Week 8

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. –Joseph Campbell
 

Good day to you all. I hope you had a nice weekend.  

Today we will spend some time reviewing classwork, the profile and exercises, before turning to the week's assignment, which is described below, and due in class when you return week 9 or 10.  If we do not get to it today, we will address it next week.  This essay is an extra credit work and will replace any missing grade or low grade.  Our final is scheduled for week 10 also, although we can push it ahead to week 11, to allow for more review.

Note:  To all of you in Monday night's class, as indicated on the syllabus, we will not be meeting next week as it is the Memorial Day holiday. 

Essay #8:  In 350-500 words address address an idea that you hold as an article of faith or philosophical belief, using narrative or descriptive examples to support and flesh out the basis of that belief.  I have several examples to give you from a book collection called This I Believe II:  The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women, but more can be found at thisibelieve.org.  The site supports a public forum on personal belief, and opportunity to upload your essay for publication.  It also allows you to explore topics and examples going all the way back to the 1950's, when the project itself first began. 

 The guidelines for writing the essay are much like those we have been following in class, keeping to 350-500 words in a voice that is personal and original.  The following URL within the site describes in detail what the editors want in terms of style and development:   http://thisibelieve.org/guidelines/.   You may summarize and quote from any one of the published essays as a lead-in to your piece, though neither summary nor response is a required element of the essay.  The topic you address should reflect your particular experience and corresponding beliefs or concerns–whether of religion, money, virtue, vice, growing up, growing old, love, death, sickness, health, the meaning of life, the nature of existence, the human condition, the fate of life on this planet, etcetera.  Your statement of belief should be articulated in a sentence or two.

Week 7

Good day!  Hope you are well.  Today we will pick up where we left off last week.  I will be returning the summary/response work, and rewrites.  We will review/share some of the hypothetical pieces assigned last week and then move on to the character study or profile (#7), a piece which I hope you'll enjoy researching and putting together.  It will be due in class next week, week 9.

The Character Profile or study requires you present a "portrait" of an individual.  It includes the individual's background, and a look into their current endeavors, activities, interests, ideas and attitudes.  To put it together involves an interview of sorts, really a two-way exchange in which the pair members dialogue to come up with enough information and first-hand impressions to write the piece. The purpose is to bring to readers a sense of the background, motivation, and personality of the students pursuing specific degrees or career goals, specific skills and interests here at AiFL. It will be a chance to exchange personal interests and ideas with others as you gather the information to present the individual(s) with whom you share class and common pursuits and perhaps personal concerns and lifestyles. I imagine the audience as perhaps students and others in the local community or at other colleges locally or nationally who would be interested to know the experiences, concerns, and interests of college students today and something of college life. So key will be eliciting from your subject individual(s) a sense of the background and personal aims they bring to their school pursuits, and to bring that information to life in the profile. 

Some questions to ask to get your subject's story include the following:

*What's this experience or period of your life really about?

*What is the emotional truth of your life today? What feelings are you working through? What do you feel good about, uncertain about?

*How did you get to this point or place in life?

*Describe a past or current struggle in some detail to show the kind of challenge you know best.

*Who were the important people in your life? How did they influence or shape you?

*What are your near and long term goals?

We will cover in class how to structure this essay. In brief, it will involve framing your subject to support a certain thesis idea, which the life of your subject will illustrate. 

There are two ways of structuring the piece.  One is to introduce the subject in an opening paragraph, providing context and a lead-in that generates reader interest.  (See the introductory paragraph description below for more details.)  Imagine a target audience of your peers or some other reader group.  Follow the introductory paragraph with a transcript of the questions posed to your subject and the responses elicited.  Shape the dialogue so that the  questions and responses, from beginning to end, are expressive of the subject's history, interests, and future prospects or concluding thoughts on this stage of life.

The second way of structuring the piece is to summarize much of what you learn from your subject, shape the main story line around a theme, and illustrate the whole with a few well-chosen quotations from your subject.  The second way is the article or essay form, as described more fully directly below:

In the introductory paragraph, the writer must say something of the personal impressions your subject makes in a face-to-face meeting. We want readers to feel they are meeting this individual in person; of course the impressions are those you have drawn in meeting and talking with your subject.   The body paragraph(s) will recount history and current endeavors, any conflicts or issues the subject is adressing, and how they are being addressed.  

The body material is meant to illustrate  the nature of the personality and character of the individual subject.  Again, the pairs or groups will be talking and exchanging information in an informal flow of give and take as you establish rapport and commonalities and differences. You will take notes on each other, specific background information, career goals, interests, concerns, etcetera, which later you will incorporate into the essay. You will unfold something of the life of your subject to illustrate a point about students or student life today. 

Your conclusion will bring the presentation back to the central idea, underscoring it, and providing final comments. You may want to incorporate direct quotation of one or another remark your subject has made, as well, to give some sense of the individual's actual speech or voice. Dialogue or direct quotation is a dramatic device and draws readers into the presence of your subject. You may use present or past tense overall. Bringing a sense of the subject individual's physical presence is a means of creating interest and imaginative appeal. Description of hair, eyes, gestures, clothing, in some brief but telling way will allow readers to actually "see" the subject person as they learn something of the story he or she embodies in the role of student.

An alternative to assignment (7)  involves getting together with one or more classmates to discuss an issue important to you all, airing your thoughts, concerns, and collective knowledge.  As a pair or group, you will google some very narrowly focused area of the subject matter to see what can be learned from recent reports or the opinions expressed by others.   Each of you will write about the issue, incorporating into the paper some of what your classmates have had to say, your own beliefs, and any important items of fact or opinion expressed in news reports.  

