ ability to synthesize and document information, not research it.
Three to five two-to-three-page essays, at least two, but no more than three, of which must be written in class and at least one of which is an argument.
The Common Essay: The Common Essay is an in-class exam given to English 100 and/or110 students mid-quarter. The Common Essay serves a dual purpose: to insure that all composition instructors are normed with one another in reference to grading and to provide students with a contest opportunity. The norming and grading process may vary depending on the number of faculty involved.
Instructors may choose to count the Common Essay as either one of two mandatory in-class essays, as a replacement grade for one of the two in-class essays, or simply as a writing experience that counts towards participation or homework percentages. Instructors should indicate on their syllabus how they intend to factor the Common Essay grade into the course grade.
Instructors will receive a detailed Common Essay package, including the essay prompt and further instructions, from the Common Essay Coordinator.
Writing Workshops
Required: A MyWritingLab online workshop is required for this course. The workshop consists of the following 10 topics that students work on outside of class at their convenience:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
This requirement is 10% of the overall course grade. To receive full credit, students must master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To demonstrate mastery, students must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each topic.
Instructors may deviate from the order and schedule of topics for individual students and/or for the class as a whole, so long as students are required to master the given ten topics throughout the quarter. For example, an instructor may require that all topics be completed earlier than the last week of class or that students work on fragments before parallelism or that an individual student work on a specific topic, and so on.
Instructors may use their own discretion when calculating grades for students who fail to master all ten topics or fail to master them by the deadline so long as these students are not given full credit.
Instructors who deviate from the schedule will have to self-monitor students’ progress by requiring students bring in their “student detail” page from the MyWritingLab site for each topic.
Instructors should also use the OASIS Referral Forms to require students who need additional help to get individual, drop-in tutoring.
Students who are registering to MyWritingLab for the first time need to register and create a user profile using the code packaged with their Ouick Access textbook and a course identification number provided to instructors by a MyWritingLab spokesperson. However, some students may have already registered to the site in a previous class. In this case, students can use their previous code so long as the code has not expired. Codes expire approximately one year after activation. Students who still have an active code simply need to login, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
Instructors should schedule class time the first or second week of classes to help students register to the site. Instructors will also need to provide Brooke Hughes and/or Randi Brummett with an approved class roster by the third week of classes. Indicate on the roster any students who have switched classes, dropped, or added your class.
Instructors will then receive weekly updates indicating each student’s progress, and instructors should actively monitor and promote the lab to encourage maximum participation.
Note: To avoid double enrolling students in the MyWritingLab, please inform students that they should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. Probationary students instead may choose Advancing Academic Confidence (General Studies 157), Improving Academic Fitness (General Studies 102), or My Reading Lab (Humanities 277.2/477.2).
.
You are responsible for completing 10 MyWritingLab topics in conjunction with your English 100 class. This requirement is worth 10% of your overall English 100 grade. To receive full credit, you must master at least one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To master a topic, you must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each of the following MyWritingLab topics:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
You will be held responsible for these new skills every week in your writing. Since this is an online workshop, you can work on these topics outside of class at your convenience, so long as you master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics. This means that if you wait until the end of the quarter to complete all ten topics, you will not receive full credit and your essay grades may suffer.
You will need a MyWritingLab workbook, which you can purchase from Reprographics; your access code, which is packaged with your Quick Access text; and the following course identification number:
Course ID#--####
A time will be scheduled during your first or second week of class to help you register to the site and create your user profile, and you will need your MyWritingLab code and course identification number to do this. If you have already registered to the site in a previous class, you do not need to register and create a new user profile. Instead, you will need to login to the site, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
For additional information on MyWritingLab, view the power points at the following Web sites:
How to register for MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/updated mwlreg.ppt
How to switch classes in in MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwlswitchclass.ppt
How to get around MWL for English100
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwleng100.ppt
Note: If you exhaust a topic before mastering it, let your instructor know, and he or she will have it “unlocked” for you.
Note: To avoid double enrollment in MyWritingLab, students should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. If you are enrolled in Humanities 277.1, please let your instructor know immediately.
Note: Instructors should contact Brooke Hughes (bhughes@csub.edu) or Randi Brummett (rbrummett@csub.edu) for help registering students to the site or for problems or questions regarding codes, exhausted topics, or any other concerns. When reporting an exhausted topic, instructors need to provide the students name, class, and instructor.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
COURSE SYLLABUS
Office: Faculty Towers 201A
Instructor: Dr. Schmoll
Office Hours:
Monday: 11-12:15
Wednesday: 10:30-12:20 and 4-5
Friday: 11-12:15
…OR MAKE AN APPOINTMENT!!!
Fall 2009
Email: bschmoll@csub.edu
Office Phone: 654-6549
ENGLISH 100, SECTION 3
MoWe 12:20 - 13:40 DDH 107K
Fr 12:20 - 13:40 Classroom Bldg 101
SYLLABUS
Dear Class,
Welcome to this course. This quarter, we will enjoy numerous experiences together, traveling on countless mental journeys. To start things off, I have constructed a syllabus that will guide the class, hopefully answer many of your questions, and become the official constitution and law of this course.
Why is this syllabus so long, you may ask? As a student, you realize what you must do to succeed in college, right? Some students, rather than doing what is necessary and accepting the consequences of their decisions, would rather abuse the system by searching for loopholes in each professor’s syllabus. One of the best professors to ever teach at this institution never even gave students a syllabus; how would he fare in our overly legalistic climate today? I’ll let you ponder that, but for now, it’s important to say that this ridiculously long syllabus represents my desire to state all rules and regulations and to clarify what this course is all about.
