Week 2 Day One: Group Activity on Tim Gautreaux's Died and Gone to Vegas

I began Week 2's class with some kudos for my students. Jade M. and Vince G. had the best plot awards, while Mason got the award for best sandwich critique.

We moved onto the journaling of an NPR Storycore podcast about a couple who has been married for 60 years. I am using the journaling feature in Angel (which is really called the survey feature) to have students free write on weekly prompts. I chose this prompt to follow up on Margaret Atwood's Happy Endings. I gave them 5 minutes to write and spoke about exercising the writing muscle in order to become better writers. I enjoyed writing along with them. I offered to set up the journal so that others who wanted to share their entries could do so.

Next week I will have volunteers read their entries with me voluteering first to get the ball rolling. I wish I had thought to do that today. This was something we did in the National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute a couple of years ago. I was scared to share at first but then decided no one was judging my writing, so I got braver as the days passed during the institute.

The group project, I felt, was too rushed. I gave them 15 minutes to do their response according to whether they were an author expert, character expert, vocabulary expert, or plot expert. There were a few students who hadn't done the readings. However, when one student pointed out that in the Week 2 Overview of Assignments, I had written the Monday deadline as 11:55 p.m. rather than by class time, I had to let this slide . I hate it when I screw up the details and the students call me up on them. No penalties this week for not doing the reading.

The other exercise to write down on an index card two questions they didn't know the answers to was never done. I spent 20 minutes on the kudos, business matters (having them fill out an index card with some personal info, giving them this blog address, talking a little about why I was having them journal, etc.) I didn't get the chance to show them the National Gallery of Writing site and talk about Paper 1 (which I haven't posted yet in the Course Documents folder). I can't spend all this time on business matters, but until my students get in the groove of what is expected each week, I'm afraid I won't be able to economize.

I talked to the students about leaving the classroom with one gem....one thing that will stick with them about what they learned, or what they did, or how they felt about what they learned or did. Then, as I saw the clock tick down to 3:13 with people still submitting their group project in the drop box, I had a flash of brilliance (or a brain fart as my former colleague Vince used to say). I stood at the door and said that everyone had to say what gem they were walking out the door with. I got some good gems from them all, even Ian who was going to just repeat what someone before him said. I was cruel and let everyone go before he came up with a variation of what someone said about the importance of annotating.

So what was my gem as I walked out of the class at 3:20 p.m? I learned that just about everyone in the class knows what a wet willy is but me. My childhood was much too sheltered, I guess.

Things to refine for this lesson if I do it again:
1. Delete the assignment to read the Prologue of the Wife of Bath and just assign the Tale of the Wife of Bath instead. They didn't have to read that long prologue to understand the points on characterization and relate it to Tim Gautreaux's Died and Gone to Vegas.
2. Clarify during the group work feedback session that an individual group member could add to his or her answer during the discussion with the group members before emailing the answer to the writer to collect all responses and turn into the drop box.
3. Spend a few minutes having a whole class discussion having students summarize some of their answers
4. Choose one group to record the discussion rather than just flitting around catching bits and pieces of conversations
5. Incorporate a small assessment of the activity at the end of the activity before the group processing to make individuals accountable for their own learning of the material.

We are all Process Improvement Consultants (PICs) in this learning journey, right. Literary Laureates, I invite you to comment on these ramblings of my learning and teaching of Lit 2000. I have sooooo much to learn from you! Ciao for now.......

Week 1 Day Two Online Class: Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood

The first assignment to describe a plot following Margaret Atwood's Happy Endings and create a PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the elements of plot: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution was a huge success.

John the revolutionary and Mary the counterespionage agent were the generic characters in Scenario F of Atwood's short story. My literary laureates put on their creative caps and went to town on a plot line. Many captured Atwood's writing style and tone.

A couple of things I would do differently next time are:

1. assigning same due date for storyline and PowerPoint
2. refining the directions to include information that students needed to keep the setting in Canada
3. clarifying in the directions that the students had to invent a storyline for the two characters, not analyze Atwood's Scenario F.

Initially, with the first three posts, there was a confusion with the directions, so I had to explain in the discussion forum that they were writing a plot description not an analysis of Scenario F.

All in all, it was a fantastic beginning to my first Introduction to Literature class.

