Notes Towards Day 6 (Thurs, Sept. 20): Finding our keywords

I. coursekeeping
* weather prediction for noon: partly cloudy, 10% chance of precipitation, 67 degrees, 7 MPH wind-->

* Alex is situating us on the path between Goodhart and Rhoads (Sarah C: Tuesday,
when it's predicted to be clear--> chairs in
front of English House)

* naming: how far can we get?

* by 5 p.m. Fri  your "keyword" writing assignment is due, both to me and your writing partner

alexb2016 <--> Barbara
Cahier <--> CMJ
Hannah <--> mbackus
mtran <-->Rochelle W
Sarah C <--> Zoe
Shengjia-Ashley <--> Susan
wanhong <--> Sarah L

* by 5 p.m. on Sun you should begin recording on-line your weekly observations of your adopted on-campus "site" (this will be your Sunday assignment for the next 10 weeks). (I posted the map of what we are attending to.) For inspiration, you might want to visit Writing Nature. Digital Storytelling course. Swarthmore College. Fall 2010; Joan Maloof's "Teaching the Trees: How to Be a Female Nature Writer" (from Women Writing Nature, 2007, in our password protected file); and/or my trial run: Alone on the Friendship Bench. As a balance to your Friday papers (which are more formalized), this is your place to play! Try to incorporate in your writing some of your new keywords, your evolving sense of how a "green grammar" operates (try out the "rheomode," and "nominalization," and....?). Also: "type in your own topic" (I used my title) in order to generate a page that is just a record of your "site sits."

* Next week we have an interesting "interruption" in our schedule! To prepare for Alison Bechdel's ESem extravaganza next Thursday night, we are going to spend next week reading her graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragiccomic. Try to finish the whole book by Tuesday (I'll try to focus us on the first 1/2, but it's very hard to discuss 1/2 a novel). Give yourself time to do this (it's NOT an occasion for skimming, and a very complicated procedure, attending to complex intersection of visuals and words...). We will (of course!) be reading Bechdel's graphic novel "ecologically," asking what it foregrounds/ackgrounds about the natural world, as the "environment" in which this family psychodrama emerges--so pay attention to that dimension in particular....

Questions about assignments....?

I also put our group-written "poem" about "what was happening in the room" on Tuesday up in our course forum, and asked if anyone could make a visualization of it...I'm still thinking about wanhong's claim that her physics class always diagrammed motion using dots or squares to represent the object in motion.  Sarah noted the tension in the poem between the sense of physical stillness in the room, and the intensity of the mental activity....that's the motion! Is it an object? Can it be diagrammed?

II. I asked you to bring a copy of your paper #2, so that we could work in pairs,
and help one another generate theses...what is the thesis of the paper you
wrote last week? does it "work"? how might you make it do "more" work?

alexb2016 <--> Barbara
Cahier <--> CMJ
Hannah <--> mbackus
mtran <-->Rochelle W
Sarah C <--> Zoe
Shengjia-Ashley <--> Susan
wanhong <--> Sarah L

Coming back to the large group: what emerged? Can we hear some possible theses?

III. staying in your pairs, drawing now from Raymond Williams' "Keywords":
what are the keywords in your partner's essay?
do you understand what they mean? (does she?)
(how responsible is she for making you understand?)
how advisedly/carefully does she use them?
which ones might you suggest she research?

V. Come back together again, and share some insights:
Are there words in here/words we are using that we
need to understand better/use more carefully?
What are some possible keywords for researching?