Week of 9/11

Monday, September 11

• Discussion: Words and sentences
• Handout(s):
  • “Audience”
  • “Sentence Patterns”
  • “Fragments and Run-ons”
  • “Commas”
  • “Edited Standard Written English”
  • “Converting Fragments into Full Sentences”
  • “Choosing the Correct Word Form”
  • “Reducing Informality”
• Homework:
  • • Rewrite your selected paragraph from the Bad Bunny profile three times (or use one of the options below)
      1. In Standard Written English, for an academic audience, interpreting what you’ve read
         • I’d recommend looking at the handout titled “Audience” here
      2. With more self-expressive detail, that includes your thoughts and reactions to what you are reading, not necessarily in Standard Written English
      3. By changing the genre or changing the paragraph for a new audience (a few ideas below)
         • If you were sharing the story with a grandparent
         • If you were rewriting the paragraph as a song lyric
         • If you were turning the paragraph into a movie scene (using only dialogue and action)
         • If you were a narrator who was omniscient (knew everything)
  • Option 1:
    At the end of my time with Benito and his friends, my mind turned back to what we owe superstars (probably nothing) and what they owe us (maybe something). The night was soft. Ormani volunteered to drive me back to the garage where I left my rental car, and it was easy to pretend we were friends on our way out for pizza and a movie. He cued up a freestyle Benito recorded around 2014, when he was just beginning to post on SoundCloud, and I was startled to find his voice much higher, his flow more frantic. He was broke back then, but he knew there was only one way to get where he wanted to go: “Aquí nadie sube sólo, él que te diga eso miente, uno siempre necesita ayuda de la gente.”…
  • Option 2:
    Even in the terrifying early weeks of the pandemic in New York, I tried to protect my sanity by riding my bike in the evenings from West 113th Street up to the George Washington Bridge at 178th by way of the riverside path. I rapped along to the “Ronca” freestyle, as if it were a spell: “El conejo es la verdadera pandemia” — “The bunny is the real pandemic.” Would that it were so. This stretch of park is intensely Latino, so I’m never the only one listening to Bad Bunny: I hear his music pouring from Bluetooth speakers hooked to handlebars and full sound systems with amps and turntables set up for baby showers and birthday parties. Always a working-class refuge, the park has now become one of the only places to gather, so the scene has leveled up accordingly: bowers of white and blue balloons, elaborate hookah setups with embroidered pillows, steaming trays of plantains and pernil, a salsa combo with a 12-year-old girl on maracas, couples in skintight athleisure and impeccably maintained Nike Huaraches…
  • Option 3:
    On Sept. 20, 2020 — the third anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico — Bad Bunny descended unexpectedly on my city. On YouTube, I watched him cruise down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx on top of a semi truck styled to look like a graffitied subway car, a stream of exuberant pedestrians running in his wake. “Dreaming is everything,” Benito had told me, and this vision was indeed dreamlike: a larger-than-life enchantment of our quotidian reality here in the uptown corridors where so many Puerto Ricans have become, and refused to become, Americans. He wore all black — sunglasses, a long leather coat — like a true New Yorker, but also like a man in mourning, like the black resistance flag that has dominated street protests in Puerto Rico since the passage of PROMESA…

Wednesday, September 13

• • Discussion: Paragraphs and scenes
  • Handout(s):
    • “Introductions and Conclusions for Humanities Papers”
    • “Paragraphs”
    • Scenes (1, 2)
  • Homework
    • Write a first paragraph of your Unit 1 assignment
      • Turned in on Monday, 9/18 via email or hard copy
  • Optional Readings:
    • Alternative forms of language narratives
      • “Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji”
      • “Seeing at the Speed of Sound”
      • “Three Ways to Speak English”

Next Week

• Structuring and Drafting Essays