Attendance:
Just to be clear, to succeed on tests and papers you really should be in class. That’s just common sense, right? To pass this class, you may not miss more than two classes. Why is that? Does it sound harsh? Every class meeting matters. If you miss two classes that’s bad; how can you expect to do well doing that? Certainly your participation grade will suffer if you do that, but we’ll talk about that later. For now, if you miss that third class meeting, you are missing 10% of the quarter. You cannot do that and pass. So, here’s what we do. Do your darndest to not miss any class unnecessarily. Let’s say your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife calls and wants to take you to Tahiti this weekend, but you won’t be back until late Tuesday night. Here’s what you say: “Honey, I love you, but Dr. Schmoll seems to value my education more than you do, so we are breaking up.” Ok, that may be harsh, so don’t do that, but just make sure that you do not miss any class until the 8th week. What I’ve found is that it seems inevitable that those who miss two classes early for pathetic reasons like doctor’s appointments that should have been more carefully scheduled get to the 8th week and then have to miss for a legitimate reason (like a surprise meeting at work, a sick child to take care of, or a flat tire). If you get to that 8th week and then have to miss your third class, it’ll be bad. By that point, I’ll be kind, compassionate, a real shoulder to cry on, if you want, when telling you that you’ve now failed the course. Now, if you make it to the 8th or 9th week and you have not missed those two classes, then you have some wiggle room, so that if, heaven forbid, your cat Poopsie gets pneumonia and you have to sit up all night bottle-feeding her liquid antibiotics, you and I don’t have to have that ugly conversation where I tell you that Poopsie gets blamed for you failing the course. Let’s put this another way; do you like movies? No way, me too! When you go to the movies do you usually get up and walk around the theatre for 15% of the movie? Let’s say you do decide to do that, out of a love of popcorn and movie posters, perhaps. If you did that, would you expect to understand the whole story? Okay, maybe if you are watching Harold and Kumar, but for anything else, you’ll be lost. So, please, get to class.
Being Prompt:
Get to class on time. Why does that matter? First, it sends the wrong message to your principal grader(that’s me). As much as we in the humanities would like you to believe that these courses are objective, that is not entirely the case. If you send your principal grader the message that you don’t mind missing the first few minutes and disturbing others in the class, don’t expect to be given the benefit of the doubt when the tests and papers roll around. Does that sound mean? It’s not meant to, but just remember, your actions send signals. Being late also means that someone who already has everything out and is ready and is involved in the discussion has to stop, move everything over, get out of the chair to let you by, pick up the pencil you drop, let you borrow paper, run to the bathroom because you spilled the coffee, and so on. It’s rude.
So, what are the consequences of persistent tardiness? What do you think they should be? Remember that 10% participation? You are eligible for that grade if you are on time. Get here on time. One time tardiness is not a problem precisely because it is not persistent. It’s an accident; if you are late more than once, it's not an accident, and it'll result in losing your 10% participation grade.
The Unforgivable Curse:
Speaking of one time issues, there is something that is so severe, so awful, that if it happens one time, just one time, no warning, no “oh hey I noticed this and if you could stop it that’d be super,” you will automatically lose all 10 percent of the Participation grade. Any guesses? Cmon, you must have some idea. No, it’s not your telephone ringing. If that happens, it’ll just be slightly funny and we’ll move on. It’s a mistake and not intentional, and the increased heart rate and extra sweat on your brow from you diving headfirst into an overstuffed book bag to find a buried phone that is now playing that new Cristina Aguilera ringtone is punishment enough for you. So, what is it, this unforgivable crime? Texting. If you take out your phone to send or receive messages you will automatically lose 10% of your course grade. That means, if you receive a final grade of 85%, it will drop to 75%. If you receive a final grade of 75%, it will become a 65%. Why is that? The phone ringing is an accident. We laugh at it; we move on. Heck, my phone my even go off during class. Texting is on purpose and is rude. It, in fact, is beyond rude. It wreaks of the worst of our current society. It bespeaks the absolutely vile desire we all have to never separate from our technological tether for even a moment. It sends your fellow classmates and your teacher the signal that you have better things to do. Checking your phone during class is like listening to a friend’s story and right in the middle turning away and talking to someone else. Plus, the way our brains work, you need to fully immerse yourself, to tune your brain into an optimal, flowing machine (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s incredible book Flow) that can grasp and can let itself go. Students now tend to see school as a stopover on their way to a career. Brothers and sisters, that’s deadly! I wish that I could pay for you all to quit your jobs and just focus on the mind. I can’t yet do that but if I could I would, because it’d be worth every penny. Devoting time to the mind and to thinking deeply about your world will change who you are and how you approach your future, your family, your job, and your everything. Is that overstated? I believe it to be true. So, until my stock choices really take off so that I can pay all of your bills, promise me one thing. When you are in class or preparing for class, you have to be fully here. Oh crap, now it’s going to sound like a hippy professor from the 1960s: “I mean, like, be here man, just be here.” Maybe the hippies had something. Devote yourself fully to your classes by unplugging from the outside world for awhile.
Late Policy
I do not accept late papers...it's that clear. If, by some means, a tornado hits your car forcing you to turn in a paper a day late, the paper will lose 10% for each day that it is late. Be responsible.
Class Climate:
No, I don’t mean whether it’s going to rain in here or not. Sometimes I’ll lecture at you, but even then, your participation is vital. How can you participate when someone is lecturing? Any ideas? Turn to a neighbor and tell them the story of your first day at school in kindergarten. Now, if you are the one listening to the story, right in the middle look away, look at your watch, sneer at them, roll your eyes, yawn, wave to someone across the room, nudge a person next to you and tell them a joke, all while the other person is telling about his or her first day of kindergarten. If this happens in social setting we call it rude, and we call the people who listen in that way jackasses. They are not our friends precisely because we deeply value listening and do not put up with those who do not listen well. Right? So, there will be lecturing, and if you abhor what we are doing, then fake it. I used to do that sometimes too: “oh no, professor, I love hearing you talk about President Reagan’s supply side economics.” If we listen to psychologists, by faking interest you’ll be learning much more than if you show your disinterest. The next time you are sad force yourself to smile and you’ll see what I mean. So, sometimes there will be lecture. At other times there will be discussion of short readings that we do in class. During these times, it’s crucial that you do the silly little exercises: turn to a neighbor; find someone you don’t know and discuss this or that; explain to your friend what we just went over in lecture; pick something from the reading to disagree with; find two people on the other side of the room; throw cash at your professor…ok, maybe not that last one. This class is a bit unique in that it violates the normally accepted activity systems of college history classrooms. What we do in discussion will help solidify the concepts of each section of this course in your brain. If you are active in class, you will have to study less, and you’ll find yourself remembering much more.
