Thursday, September 13

 Agenda:

Today's lesson a few announcements were made:
1. Turn it in dot com will be used when turning in memoirs on Wednesday, September 19th.
2. Extra Help Appointments to reconcile your grade book, talk about the progress of any of your papers, turn in work late or without your name from the No Name Wall of Shame will have to first happen during an Extra Help appointed time. After you've demonstrated that you can come to an appointment and NOT stand me up, you will have the privilege of making appointments outside of that block. Although you are not punished for doing work late, please know that turning in late assignments is still an unfavorable situation to be in so do not get in the habit of doing so.




A discussion that was started last class, delving into the implications of Rau inserting in her memoir the imagery of her father sitting on a horse with a procession of 5 servants behind him as well as discussed possibly what the implication may have been to allude to Romeo and Juliet with the title. The students also listed character traits they assigned Cynthia before the climax of the story and the character traits she was assigned after and how this illustrated the transformation we look for in stories. Rau's character, Cynthia, was transformed although not the radical physical sense of the word, but rather in the metaphysical. She adopted a new understanding although young and shed a kind of naivete after indirectly experiencing discrimination for the first time. Lastly, we discussed what I referred to as the 'stop and think' moments of the text, as shown below. Section 4 students were asked to find such moments and put them in their own words. Students were selected to write their interpretations on the board, as shown in the figure.

Homework for Wednesday, September 19: 
1. Turn in the Memoir Final draft in MLA format along with the Rubric (will be provided for you), self-edited copy, peer-edited copy, and proposal. You may include any additional drafts you may have been working on. The drafts serve you as a record of the amount of effort you put forth in this writing process.

2. Answer the following prompt and post it on your weblog (300 word minimum):
Santha Rau reflects at the end of the her memoir, "But I put it all happily away because it happened to a girl named Cynthia and I was never really particularly interested in her." Are you convinced of this statement?

3. Continue reading your IRB1. The book should be finished by the end of this month. Specifically, your book should be entirely read by September 28, which is coming up quickly. While reading, think about what aspect of the author's writing style you like the best (the way the author slows down the story to capture the nonverbal communication going on in the room in addition to what is actually said, the way the author uses simple colloquial language to describe yet doesn't lack in depth because the reader gets the impression there is a thoughtful process behind the words, the author's use of incoroportatin the flashback to create a history of the characters to help the reader better understand the significance of the ongoing as well as the past, ...and so on). Be able to identify a passage to a page that exemplifies the qualities you enjoyed.