Whew!  Sounds difficult, doesn't it?  But it is not, really.   You will hash out the matter between yourselves to determine how you each see a particular issue, its importance today and in the years ahead.   You will have to write down some of the interesting questions and comments generated in your group discussion. Some of these you will use to illustrate the issue and the range of responses it generated in your discussions.  Each of you will write your own paper and in the course of it show what one or more of your classmates had to contribute to the discussion.  You will quote, paraphrase, or summarize briefly their views.  You could even use the question/answer format for part of the piece.  Above all, have some fun and try to learn more about the subject and your classmates' experience.

Listed below are some of the topics I have received in the past:

1.  Threats to the environment, including climate change and pollution.

2.  The weak economy and high rate of unemployment.

3.  The struggle to legitimize gay marriage.

4.  Misuse of welfare funds.

5.  The high cost of education today.

6.  The technology race.  Should we spend for 4g phones?

7.  Fast food.  The real costs.

8.  The costs of war and militarization.

9.  Culture rot or the dumbing down of society by media.

10. The threat posed by overpopulation. 

Week 6

On the Road to Yosemite, CA Welcome back to class. Hope you had a good weekend. Today I'll return last week's work and look to you for the summary/responses to "Think the Best,"  by P.M. Forni or the Hurricane Sandy anniversary piece from the New York Times You all wrote well on the midterm, and I am pleased. We will discuss the graded work in class, and I'll review with each of you, as needed. We may be doing a book or article review today that represents a combined review of narrative elements and writing about a text, including the use of direct quotation. If we do, we will work in small groups for the reading and discussion part of the assignment, and then each of you will write a review. This is an unscheduled work, and does not appear on the syllabus. Nonetheless, it will count for a participation grade, that is if we actually get to it. -------------- If we were given the chance to rewrite some chapter in life, or to relive some moment now resigned to the past, what revisions would we make, or what insight would we bring to the moment now? What lessons are there in wondering, what if . . . ? What if we could time travel? We can in some senses. We can pretend that we had been born in a different era and imaginatively enter into the lives of those who have lived before us. Thanks to the research of scientists and historians of every stripe, the past unveils its secrets, and is now recorded in new layers of story and imagery, all adding to our knowledge of life on this planet and in this universe. We may learn how other human societies lived and what they believed, how they and other species have met the challenges of life, how they at whatever time did navigate, nourish and reproduce themselves, defend themselves and their young. If you were given a day, week, month, or year to live wherever and whenever and however you chose, what choice would you make? We can say, had I known such and such a thing, I might never have done what I did. Sometimes we rewrite the past with our inner voice, as a means of understanding what has worked and not worked for us, thus reshaping our thought and behavior as we move forward in life. What if we were still stuck in outmoded ways of thinking and behaving? What if the possibility for personal change were to be taken from us? Transformation begins with our thoughts, and with the language we use to express ourselves. Thank goodness we can imagine possibilities beyond the given or present! Essay 6: In 350-500 words you are to explore a hypothetical scenario; that is, one that you imaginatively enter into, with whatever sure knowledge makes it all plausible and meaningful as an essay. You are writing non-fiction, remember, seeking to show a truth. You might think in terms of the difference made if one or another event had occurred (or not) in your personal life or in history. What effects on the past, present, and/or future do you imagine in this hypothetical scenario? How might the past look, how might today be different, and how might the future look? This essay assignment provides good practice with verbs–past, present, future–and in using comparison and contrast mode. It is helpful, too, to speculate on the possibilities life presents, and withholds. You will likely use the subjunctive mood and conditional (modal) tense forms as well as simple and perfect tenses. Again, imagine that you had been born under or into circumstances other than those you were born into; for example, a different place and/or historical era, a different family, a different body (or species), and so on. Describe what your childhood was actually like, and what it might have been like (under the changed circumstances); what your present life might be like (as opposed to what is actually happening); imagine your future, actually or hypothetically. Or look at any important decision you made or did not make and trace the consequences of having taken an opposite track. If we had the chance to do things differently, if we had superpowers, the omniscience of a goddess, what would we do with these?  Of course, we don't have superhuman powers, and we must make do with what we have–but there are insights that reflection brings on what might have been, or what might be . . . that are within our grasp. Checklist: *Title the essay. *Proofread to make sure you have a clear central idea and adequate support. *Remember your audience and write on a matter of intrinsic or practical importance. *Edit your sentences for clarity of expression and grammatical correctness. Note: –The use of narration and description, with scene setting, vivid detail and action, will make readers see and feel the particular experience(s) and ideas you have in mind. – Comparison/contrast mode will show the actual versus the imaginary, and make it clear that your focus is hypothetical.   You might start in this way: Had I been born an only child, instead of being born the fifth child of six, I might have got more attention than I did.  I might have been spoiled!  My parents had little time for me, as it was, with so many to care for. Or: If I were sixty-five (you can fill in any future age) and to at my life, what would I want to see I had accomplished Or:   If I could do one thing differently, rewrite the past, I would go back to the time . . . Or:   If we were to walk, fly, or swim the proverbial mile in the life of (fill in whatever human, animal or insect subject interests you) we would discover . . . Or: If we were to travel to the ends of the earth and back, we would discover a great deal about life on this planet, including the fascinating  . . . Essay 7 will require homework. It involves hypothetical formulations of thought and verb tense usage that may be fun and challenging for many of you. A description appears below. We will practice the tense usages in class and then have a go at writing the piece. A have photocopied a text by Alain De Botton to illustrate the manner in which you are to frame this piece. Below is a description of just what I mean when I say subjunctive mood, or hypothetical/speculative stance.