Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Day 7

English 102 Lesson Plan Day 7

For Wednesday: Selling in Minnesota to 150

For Thursday: Selling in Minnesota to end. Scrubbing and Selling worksheet due.

For Friday: Evaluation Chapter.

Best places to work.

Finish Shadowy Lines Worksheet

15 Years Slideshow and Discussion

The writing process.

About the essays: It's ok to be confused at this point. It probably means you have an open mind and see multiple angles on the questions. That's a good thing. Begin, though, to see the product: a 3-5 page paper on the topic. What it probably means is you should NARROW your topic/thesis to a single main point.

This won't happen by wishing for it. Prewrite. Freewrite. Start writing down practice thesis statements. Do some more reading. Ask each other questions. Go to the writing center. See me.

Shoot for Friday for a tentative thesis statement. That will give you the weekend to do some research, plus Monday and Tuesday to get a rough draft together.

All along the way, in any class, you should be thinking about an angle on an essay. What interests you about the topic? Where are there disagreements with what is written? What IDEAS do you want to defend or refute or change or suggest?

Also, a few notes—I'd like to have full conversations about these in class as we go. We'll get to as many as we can.

  1. On the Surface; In Reality; Not likely to change

    1. Examples, so far?

    2. What's not likely to change? What do you think?

  2. Minimum wage debate: Define the argument clearly. Is this federal? State? City? Why not more? Why not less? Saying it's in the middle isn't a good enough reason. Find what the experts say.

  3. YakTown: Decide who you are pretending to be. It works best if you use the same givens as Ehrenreich. You might change them if you want to make a counter argument section on kids or second income.

    1. Living conditions and cost of living in N&D, COMPARE and CONTRAST

  4. First, agree that there's too much in the way of the working poor to overcome on their own. (Read the evaluation chapter!) Then, explain what can be done, SPECIFICALLY, even locally, to help them overcome.

    In all of this, one of the big issues:

    Option 1: The poor are responsible for their situations. It's an individual's choice. If they don't want to be poor, they can do something about it.

    Option 2: The game is rigged against the poor and they don't know it. If we want to address poverty, the system needs to change.

    Homeless count coming up. 211 callers. How do people get into these jams? What do we do about it once they're in them? How do we keep them from happening in the first place?

    Easy to pile on the poor for "choices"—what about the rich? Do the poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich? My friends in the fruit business, for example.

    It's the Pursuit of Happyness v. Nickel and Dimed. Is one of these ways of seeing things actually hurting things?

    Who has the right idea?

Prewriting: I am thinking about either topic X or Y. I like X because: I like Y because:

Discussion.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

From an employer's point of view or that of an owner,do you think it is possible to balance good ethical consideration for your employees with the standards that have been set in terms of profit margin? It seems that humane qualities are very rare in corporate settings. Is this a requirement for profit?

twfields said...

I believe it is more then possible to be able to balance good ethical consideration with profit margins. It just takes someone who is willing to work for it and I don't mean the employees. I've actually seen it happen it's rare but it does happen.

Jonathan said...

It's really hard for employers to be ethical to their employees. It takes a lot of sacrifice that most big corporations wouldn't be willing to make.