Mining:
Have you ever wanted to be a miner? They do have those cool helmets with the lamp on top. Think about what miners do. They dig and dig, into the earth, looking for gold, coal, silver, or other valuable rocks. Sometimes all their digging amounts to nothing. They have to stop, change directions, and dig again. But sometimes they hit a productive vein. Our class will be a little like that. We’ll do some exercises that will amount to nothing and go nowhere. Who is the best judge of that? That’s right; you are! Sometimes we’ll do a written piece that will be fabulous and will produce beautiful golden prose. You will want to polish those pieces with your writing group and turn them into even more brilliant and shining jewels.
Reading:
How many of you love reading? I did not read a book until I was 18, so if you have not yet started your journey on this ever widening path, it’s never too late. In any course, there’s no substitute for reading. Jim Moffett says that “all real writing happens from plentitude,” meaning that you can only really write well about someone once you know about it. Reading is one way to know—not the only, by any means! I want you to have experiences with great texts. I can show you voluminous research proving why you nee to read more, but then if I assign a stupid, long, expensive textbook you probably will end up not reading, or only reading to have the reading done, something we have all done, right? The economy now requires much high literacy rates (see The World is Flat), and even though reading levels have not gone down in the last 40 years, it is crucial that you start to push your own reading so that your own literacy level goes up. For these ten weeks, diving wholeheartedly into the course reading is vital. Remember to read in a particular way. As reading expert and UCSB professor Sheridan Blau has argued, “reading is as much a process of text production as writing is.” Reading involves revision? Does that sound silly? As you read, think about the different ways that you understand what you read. Most importantly, when you read, think about the words of E.D. Hirsch, who says that we look at what a text says (reading), what it means (interpretation), and why it matters (criticism). Hey, but if you are in a history course, aren’t you supposed to be reading for exactly the number of miles of trenches that were dug in World War One, how many railroad workers died from 1890 to 1917, or what the causes of the Great Depression were? Anyway, the answer is yes and no. There are two types of reading that you’ll do in college. As the literary goddess theorist Louise Rosenblatt explains, there is aesthetic reading, where you are reading to have an experience with the text, and there is efferent reading, where you are reading to take away information from the text. You do both types all the time. Think about a phone book. You have probably never heard someone say of a phone book, “don’t tell me about it, I want to read it for myself.” Reading a phone book is purely efferent. In this course you will practice both types of reading. I have chosen texts that you can enjoy (aesthetic) and that you can learn from(efferent). I want to see and appreciate the detail in our reading, but in this course I’ll give you that detail in class lectures. In the reading, it’s much more important that you read texts that will live with you forever and to inspire you to think more thoroughly about your world. As you read, you should be working hard to create meaning for yourself. As Rosenblatt asserts, “taking someone else’s interpretation as your own is like having someone else eat your dinner for you.” Please, don’t let the numbskulls as wikipedia or sparknotes eat your dinner for you.
Class Rules:
1. You should not lie to your teacher. How stupid that I should have to say that here, right? But I am sick and tired of hearing that a student is not in class because of that wonderful new word to which teachers can have no response: “famamergency.” (translation: “family emergency”) Just tell the truth and the world will be a better place;
2. You will speak every day in this course. No, I will not call on you or ask you to sing in front of class, but you will quite often hear me say, “turn to a neighbor and…”;
3. Be respectful of your classmates; disagree with them often, but be respectful.
4. You should use and abuse office hours. I’m in my office a ridiculous number of hours per week. One of the nest ways for you to retain information and build the kind of intellectually active life that makes college wonderful is by connecting with your teachers in office hours. Your learning will increase immeasurably.
GRADED BUSINESS
My Writing Lab:
This is a computer-based program that will help you tackle your writing problems with exercises. While the best way to learn to write better is to write and read more, this program will give you specific assistance in your areas of greatest need.
You’ll get signed up for MWL this week. You must complete all of the assigned topics by the sixth week. You will have time during our computer lab days to work on this.
Blog Entries
Each week you will submit entries and responses to our class blog. These entries, thoughts, complaints, ideas, movie or book suggestions, restaurant recommendations, or whatever you write, will extend the discussions of our class to the wider, internet world.
The blog name for this class is http://schmollenglish100fall09.blogspot.com/
Sometimes, you may just want to read and ask questions of your classmates.
Sometimes, I’ll ask you to post something we write in class up on the blog. This is an experiment, so we’ll see how it goes.
Participation:
Restaurant Review:
Do you love to eat as much as I love to eat? Good. Go to a restaurant and take notes on the ambiance, the service, and the food. Write a review and post it to the website Bakersfield.com.
In-Class Essay:
We will write one essay in class.
To be eligible to pass this course you must earn a C- or higher on the in-class essay.
Final Assignment: A SYNTHESIS ESSAY
GRADE BREAKDOWN:
Participation: 10%
Restaurant Review: 15%
Lakota Way Essay: 15%
Synthesis Essay: 30%
In-Class Essay: 10%
Blog Discussions: 10%
My Writing Lab: 10%
Instructor: Dr. Schmoll
Office Hours:
Monday: 11-12:15
Wednesday: 10:30-12:20 and 4-5
Friday: 11-12:15
…OR MAKE AN APPOINTMENT!!!
