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 …

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: Observation and Perspective

(Consider taking students to the museum or the transfer station and having them choose an “object” for this activity) Read Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ In the poem, Stevens describes 13 different ways of looking at a blackbird. Some of Stevens’ observations are concrete others are more philosophical. Your assignment is …