Self-Help Literature (ENG 3402: Topics in Literature)
Professor Belli–Spring 2021–City Tech
For this week’s People’s Choice, you’ll be reading class blogs on your individual research of Self-Help Critiques and choosing your favorite post.
Comment here to register your vote, & don’t forget to include the name of your classmate, the link to their post, and your rationale for choosing it. Due Thursday, 4/22 by 9am. Happy reading/voting
For this week’s People’s Choice, you’ll be reading class blogs on Mindfulness & Its Critiques and choosing your favorite post.
Comment here to register your vote, & don’t forget to include the name of your classmate, the link to their post, and your rationale for choosing it. Due Thursday, 4/15 by 9am. Happy reading/voting
Tuesday, April 13th is City Tech’s Literary Arts Festival featuring City Tech students & the amazing poet Staceyann Chin.
The event is free and online this year (via Zoom), but you need to register. You can register here.
As discussed in class, this is an optional event, but I strongly encourage you to attend if you can and to share what you’ve learned with the class. We’ll be discussing more about the event and Staceyann Chin’s work next week when we meet again after Spring Break. In the meantime, you can learn more about her and the event on the Literary Arts Festival website.
If you attend & blog in response by (start of class) on Th 4/15, you will get extra credit (yay!). This extra credit will replace a missing blog if you missed some blogs, or it will count as extra credit if already you did all of your blogs (bonus points). Please note that there are only two grades for this extra credit blog: 100 and 0. If you attend the event and blog your responses/reflections thoughtfully and comprehensively, you will receive 100% (otherwise, you will receive no credit).
Don’t forget to take notes at the event, so you can include concrete details in your blog. Please categorize your blog as “Literary Arts Festival.”
Hope to see you there 🙂
For this week’s People’s Choice, you’ll be reading one another’s blogs on the The Power of Now and choosing your favorite post. Comment here to register your vote, & don’t forget to include the name of your classmate, the link to their post, and your rationale for choosing it. Due Thursday, 3/25 by 9am. Happy reading/voting 🙂
For this week’s People’s Choice, you’re exploring the Pandemic Processing blogs and choosing your favorite post.
Comment here to register your vote, & don’t forget to include the name of your classmate, the link to their post, and your rationale for choosing it. Due Saturday, 3/20. Happy reading/voting 🙂
Thanks again for sharing your reflections about the ongoing pandemic, and the somber anniversary of it. It has been a very difficult year for all, in so many ways, and I appreciate your honesty and vulnerability in sharing your reality of that with us all. Sending strength and healing your way, as we all continue to navigate this collective trauma.
Today in class we practiced self-awareness and reflection through journaling, spending time to write mindfully about our feelings, thoughts, embodied experiences, behaviors, and responses. During this freewriting loop, we even intentionally called to mind challenging (or “negative”) thoughts and experiences, and reflected in writing on the emotions that arose in response to them.
As a class, we then embarked on a shared experiment by doing a guided meditation. For this practice, we used the the Calm App and today’s Daily Calm on “Optimal Anxiety.” I know that this can be an uncomfortable and stretching experience in the best of circumstances, and especially so in class and over Zoom (!). Thank you for allowing yourself to be vulnerable and open to this experience, and for sharing this meditation practice with me.
As many of your mentioned, this was your first time practicing meditation. The freewriting we did immediately afterwards hopefully was useful for capturing your embodied response to this practice.
Both journalling and meditation are generative conduits of self-awareness, and here will will combine the two. Please share your reflections on your meditation experience in class today by commenting below.
This week, YOU were the the texts, so your reading response were a reflection on yourselves and your well-being 🙂
Read through the Self-Care posts and choose your favorite post. Comment here to register your vote, & don’t forget to include the name of your classmate, the link to their post, and your rationale for choosing it. Due Thursday, 3/11 by 9am. Happy reading/voting
Great lightning presentations today in class! Here are the slides 🙂
CHAPTER IX. Reem Saleh chapter 12 MARIa Gavino 
Ajah Shann-Chapter 7 (Smiles Presentation) Aryanna Smith Samuel Smiles Self Help Presentation Crystal Pichardo, Chapter XII
This week read through the posts on Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits and choose your favorite post. Comment here to register your vote, & don’t forget to include the name of your classmate, the link to their post, and your rationale for choosing it. Due Thursday, 3/4 by 9am. Happy reading/voting
Just like we did for The Secret read through your classmates’ reading response blogs on Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance and choose your favorite post. You can choose a post for any reason, but you always must clearly articulate your rationale for choosing it (e.g., why did you find it interesting, compelling, likeable, provocative, etc.?). This rationale can refer to content, style, creativity, etc. If, after reading everyone’s posts, you strongly feel that your post is your “favorite,” you can always vote for yourself, but you need to provide a rationale for doing so.
In order to register your vote (and get credit) for this week’s “People’s Choice,” “leave a reply” to this post, and in your comment, provide your chosen post, an excerpt from it + rationale for choosing it. Provide the title and author of the chosen post, along with a link to the post you are citing (please provide the link in the same comment: don’t make a separate one with just the link). Citing is really important (in this case, citing your classmate!), and this is a way of giving credit to other sources and putting yourself in dialogue with them.
Comments/votes are mandatory (regardless of whether you completed your own reading response post on Smiles’ Self-Help should be made by Thursday, 2/25 by 9am: the person with the most votes will earn the coveted “People’s Choice” honor for this round of posts! I’m looking forward to seeing what you choose, and why.
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