Fall 2009
Email: bschmoll@csub.edu
Office Phone: 654-6549
ENGLISH 100, SECTION 3
MoWe 12:20 - 13:40 DDH 107K
Fr 12:20 - 13:40 Classroom Bldg 101
SYLLABUS
Dear Class,
Welcome to this course. This quarter, we will enjoy numerous experiences together, traveling on countless mental journeys. To start things off, I have constructed a syllabus that will guide the class, hopefully answer many of your questions, and become the official constitution and law of this course.
Why is this syllabus so long, you may ask? As a student, you realize what you must do to succeed in college, right? Some students, rather than doing what is necessary and accepting the consequences of their decisions, would rather abuse the system by searching for loopholes in each professor’s syllabus. One of the best professors to ever teach at this institution never even gave students a syllabus; how would he fare in our overly legalistic climate today? I’ll let you ponder that, but for now, it’s important to say that this ridiculously long syllabus represents my desire to state all rules and regulations and to clarify what this course is all about.
Attendance:
Just to be clear, to succeed on tests and papers you really should be in class. That’s just common sense, right? To pass this class, you may not miss more than two classes. Why is that? Does it sound harsh? Every class meeting matters. If you miss two classes that’s bad; how can you expect to do well doing that? Certainly your participation grade will suffer if you do that, but we’ll talk about that later. For now, if you miss that third class meeting, you are missing 10% of the quarter. You cannot do that and pass. So, here’s what we do. Do your darndest to not miss any class unnecessarily. Let’s say your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife calls and wants to take you to Tahiti this weekend, but you won’t be back until late Tuesday night. Here’s what you say: “Honey, I love you, but Dr. Schmoll seems to value my education more than you do, so we are breaking up.” Ok, that may be harsh, so don’t do that, but just make sure that you do not miss any class until the 8th week. What I’ve found is that it seems inevitable that those who miss two classes early for pathetic reasons like doctor’s appointments that should have been more carefully scheduled get to the 8th week and then have to miss for a legitimate reason (like a surprise meeting at work, a sick child to take care of, or a flat tire). If you get to that 8th week and then have to miss your third class, it’ll be bad. By that point, I’ll be kind, compassionate, a real shoulder to cry on, if you want, when telling you that you’ve now failed the course. Now, if you make it to the 8th or 9th week and you have not missed those two classes, then you have some wiggle room, so that if, heaven forbid, your cat Poopsie gets pneumonia and you have to sit up all night bottle-feeding her liquid antibiotics, you and I don’t have to have that ugly conversation where I tell you that Poopsie gets blamed for you failing the course. Let’s put this another way; do you like movies? No way, me too! When you go to the movies do you usually get up and walk around the theatre for 15% of the movie? Let’s say you do decide to do that, out of a love of popcorn and movie posters, perhaps. If you did that, would you expect to understand the whole story? Okay, maybe if you are watching Harold and Kumar, but for anything else, you’ll be lost. So, please, get to class.
Being Prompt:
Get to class on time. Why does that matter? First, it sends the wrong message to your principal grader(that’s me). As much as we in the humanities would like you to believe that these courses are objective, that is not entirely the case. If you send your principal grader the message that you don’t mind missing the first few minutes and disturbing others in the class, don’t expect to be given the benefit of the doubt when the tests and papers roll around. Does that sound mean? It’s not meant to, but just remember, your actions send signals. Being late also means that someone who already has everything out and is ready and is involved in the discussion has to stop, move everything over, get out of the chair to let you by, pick up the pencil you drop, let you borrow paper, run to the bathroom because you spilled the coffee, and so on. It’s rude.
So, what are the consequences of persistent tardiness? What do you think they should be? Remember that 10% participation? You are eligible for that grade if you are on time. Get here on time. One time tardiness is not a problem precisely because it is not persistent. It’s an accident; if you are late more than once, it's not an accident, and it'll result in losing your 10% participation grade.
The Unforgivable Curse:
Speaking of one time issues, there is something that is so severe, so awful, that if it happens one time, just one time, no warning, no “oh hey I noticed this and if you could stop it that’d be super,” you will automatically lose all 10 percent of the Participation grade. Any guesses? Cmon, you must have some idea. No, it’s not your telephone ringing. If that happens, it’ll just be slightly funny and we’ll move on. It’s a mistake and not intentional, and the increased heart rate and extra sweat on your brow from you diving headfirst into an overstuffed book bag to find a buried phone that is now playing that new Cristina Aguilera ringtone is punishment enough for you. So, what is it, this unforgivable crime? Texting. If you take out your phone to send or receive messages you will automatically lose 10% of your course grade. That means, if you receive a final grade of 85%, it will drop to 75%. If you receive a final grade of 75%, it will become a 65%. Why is that? The phone ringing is an accident. We laugh at it; we move on. Heck, my phone my even go off during class. Texting is on purpose and is rude. It, in fact, is beyond rude. It wreaks of the worst of our current society. It bespeaks the absolutely vile desire we all have to never separate from our technological tether for even a moment. It sends your fellow classmates and your teacher the signal that you have better things to do. Checking your phone during class is like listening to a friend’s story and right in the middle turning away and talking to someone else. Plus, the way our brains work, you need to fully immerse yourself, to tune your brain into an optimal, flowing machine (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s incredible book Flow) that can grasp and can let itself go. Students now tend to see school as a stopover on their way to a career. Brothers and sisters, that’s deadly! I wish that I could pay for you all to quit your jobs and just focus on the mind. I can’t yet do that but if I could I would, because it’d be worth every penny. Devoting time to the mind and to thinking deeply about your world will change who you are and how you approach your future, your family, your job, and your everything. Is that overstated? I believe it to be true. So, until my stock choices really take off so that I can pay all of your bills, promise me one thing. When you are in class or preparing for class, you have to be fully here. Oh crap, now it’s going to sound like a hippy professor from the 1960s: “I mean, like, be here man, just be here.” Maybe the hippies had something. Devote yourself fully to your classes by unplugging from the outside world for awhile.
