Gabi's Log
We began class on September 18th by filling out our attendance cards which read: “In one word, the hurricane was ________.” Next, Mat introduced us to a poem called “Paris, October 1936” by Cesar Vallejo. After the poem, Samantha read her log about our last class on September 6th. Before we got into the day’s activities, Mat showed us what he posted about the hurricane. He asked the class how our week was to make sure everyone was okay, and for the most part, we were all fine.
Once the introductory portion of the class was over, Mat pulled up the newly revised syllabus. In addition to our usual assignment of writing biweekly blog posts, we will now also have to make three comments on the posts of other students in the class. Of these three comments, one must be a comment on someone else’s comment. The intention of this assignment is to actually develop threads that will allow us to engage in discussion with our peers. Another change to the syllabus is that we will be taking out “blog #5” which was the assignment to choose any chapter of the Bedford Book of Genres to write about. Instead of doing this post, blog #6 will be called blog #5. The new blog #5 will be very important to the class as it will serve as a model for our second project.
After reviewing the new syllabus, we ended the class by “peeling the onion.” This was an incredibly engaging and helpful activity in which we were able to share our project ideas with the class and open the floor to suggestions. Unfortunately, we only got through about 8 students. However, the ideas of and suggestions for these students surely benefitted everyone in the room (regardless of whether or not they were able to share their own experiences). This assignment taught us that the genre struggle is real, so Mat removed that aspect of project one. Instead we will simply focus on text. We also learned that project one has absolutely no research involved and should only tell of personal experience. In order to be as successful as possible with projects one and two, it would be in our best interest to pick fairly tight-knit communities, rather than large organizations. We should also choose a specific text that holds significance to the group, as opposed to broad texts.
Hopefully the “peeling the onion” assignment benefitted everybody in the class because by this point in the syllabus, we should all have a general idea of our topics. In addition, the shitty first draft of our first project is due this Friday via e-mail. The draft should be 750 words but it’s okay if it’s horrible because Mat most likely won’t be reading it anyway (woo-hoo)!
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