Hi guys! Only ONE MORE WEEK before spring break! Also it's the last week of our setting unit, and it marks the exact halfway point of our semester. Once you turn in your final draft of the essay, you will officially be fifty percent of the way done with your Composition 2 course! Exciting stuff. In this blog post, I will cover:
Debriefing the First Drafts of the Setting and Context Research EssaysDebriefing is when I give general feedback to you guys. I wanted to start the week off pinpointing a few specific struggles that I saw more than once in our first drafts. These are things I want all of us to keep in mind as we develop our second drafts. So here we go:
Setting CreationThis week, we get to add to my other favorite thing to grade and teach—the creative piece of the class. Remember how the last week of Unit 1 you developed a main character? You gave them a name, a family, a job, and a place to live. Now we're really going to think about that place a little harder. These are the questions you'll be addressing in your Blackboard assignment. I recommend going back and rereading your Character Notes that you submitted and going from there. Remember, it is absolutely 100 percent okay to change up your setting.
Setting and Cultural Context Essay Final Draft RubricI will be assessing these elements that I looked at in your first drafts:
And I will also be assessing for:
Unit 2 PoetryWhen I'm designing our Units, I think of them visually. Kind of like an outline for a paper, I guess. If you really spend some time gazing intently at the calendar section of our syllabus, you will notice there is a kind of order to things, and the order is this:
Within those four weeks, each Unit is divided like so:
Everybody's brain is different, but I, personally, derive probably too much satisfaction from the symmetry of it all. Anyways, I want to give a little blog space to the poems from this Unit that we've looked at in class. They can also be found in the Readings folder in Blackboard (same goes for the Unit 1 poems we looked at). Just in case you ever desperately need to revisit one. We talked about how the very specific setting of the poem, a field of daffodils in the Lake District of England, helped the speaker of the poem redefine was solitude meant for him and awakened beauty in the still moments of his life long after he was no longer physically in the daffodil field. Then we talked just a little about Romanticism as a artistic and literary movement, and how one of its tenants was the celebration of beauty in nature. We looked at the lyrics of this song, noticed how they also seemed to celebrate nature, and picked up on a tone of nostalgia, wistfulness, also solitude, even sorrow. We checked out the explicit shout out to Wordsworth himself. Then we considered the cultural context and discussed how knowing that the song was written in the summer of 2020 when COVID lockdowns were in full swing changed or deepened or altered the meaning of the lyrics. These are the same skills you are focusing on in your papers, but at a bigger scale. This week we are going to look at a British ex-pat living in France. We are going to visit another cafe (just now realizing I definitely have a thing for European cafes and it shows). But instead of being presented as a haven, like in Hemingway's "Clean Well-Lighted Place," this cafe is basically a horror show. Where could this gruesomeness come from I wonder? How would it have been perceived differently by the original readers in 1914? (spoiler alert: war. again.) Nobody in this world is going to convince me that "Hotel California" isn't a 1970's glamor gothic reimagining of Stoker's "Dracula" and also Milton's "Paradise Lost," but I sure wish someone would try. Since that doesn't seem very likely, I'm going to tell you guys all about it, and we'll look especially at how the setting transforms the speaker. Songs are poems, turns out. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorProfessor Annilee Newton ArchivesCategories
All
|