Late Policy
I do not accept late papers...it's that clear. If, by some means, a tornado hits your car forcing you to turn in a paper a day late, the paper will lose 10% for each day that it is late. Be responsible.
Class Climate:
No, I don’t mean whether it’s going to rain in here or not. Sometimes I’ll lecture at you, but even then, your participation is vital. How can you participate when someone is lecturing? Any ideas? Turn to a neighbor and tell them the story of your first day at school in kindergarten. Now, if you are the one listening to the story, right in the middle look away, look at your watch, sneer at them, roll your eyes, yawn, wave to someone across the room, nudge a person next to you and tell them a joke, all while the other person is telling about his or her first day of kindergarten. If this happens in social setting we call it rude, and we call the people who listen in that way jackasses. They are not our friends precisely because we deeply value listening and do not put up with those who do not listen well. Right? So, there will be lecturing, and if you abhor what we are doing, then fake it. I used to do that sometimes too: “oh no, professor, I love hearing you talk about President Reagan’s supply side economics.” If we listen to psychologists, by faking interest you’ll be learning much more than if you show your disinterest. The next time you are sad force yourself to smile and you’ll see what I mean. So, sometimes there will be lecture. At other times there will be discussion of short readings that we do in class. During these times, it’s crucial that you do the silly little exercises: turn to a neighbor; find someone you don’t know and discuss this or that; explain to your friend what we just went over in lecture; pick something from the reading to disagree with; find two people on the other side of the room; throw cash at your professor…ok, maybe not that last one. This class is a bit unique in that it violates the normally accepted activity systems of college history classrooms. What we do in discussion will help solidify the concepts of each section of this course in your brain. If you are active in class, you will have to study less, and you’ll find yourself remembering much more.
Mining:
Have you ever wanted to be a miner? They do have those cool helmets with the lamp on top. Think about what miners do. They dig and dig, into the earth, looking for gold, coal, silver, or other valuable rocks. Sometimes all their digging amounts to nothing. They have to stop, change directions, and dig again. But sometimes they hit a productive vein. Our class will be a little like that. We’ll do some exercises that will amount to nothing and go nowhere. Who is the best judge of that? That’s right; you are! Sometimes we’ll do a written piece that will be fabulous and will produce beautiful golden prose. You will want to polish those pieces with your writing group and turn them into even more brilliant and shining jewels.
Reading:
How many of you love reading? I did not read a book until I was 18, so if you have not yet started your journey on this ever widening path, it’s never too late. In any course, there’s no substitute for reading. Jim Moffett says that “all real writing happens from plentitude,” meaning that you can only really write well about someone once you know about it. Reading is one way to know—not the only, by any means! I want you to have experiences with great texts. I can show you voluminous research proving why you nee to read more, but then if I assign a stupid, long, expensive textbook you probably will end up not reading, or only reading to have the reading done, something we have all done, right? The economy now requires much high literacy rates (see The World is Flat), and even though reading levels have not gone down in the last 40 years, it is crucial that you start to push your own reading so that your own literacy level goes up. For these ten weeks, diving wholeheartedly into the course reading is vital. Remember to read in a particular way. As reading expert and UCSB professor Sheridan Blau has argued, “reading is as much a process of text production as writing is.” Reading involves revision? Does that sound silly? As you read, think about the different ways that you understand what you read. Most importantly, when you read, think about the words of E.D. Hirsch, who says that we look at what a text says (reading), what it means (interpretation), and why it matters (criticism). Hey, but if you are in a history course, aren’t you supposed to be reading for exactly the number of miles of trenches that were dug in World War One, how many railroad workers died from 1890 to 1917, or what the causes of the Great Depression were? Anyway, the answer is yes and no. There are two types of reading that you’ll do in college. As the literary goddess theorist Louise Rosenblatt explains, there is aesthetic reading, where you are reading to have an experience with the text, and there is efferent reading, where you are reading to take away information from the text. You do both types all the time. Think about a phone book. You have probably never heard someone say of a phone book, “don’t tell me about it, I want to read it for myself.” Reading a phone book is purely efferent. In this course you will practice both types of reading. I have chosen texts that you can enjoy (aesthetic) and that you can learn from(efferent). I want to see and appreciate the detail in our reading, but in this course I’ll give you that detail in class lectures. In the reading, it’s much more important that you read texts that will live with you forever and to inspire you to think more thoroughly about your world. As you read, you should be working hard to create meaning for yourself. As Rosenblatt asserts, “taking someone else’s interpretation as your own is like having someone else eat your dinner for you.” Please, don’t let the numbskulls as wikipedia or sparknotes eat your dinner for you.
Class Rules:
1. You should not lie to your teacher. How stupid that I should have to say that here, right? But I am sick and tired of hearing that a student is not in class because of that wonderful new word to which teachers can have no response: “famamergency.” (translation: “family emergency”) Just tell the truth and the world will be a better place;
2. You will speak every day in this course. No, I will not call on you or ask you to sing in front of class, but you will quite often hear me say, “turn to a neighbor and…”;
3. Be respectful of your classmates; disagree with them often, but be respectful.
4. You should use and abuse office hours. I’m in my office a ridiculous number of hours per week. One of the nest ways for you to retain information and build the kind of intellectually active life that makes college wonderful is by connecting with your teachers in office hours. Your learning will increase immeasurably.
GRADED BUSINESS
My Writing Lab:
This is a computer-based program that will help you tackle your writing problems with exercises. While the best way to learn to write better is to write and read more, this program will give you specific assistance in your areas of greatest need.
You’ll get signed up for MWL this week. You must complete all of the assigned topics by the sixth week. You will have time during our computer lab days to work on this.
Blog Entries
Each week you will submit entries and responses to our class blog. These entries, thoughts, complaints, ideas, movie or book suggestions, restaurant recommendations, or whatever you write, will extend the discussions of our class to the wider, internet world.
