1). Final research papers due in single hardcopy! Don’t forget your Works Cited/Reference Page!
2). Come on time and fully prepared for panel discussion! If you were absent last class, it’s your responsibility to apprise yourself of the panel guidelines and groups on Open Lab!
3). Reread Martin Espada poem from last class and & Ta-Nehisi Coates essay from two weeks ago, and be prepared for discussion!
For Espada’s poem “Return”:
–Create context for this poem: Where are we? When is this taking place initially? When in time is the speaker located in the final stanza? What can we infer about the wars the speaker mentions, given the two time periods?
 –Underline any imagery you come across (anything that evokes one or more of the senses)
 –There are two similes (a figure of speech in which things are compared using “like” or “as”) in this poem–what are they?
–If you have to summarize this poem’s intent, what would you say? How is the speaker feeling about themselves? About the world around them?
For Coates:
–Who is Coates addressing in this essay?
 –How does Coates view the experience of growing up a black male in America?
 –What strategies and/or communities did Coates discover to help him navigate through these perils?
  –Find one passage you find particularly evocative or even provocative and analyze Coates’s message before explaining why this is meaningful to you. Practice sentence-level clarity, transitions, and metacommentary. It doesn’t need to be typed, but be prepared to read this passage aloud.
