Notes Towards Day 23: Revising (Moby-Dick and your papers!)

Notes Towards Day 23 of
Food for Thought:
Revising (Moby-Dick and your papers)

I. Coursekeeping: reviewing the remaining
(two weeks?!) of the semester

Tues, Dec. 2 & Thurs. Dec. 4
Chapters 29-37 & 38-54 of Ahab’s Wife

Fri, Dec. 5: Collaboratively-written 6 pp. paper
in which you creatively re-frame an ethical dilemma
two exercises upcoming today to help w/ this process;

talk about the pleasures/payoffs/difficulties of
working w/ a brain different than your own?

structures to accomodate this?
(two "hinged" papers, saying
"I'm thinking a little differently about this?")

Tues, Dec. 9 & Thurs, Dec. 11: Final Performances
(or cancel classes, re-schedule longer single
session for the weekend?)

All work due 12:30 p.m. Friday, December 19,
including all postings, all marked papers
already written for the course,
one revised paper (if you choose),
the script for your final performance
(or some other summary of "what you've learned"),
the checklist and the portfolio with self-evaluation.

II. relevant articles/events
Laboring in the Cultural Commons:
emergence of new journal, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict
(to bridge "peace" and "war" cultures-->
response to request for Journal on the Psychology of Terror)

A New Face for ADHD, And a Debate:
Children with the disorder typically have trouble sitting still and paying attention. But they may also have boundless energy and a laserlike focus on favorite things — qualities that could be very helpful in, say, an Olympic athlete...He tells children with attention deficit that they have the brain of a race car, and he wants to work with them to build better brakes. “We want to tell children, ‘You’ve got a difference, but not a disease.'"

A Soldier, Taking Orders from its Ethical Judgment Center:
they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness...and they can be made invulnerable to what he called “the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,’ ” which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.

III. collaborative poetry writing

IV. Beginning Ahab's Wife, Chapters 25-28

The section we read begins w/ her decision to go to sea.

Let's begin by writing the backstory to that decision:
why might she be doing this?....