The blog name for this class is http://schmollenglish100fall09.blogspot.com/
Sometimes, you may just want to read and ask questions of your classmates.
Sometimes, I’ll ask you to post something we write in class up on the blog. This is an experiment, so we’ll see how it goes.
Participation:
Restaurant Review:
Do you love to eat as much as I love to eat? Good. Go to a restaurant and take notes on the ambiance, the service, and the food. Write a review and post it to the website Bakersfield.com.
In-Class Essay:
We will write one essay in class.
To be eligible to pass this course you must earn a C- or higher on the in-class essay.
Final Assignment: A SYNTHESIS ESSAY
GRADE BREAKDOWN:
Participation: 10%
Restaurant Review: 15%
Lakota Way Essay: 15%
Synthesis Essay: 30%
In-Class Essay: 10%
Blog Discussions: 10%
My Writing Lab: 10%
COURSE SCHEDULE
COURSE SCHEDULE
9/14
Go over syllabus; assign reading; assign homework
You will begin reading Me Talk Pretty One Day during SSR on Wednesday and everyday thereafter.
9/16
Signed Syllabus Statement Due
Make a List of what makes good writing
Profile Interviews
Explain Reading Groups: you will meet with this group all quarter long.
Before you read any piece to the group, you should tell the group what you want as feedback: just listen, look at word choice, does it flow?, is it funny?, is it worth pursuing and polishing? Is it too long? Is it too short?
Also, no excuses from the reader: “this is no good.”
The rule is simple; just read the crap!
After you read the piece, someone in the group will say “thank you.” It seems odd, right? It’s a nice way to break the ice, and it really is nice to thank the author for having been so bold as to read something.
9/18
Stories and Meaning Exercise:
“McDonalds and ‘Honey’” Story Told Two Ways
When you start dating someone you tell them stories about yourself. Think of some of those and give them titles. Now tell one of those stories. Two other people will tell what it means.
What’s the point? Look again at your list of what makes good writing?
Meeting with Writing Group
9/21
Meet with Writing Groups
Focusing Exercise (Start in the Middle)
Working with They Say/I Say
Assign Restaurant Review:
Restaurant Review Chapter of Me Talk Pretty Due
9/23
Book of your Choice Due:
Be ready to write the greatest book report ever created!
Dan Kirby Exercise: _____ at your age.
_____ at half your age.
_____ at twice your age.
Observe the person from the outside.
For each time period, take a picture of yourself in words.
For each time period, start with a place: for example, “I am sitting
on the hood of my 1981, dog poo brown Dodge Omni, waiting for my bobbed blond haired 5 foot nothin’ tall girlfriend Beth Anne to finish working at the Wherehouse Music store on Columbus Street…”
9/25 FURLOUGH DAY: Remember, if you email me on that day I won’t be able to respond until midnight. If I see you in Trader Joe’s or at the gas station or elsewhere, I am required by school policy to ignore all questions.
9/28
Typed Complete Rough Draft of Restaurant Review Due
9/30
Restaurant Review Due
George Hillocks Exercise on Analyzing Evidence: Slip or Trip?
10/2
In Class Essay/ Assign Lakota Way Essay
10/5
IDIOMS EXERCISE (linguistic collocations): Hit the Road, Air your dirty laundry in public, all hell broke loose, alive and kicking, backseat driver, keep in mind, par for the course, hit the road, got up on the wrong side of the bed, as sharp as a tack, piece of cake. kick the bucket…what do these mean? Draw them as literal statements.
Crickets: http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/category/poet/aram-saroyan/
or try http://www.mtraks.com/artist/aram_saroyan/track/498707-crickets_1965/
by Aaron Saroyan (Is this poetry?)
Haiku: 5-7-5
Fall in Bakersfield
Leaves change but heat will not cease
Burn, infernally, summer
10/7
Meet with Writing Groups
Ellis Island Photo Writing (with photos from Ellis Island, write a first
person narrative)
Compare and contrast the following two videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lk1awSIang (outkast)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0FuMRHRCVY (hayseed)
10/9
Commas are not Evil
10/12
Run Ons May be Evil
10/14
Write Around with Quotes
Start Multi-Genre Piece
Look back at the “Everyone is a Poet Anger Exercise” as a Sample.
For this assignment you must complete a writing topic in five different genres.
Let’s start by making a list of genres: college essay, apology,
bedtime story, movie script, description….
Next, decide on a written topic, either something you’ve already
started or something new you would like to write about.
Now, brainstorm a list of genres that seem to fit this topic. Think
broadly here. For instance, even if your topic is Sen. Obama you can still write a speech, recipe, bedtime story, or telenovela (soap opera).
10/16
Dear Abby Writing/Food Write Around
10/19 FURLOUGH DAY
10/21 LAKOTA WAY ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS; Remember, if you fail to turn in a complete typed rough draft in the first five minutes of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
10/23 LAKOTA WAY Final Draft Essay Due
Writing about Art:
Is this beautiful? http://wallpaper.travelblog.org/Wallpaper/pix/tb_fiji_sunset_wallpaper.jpg
Is this beautiful? http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/Gustav_Klimt/kiss.jpeg
Is this beautiful? http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/5448/198420afghan20girlhz1.jpg
Now, define beauty without using examples.
Is it possible? What does it mean to be beautiful?
10/26
Crime Story (Porphyria’s Lover) R.J. Blick, Mrs. R.J. Blick, Porphyria
Blick, Hubert Fenston, R. Emerson Chandler
What kinds of writing would this crime produce?
10/28
Poetry is Cool:
Barry Spacks: “let’s get some poetry in the air.”
Yates: “every poem sings a little tune.”
Everyone is a Poet Exercise:
Think about the last time you were enraged, absolutely incensed, full of anger. Why were you so mad? With whom were you mad?
Now, on paper write a description of the feeling, the
setting, the reason for your anger, and how the whole thing was resolved, if it was resolved.
Finally, circle key lines, words, or phrases in that piece.
