• • Week 15 Assignments

    • Each week, I will ask you to do four things:
    • 1/  Post an entry in your Learning Journal.  Entries in your Learning Journal (LJ) will most often be focused on Free Writing or Structured Free Writing, which is Free Writing in response to a specific topic, prompt, or question.  I will give you a weekly LJ assignment.  Please post entries in your LJ HERE.  This is a private journal that only you and your instructor can access.
    • 2/ Complete one or more Group Assignments (GA), which will require that you contribute either a BLOG POST and/or to our course Discussion Board.  These posts and discussions will be read by our entire class.
    • 3/ Complete one to two Reading and Writing Assignments (RWA), which, unless otherwise specified, you will submit as a separate entry/entries in your Learning Journal HERE.
    • 4/ Check in at least THREE separate times a week and respond at least ONCE to contributions by other student blog posts on the Home page of our course Web site AND to forums on the course Discussion Board

     

    • WEEK 15 ASSIGNMENTS:  DUE DATE:  Monday, December 17  at 5PM.

    During Weeks 15, we are going to complete the research project and prepare for the final exam, which will be made available as soon as I have a copy (hopefully by Friday, December 14) and MUST BE COMPLETED BY 11:45 pm Thursday, December 20.

    • LEARNING JOURNAL 15
      
    • For this  LJ entry, I’d like you to reflect on what you have learned in this class about writing in general and college writing in particular.  Please consider the following:Has your relationship to writing changed as a result of taking this class?  If so, how?What did we do this semester that was most useful to you?If you were to add another essay or assignment to the class, what might you suggest adding?In one to two paragraphs, please reflect on your overall satisfaction with a fully online class.  What did you like about it?  What did you dislike about it?  Would you recommend such a class to other students? Why or why not?

  • GROUP ASSIGNMENTS

   Group Assignment 20:   Reflecting on Photographable/Unphotographable Moments

• Please re-read your original unphotographable blog post.  In response to this, please write a short (five to seven sentences) blog post in which you consider how and why this original blog post functions in a similar or dissimilar manner to an actual photograph.

READING AND WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

RWA20:  Drafting a Source Overview and Revising Your Project Proposal

DUE: Monday, Dec. 17
Please submit your Revised Project Proposal here
Please submit your Draft Source Overview here

Please read Chapter 9 of Bazerman’s The Informed Writer:  http://writing.colostate.edu/textbooks/informedwriter/

After reading this, take another look at the following Sample Source Overview that is included in that chapter.  I’d like you to use this as a model to draft an overview of your three sources.  In this short essay, you will discuss the various sources that you’ve located and how they relate to your research question.  At a minimum: please write a one paragraph summary of each one of your sources.  Alternately, you can draft a thesis statement to organize the discussion of your sources based on some other taxonomy.   This essay should have a brief introduction to your topic, an approach to categorizing/discussing your sources, and then a discussion of the sources themselves.  Please try to discuss all three sources in each paragraph.

Also, please REVISE your Project Overview and draft your Annotated Bibliography.   Below is a sample.

Here is a Sample of what I’d like you to hand in on Monday:

Assessing the Success of Brown v. Board of Education in New York State in the 21st Century

Jonathan Kozol

English 110

Project Overview

Segregation has returned to public education with a vengeance, as a result of years of federal policies that started in the early 1990s when the U.S. Supreme Court and the local federal courts began to rip apart the legacy of the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. The percentage of black children who now go to integrated schools has dropped to its lowest level since 1968. New York State is the most segregated state for black and Latino children in America: seven out of eight black and Latino kids in New York go to segregated schools. The majority of them go to schools where no more than two to four percent of the children are white. How is it possible that more than fifty years after the Brown decision, New York’s public schools are actually less integrated than they were at the end of the 1960s?  What factors have contributed to this?  What, if anything, is being done to reverse this trend?

Annotated Bibliography

Balkin, Jack M., ed. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
A group of constitutional scholars rewrites the Brown decision, looking back over the 50 years of American history and race relations that have passed since the decision was first announced.

Cottrol, Robert J., Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. Brown v. Board of Education: Case, Culture, and the Constitution. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Intended for students and general readers, this book tells the dramatic story of the road to and from Brown. Argues that “Brown not only changed the national equation of race and caste—it also changed our view of the Court’s role in American life.”

Irons, Peter. Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision. New York: Viking, 2002.
Argues that Supreme Court decisions over the past few decades have significantly reduced the promise of the Brown decision, contributing to trends of “resegregation” and persistent racial gaps in education today.

RWA21:  Preparing for the Final Exam

The final exam for our course will be available beginning Friday, Dec. 14 at 9 a.m. and will  be available UNTIL Thursday, Dec. 20 at 11:45 p.m.  The exam has two parts:  a one paragraph summary of an article and a timed essay.  You will have one hour and fifteen minutes for each part of the exam, or two and a half hours total.  Because you will be taking the exam online, you will have to complete both parts of the exam in ONE two and a half hour period.  There are advantages and disadvantages to this, I know.  Unfortunately, this is the only way that this particular test can be securely administered using the Bb system.   PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make arrangements to complete the exam by Thursday, Dec. 20 at 11:45 pm.  I will not be able to make the exam available to you after that date.

The final exam will be very much like our midterm exam, though it will also include a one paragraph summary.  To prepare for this exam, please review your handouts on summary writing, writing about texts, and the various components of effective essay writing (thesis statements, paragraphs, revision).  Here is a sample exam:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-9gdCKLbfvIbmd0Tl9taHBYc2s/edit

I will be grading the exam based on the following rubric:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-9gdCKLbfvIa3RYdFFLSWxaWm8/edit

If you would like to take the sample exam, feel free to.  If you’d like some feedback on the sample exam, e-mail me your summary and essay and I will send you my assessment and suggestions.