Tuesday, September, 30 2008

Today’s Agenda

1) Get out your papers

2) Journal Entry

a. Get out the major drafts of your paper. I want you to describe in your journal how the document changed from draft to draft. Don’t just write about the physical changes to the draft (i.e. the introduction of new content). Focus on how you changed as a writer as you met the challenges of each draft, and, more importantly, how you changed at a proofreader. This writing will take the next 20-30 mins.

b. When we are done, you will pass in your drafts.

3) Get out Tuesday’s with Morrie.

4) Go over your annotations

5) Get into groups and discuss the reading.

6) Group discussion.

  7) Unit Two: Academic Literacy

 

We will begin your homework for Thursday in class.

 

Your homework is to explain fully a time when you changed your mind in the full sense. 

By “full sense” I mean a time when in the beginning you held one belief or position strongly.  At that time, you were convinced you were right and you acted on that conviction. Then somehow you came to realize that you had changed your mind. Present that change using the skills you developed in Unit One so that we can understand it completely.  (Tension of opposites, Settling, Dialogue, ect)

Writing help for this first writing:

This opening assignment of Unit Two asks you for your own example of a basic and very important mental experience, one that underlies a great deal of higher education. The point of doing this writing is to put into words some of the conditions everyone must meet in becoming educated or prepared for a profession.  In class, you’ll hear others’ views, which we expect will improve all our understanding of how such a change can be made. This kind of change is at the heart of life in colleges and universities, not only for students, but for teachers and researchers as well. It is how we all become wiser. That is why we begin this unit here. 

An example from physical therapy might be helpful.  As students enter the professional phase of that program, they encounter a human cadaver. As would-be doctors do, they need to experience first-hand how the anatomy of a body works, and this experience is regarded by the profession as essential for that understanding.  For many, it is their first encounter with a dead body, and they may have to overcome some internal resistance.  How can they make the adjustment required? That adjustment or one like it in some way occurs in almost all professions.

In order for others to learn from your incident and analysis (the analysis will come in the next writing), you must put enough of it on paper so that anyone can understand what you went through.  One way, not the only way, to structure this writing is

• The situation and your belief before the change, especially actions based on it
• The change itself – causes, details, everything you can recall about how the change happened
• Your belief and action afterward that show the change clearly

 One hard part of this writing is to represent fairly your original belief or position, once you have changed your mind away from it.  It may require some effort to remember how and why you believed or acted the way you did.  Please use the skills you developed in our first unit for this challenge. 

 Another hard part is to put on the page how you actually did it, made the change.  It’s too easy to say “I just saw I’d been wrong,” because far too often, we don’t see that we’ve been wrong, but instead hold onto the old idea no matter what.  Some conditions or reasoning must have been involved in the change for it to happen.

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