Write the circled lines in a row, in any order.
10/30
Finish MWL: By this date you must be done with your MWL sections.
11/2
Begin Synthesis Assignment
11/4
Individual Work on Synthesis
11/6
Neighborhood Map
Creation Stories:
Blood Clot Boy
Write your own creation story, giving personality to animals or other natural
forces. Explain some aspect of nature.
11/9 Individual Writing Conferences
11/11 Campus Closed: Veteran’s Day
11/13 Individual Writing Conferences
11/16 Random Autobiography
Recall your favorite place to play as a child. Write about something that happened there. What was so great about the place?
Take three stories from around the room and answer the following questions: who do these stories have in common? taken together, what does it mean to play? Answer them in your group.
11/18
SYNTHESIS ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS; Remember, if you fail to turn in a complete typed rough draft in the first five minutes of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
11/20
FINAL DRAFT OF SYNTHESIS ESSAY DUE IN CLASS
9/14
Go over syllabus; assign reading; assign homework
You will begin reading Me Talk Pretty One Day during SSR on Wednesday and everyday thereafter.
9/16
Signed Syllabus Statement Due
Make a List of what makes good writing
Profile Interviews
Explain Reading Groups: you will meet with this group all quarter long.
Before you read any piece to the group, you should tell the group what you want as feedback: just listen, look at word choice, does it flow?, is it funny?, is it worth pursuing and polishing? Is it too long? Is it too short?
Also, no excuses from the reader: “this is no good.”
The rule is simple; just read the crap!
After you read the piece, someone in the group will say “thank you.” It seems odd, right? It’s a nice way to break the ice, and it really is nice to thank the author for having been so bold as to read something.
9/18
Stories and Meaning Exercise:
“McDonalds and ‘Honey’” Story Told Two Ways
When you start dating someone you tell them stories about yourself. Think of some of those and give them titles. Now tell one of those stories. Two other people will tell what it means.
What’s the point? Look again at your list of what makes good writing?
Meeting with Writing Group
9/21
Meet with Writing Groups
Focusing Exercise (Start in the Middle)
Working with They Say/I Say
Assign Restaurant Review:
Restaurant Review Chapter of Me Talk Pretty Due
9/23
Book of your Choice Due:
Be ready to write the greatest book report ever created!
Dan Kirby Exercise: _____ at your age.
_____ at half your age.
_____ at twice your age.
Observe the person from the outside.
For each time period, take a picture of yourself in words.
For each time period, start with a place: for example, “I am sitting
on the hood of my 1981, dog poo brown Dodge Omni, waiting for my bobbed blond haired 5 foot nothin’ tall girlfriend Beth Anne to finish working at the Wherehouse Music store on Columbus Street…”
9/25 FURLOUGH DAY: Remember, if you email me on that day I won’t be able to respond until midnight. If I see you in Trader Joe’s or at the gas station or elsewhere, I am required by school policy to ignore all questions.
9/28
Typed Complete Rough Draft of Restaurant Review Due
9/30
Restaurant Review Due
George Hillocks Exercise on Analyzing Evidence: Slip or Trip?
10/2
In Class Essay/ Assign Lakota Way Essay
10/5
IDIOMS EXERCISE (linguistic collocations): Hit the Road, Air your dirty laundry in public, all hell broke loose, alive and kicking, backseat driver, keep in mind, par for the course, hit the road, got up on the wrong side of the bed, as sharp as a tack, piece of cake. kick the bucket…what do these mean? Draw them as literal statements.
Crickets: http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/category/poet/aram-saroyan/
or try http://www.mtraks.com/artist/aram_saroyan/track/498707-crickets_1965/
by Aaron Saroyan (Is this poetry?)
Haiku: 5-7-5
Fall in Bakersfield
Leaves change but heat will not cease
Burn, infernally, summer
10/7
Meet with Writing Groups
Ellis Island Photo Writing (with photos from Ellis Island, write a first
person narrative)
Compare and contrast the following two videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lk1awSIang (outkast)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0FuMRHRCVY (hayseed)
10/9
Commas are not Evil
10/12
Run Ons May be Evil
10/14
Write Around with Quotes
Start Multi-Genre Piece
Look back at the “Everyone is a Poet Anger Exercise” as a Sample.
For this assignment you must complete a writing topic in five different genres.
Let’s start by making a list of genres: college essay, apology,
bedtime story, movie script, description….
Next, decide on a written topic, either something you’ve already
started or something new you would like to write about.
Now, brainstorm a list of genres that seem to fit this topic. Think
broadly here. For instance, even if your topic is Sen. Obama you can still write a speech, recipe, bedtime story, or telenovela (soap opera).
10/16
Dear Abby Writing/Food Write Around
10/19 FURLOUGH DAY
10/21 LAKOTA WAY ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS; Remember, if you fail to turn in a complete typed rough draft in the first five minutes of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
10/23 LAKOTA WAY Final Draft Essay Due
Writing about Art:
Is this beautiful? http://wallpaper.travelblog.org/Wallpaper/pix/tb_fiji_sunset_wallpaper.jpg
Is this beautiful? http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/Gustav_Klimt/kiss.jpeg
Is this beautiful? http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/5448/198420afghan20girlhz1.jpg
Now, define beauty without using examples.
Is it possible? What does it mean to be beautiful?
10/26
Crime Story (Porphyria’s Lover) R.J. Blick, Mrs. R.J. Blick, Porphyria
Blick, Hubert Fenston, R. Emerson Chandler
What kinds of writing would this crime produce?
10/28
Poetry is Cool:
Barry Spacks: “let’s get some poetry in the air.”
Yates: “every poem sings a little tune.”
Everyone is a Poet Exercise:
Think about the last time you were enraged, absolutely incensed, full of anger. Why were you so mad? With whom were you mad?
Now, on paper write a description of the feeling, the
setting, the reason for your anger, and how the whole thing was resolved, if it was resolved.
