Prompt: Defining Utopias, Dystopias, Heterotopias

Contributed by Jen Schell Although it is short, Michel Foucault’s essay “Of Other Spaces’ is the most difficult reading we will complete this semester. This piece uses many, many challenging and confusing words, and it deals with abstract and theoretical ideas. So how do we cope with this piece? One way of dealing with a …

Lesson: Thesis Statement Translation Workshop

Contributed by Natalie Taylor, Fall 2013 Context: In the analysis unit, we were using Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue’ and Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood’ to think about language, identity, and contexts. We had also watched John McWhorter’s TED talk “Txting is killing language. JK!!!’ They were working on argumentative papers using a …

Reflection Unit Plan: Into the Wild Movie Reflection

For our final, “Reflection” unit, I decided to pair watching a movie with a low-key writing assignment in my class. I chose Into the Wild  because 1) I think it is great 2) Alaskan students generally have a lot to say about it 3) students can relate to the main character, which makes for good …

Handout: How to Write an Abstract

    This handout is attributed to Philip Koopman, of Carnegie Mellon University. A link to his text can be found here:  https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html. It is also copied below:   Because on-line search databases typically contain only abstracts, it is vital to write a complete but concise description of your work to entice potential readers into …

Lesson: Creating Thesis Statements

A topic sentence is the sentence that conveys a central position of a paragraph. Like a topic sentence, a thesis statement is a sentence that conveys your central position for a multi-paragraph essay. Argumentative/Persuasive thesis statements must contain an arguable claim. Statements of fact are not argumentative thesis statements. An argumentative/persuasive thesis statement must be …

Lesson: Use Your Senses, An Introduction to Observation

Introduction to Observation activity: Use your senses! 1. (10-15 minutes) Choose a short piece of writing that features sensory details. I chose the first chapter of “We the Animals’ by Justin Torres (it’s one of my favorite books!) Read the piece aloud in class. I read the piece to my students so that they could …