The following is the winning plot for Scenario F:

Dior and Deception
by Jade M.

The time is 11:42am on a damp Sunday morning in Manhattan. Mary, with cold steel pressing against her tiny back, surfaces from the downtown NRW train on the northeast corner of Broadway and Canal Street. At precisely noon, Mary is scheduled to meet the man that she must kill at a sushi restaurant that is located only few blocks east.

Mary is a green counterespionage agent for a rather exclusive department within the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, more commonly known as the CIA.

Mary was assigned this case based simply upon her looks. At a mere twenty-nine years old, Mary is a goddess: radiant hazel eyes, olive tanned skin, jet black hair, and a body that could give Brooke Burke a run for her money – with the fashion sense to match. Mary was irresistible to almost any man.

Mary’s task was simple: to befriend John and then kill him. John was a British revolutionary with a weakness for only two things: women and Jack Daniel’s. John, as deceptive as his charming and personable exterior may be (not to mention the perfect body) – was a very deadly man. John was responsible for organizing and designing over three hundred criminal cells within Europe – and within the last four years, these cells have been responsible for over three-quarters of all human and drug trafficking throughout eastern Europe and John was looking to expand these cells into New York City. You would neve be able to tell by looking at John, but he has killed thirty-seven men, raped seventeen women, and has trained over ninety-one children how to use a gun.

Over the nine months since John’s relocation to New York City, he has been intimately chatting over the internet with Mary. Little did John know that when he accepted the friend request of Mary, an undercover agent, on Facebook in November that he was, essentially, signing his death warrant.

Much to Mary’s surprise, she enjoyed her conversations with the revolutionary. What began as a few cordial exchanges between the two had turned into a rather private encounter. Facebook messages turned into text messages, text messages turned into brief phone conversations, phone conversations turned into all out phone sex. Mary, as disgusted as she became with the thought of it – she could not be more sexually aroused by her target.

It is now 11:56am and Mary is sitting at a table, plated for two, at Tatsuna – the aforementioned sushi restaurant. Mary will be meeting John for the first time in person. John walks into the restaurant and immediately recognizes Mary from the dozens of pictures that she had sent him. Mary, torn between emotion and rationale, rips from her seat and hastily approaches John. With a comforting grin on her face, she grabs John’s hand as she lead’s him into Public Alley #47 behind Tatsuna. Within a matter of seconds, and with the majority of their clothing still on, John and Mary are desperately entwined in passion. Mary has had a taste of her forbidden fruit. After the deed is done, Mary wipes the Christian Dior lipstick off of John’s neck and asks him to pick up her earring. Mary grips the 9mm that she had cautiously hidden before their physical encounter and cocks the gun as she coughs to mask the sound. Silence: the job is done.

Mary exhales a sigh of mixed emotion as she wipes a spot of fresh blood off of her Balenciaga stilettos. Mary, feeling a bit different than just fifty minutes before, enters the uptown NRW train on the northeast corner of Broadway and Canal Street at 12:37pm to begin the trek back home.

Week 1 Day One F2F Class: Icebreakers, Polls, and Wordles

The time is 2 p.m. on Monday, August 24th. It's another academic year at Florida Gulf Coast University and a family affair on the first day of my LIT 2000 Introduction to Literature class.

My daughter, Leana, and my husband and best buddy, Mark, are there to observe, participate, and support me. The class is active from the beginning. Cedric and Lisa return for more and it's great to see some familiar faces.

The polleverywhere activity tells me that about 67% of my students are in my class because they are fullfilling a Gordon Rule requirement to complete a writing intensive class. I laugh and tell everyone how depressed they are making me. Hopefully, by the end of the term, this dreaded course will bring joy to some.

The Find Someone Who icebreaker gets everyone talking to one another about books and their experiences with books. I learn lots about what people are reading from a New York Times bestseller Freakonomics to Something Borrowed.

The worldles were fun to create around completing the sentence "Literature is...." I wish I had more time for wrap up, but as usual, it was a race to the finish line with two final questions. Did you have fun? Did you learn? I know I learned lots and had a ton of fun. My literary laureates are lovely and I look forward to our Wednesday discussion forum and our face-to-face class on Monday.

Here is a Wordle on literature by Talia and Sam.



http://www.wordle.net/

How about this wordle by Krista and Kevin



Or this one by Ian and Jessica