Finally, circle key lines, words, or phrases in that piece.
Write the circled lines in a row, in any order.
10/30
Finish MWL: By this date you must be done with your MWL sections.
11/2
Begin Synthesis Assignment
11/4
Individual Work on Synthesis
11/6
Neighborhood Map
Creation Stories:
Blood Clot Boy
Write your own creation story, giving personality to animals or other natural
forces. Explain some aspect of nature.
11/9 Individual Writing Conferences
11/11 Campus Closed: Veteran’s Day
11/13 Individual Writing Conferences
11/16 Random Autobiography
Recall your favorite place to play as a child. Write about something that happened there. What was so great about the place?
Take three stories from around the room and answer the following questions: who do these stories have in common? taken together, what does it mean to play? Answer them in your group.
11/18
SYNTHESIS ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS; Remember, if you fail to turn in a complete typed rough draft in the first five minutes of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
11/20
FINAL DRAFT OF SYNTHESIS ESSAY DUE IN CLASS
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Building into the Landscape
Why don't we build more into the landscape such as they did here in Petra, Jordan, 2000 years ago? Why not build homes into the earth in a flat and hot place like Bakersfield? What do you think?
Do you agree with the anti-body odor law that may pass in Hawaii? Should "BO" be legislated by government?
Honolulu seeking to ban 'BO' on buses
Wed Sep 2, 7:58 am ET
HONOLULU – Stinky city bus riders soon could get soaked. The Honolulu City Council is considering a bill that would impose up to a $500 fine and/or up to six months in jail for public transit passengers convicted of being too smelly.
The bill will be heard Thursday in committee. It would make it illegal to have "odors that unreasonably disturb others or interfere with their use of the transit system."
It doesn't matter if it's body odor or offensive fumes that emanates from clothes, personal belongings or animals.
Councilmen Rod Tam and Nestor Garcia co-sponsored the anti-odor bill.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii says it is concerned with laws that are inherently vague, which opens the door to discriminatory enforcement based on an officer's individual prejudices.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_odd_stinky_bus_bill
Should you kill your television?
Does tv have a positive or negative impact? I know, you can give me the nuanced answer: "Well, Dr. Schmoll, one might actually consider that television has had both a positive and negative impact on our society." Blah blah, be bold, take a side!
Angola
THIS IS ANGOLA. What are your impressions of the country from these pictures? Have you ever heard of the place? Would you want to visit? What problems does a country like this face?
David Sedaris
Post your thoughts on the book here:
What is your favorite chapter?
Do you find his writing funny?
Was your experience of grade school anything like his?
Have you ever eaten in a restaurant that serves dishes with very long names? When? Where?
Have you been in a place where there was a language barrier? How did you manage the situation?
IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID?
July/August 2008
What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Illustration by Guy Billout
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
Also see:
Living With a Computer
(July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Illustration by Guy Billout
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
Also see:
Living With a Computer
(July 1982)
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
STOP USING ALL CAPS IMMEDIATELY
Just kidding, but read this story of a woman getting fired, suing, and winning, all because she used all caps:
ALL CAPS emails lead to woman's firing
(http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/148175)
WHAT COULD BE MORE ANNOYING THAN THIS? MAYBE IF IT WAS BOLD? AND RED?
OK, I can't actually make that text red due to the publishing system I'm on, but it would certainly be annoying, wouldn't it?
And if you worked for New Zealand's ProCare Health, it could even get you fired.
That's exactly what happened to Vicki Walker, who was abruptly kicked out of her job for sending "confrontational emails" with text formatted in a variety of red, bold, and all caps fonts. Walker had sent the emails to fellow workers within the company, usually with stern and detailed instructions on how forms should be properly filled out.
Someone at ProCare didn't like her approach, suggesting she caused "disharmony in the workplace" and was being too confrontational via email, eventually firing her without warning.
Walker, however, got the last laugh. She sued for wrongful termination and won the case, pocketing $17,000 in lost wages and for other unspecified harm caused due to the firing.
Quite a predicament. Is it actually possible to be confrontational in an email message? With instructions on how to fill out a form? By all accounts, Walker's emails sound rude and brusque, but did she cross a line? Just how angry would an email have to be in order to merit being fired from her job? I know I've sent a "confrontational" message or two to my co-workers in the past, and I've received more than my fair share of them, I think. I never recall anyone getting fired for it.
What do you think? Is it OK to fire someone for misuse of their caps lock button? Feel free to respond in the comments section below. First one to do so in all caps gets fired.
ALL CAPS emails lead to woman's firing
(http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/148175)
WHAT COULD BE MORE ANNOYING THAN THIS? MAYBE IF IT WAS BOLD? AND RED?
OK, I can't actually make that text red due to the publishing system I'm on, but it would certainly be annoying, wouldn't it?
And if you worked for New Zealand's ProCare Health, it could even get you fired.
That's exactly what happened to Vicki Walker, who was abruptly kicked out of her job for sending "confrontational emails" with text formatted in a variety of red, bold, and all caps fonts. Walker had sent the emails to fellow workers within the company, usually with stern and detailed instructions on how forms should be properly filled out.
Someone at ProCare didn't like her approach, suggesting she caused "disharmony in the workplace" and was being too confrontational via email, eventually firing her without warning.
Walker, however, got the last laugh. She sued for wrongful termination and won the case, pocketing $17,000 in lost wages and for other unspecified harm caused due to the firing.
Quite a predicament. Is it actually possible to be confrontational in an email message? With instructions on how to fill out a form? By all accounts, Walker's emails sound rude and brusque, but did she cross a line? Just how angry would an email have to be in order to merit being fired from her job? I know I've sent a "confrontational" message or two to my co-workers in the past, and I've received more than my fair share of them, I think. I never recall anyone getting fired for it.
What do you think? Is it OK to fire someone for misuse of their caps lock button? Feel free to respond in the comments section below. First one to do so in all caps gets fired.
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