Let's Try Again

Hi.

Um, fix your family member "character profiles."

Most that I read were too short, too one-dimensional, and too superficial. "Grace" is the model for this assignment and I expected (still expect) to see writing that was (is) substantive, thoughtful, artfully crafted, detailed, interesting, and voice-driven. Only a few stand out in my mind as meeting that criteria: shout out to Michelle, Marissa, Rizwan, and Sophie. Everyone else: go read their blogs and then re-do yours.

I love you guys but GET IT TOGETHER. You're better writers than this. Just because something is on your blog does not mean that you should slack on it--exactly the opposite is true. AP formers can vouch for this. Invest. Invest in your blog. Write like you mean it. Every time. Write. Don't just park a few ideas there and call it a day. It's not a journal, a diary, a Facebook status feed, it's your vehicle to improve your writing, to take risks, to try out different techniques, "voices," approaches. So if you still haven't added links, played with your layout until your eyes begin to cross and the clock blinks 3am at you, what are you waiting for? Some of you, it seems, are not really getting the point of what we're doing in this class. It seems that you are dragging your heels, digging in at every opportunity, resisting. KNOCK IT OFF ALREADY!

Mini rant over. Go write something better than what you had before.

Thanksgiving Homework: Be Thankful for Your Education

Extended Blog Assignment

Later on this term, we are going to work on a narrative that requires some detailed observations you are going to make this weekend. You don't have a ton of AP homework over Thanksgiving. You do have this really fun extended blog.

Task: OBSERVE & RECORD.

Oftentimes, on Thanksgiving, family and friends gather and eat and celebrate. It sounds fantastic. Sometimes. You'll learn more about this as you get older, but a common irony of family get-togethers to celebrate is that family can be incredibly annoying and dysfunctional at times. Watch the Thanksgiving film Home for the Holidays with Holly Hunter, and you'll know what I mean.

Anyway. I pretty much just want you to tell me about your family. Record your observations, tell stories, note traditions. Write a lot. I want you to write a lot more than you've been writing for your previous blog posts. This is an extended journal. Like, you should be writing for at least an hour.

You can do this in multiple posts, or one big post-information-dump. It should be narrative, or descriptive, or in a list, or include pictures--it should be personal and funny and beautiful; but most important it just has to be. This is your forethought, your brainstorming, where you get it all down (remember, that's Lammott's advice, first in Shitty First Drafts--this is your down draft). It might not be the essay you come back to later. Or, you might find it's about Christmas or some other holiday that's not Thanksgiving, or some other thing about family that's not even about the holiday that it's "about" on the surface. 

Tell me about your Thanksgiving. Tell me what you observe this weekend, and then let the reflections that come directly from those observations inform what else you include in your post.

Be observant. Maybe you're noticing secret metaphors that live around your house, like the only pictures your mother hangs are in black and white, or your father is always in charge of the turkey, because it turns out your mother burned it the first year they were married and has been embarrassed about it ever since. Maybe you always play canasta. Maybe you go shopping with your friends on black Friday and only buy presents for yourselves. Maybe you decorate your tree.

Create round characters of your family members: maybe your uncle Jim always wears that yellow shirt with the airpit stains that match the same brown as your grandmother's gravy.

Reflect on the essay we read today: Barry's Lost/Turkeys in the Kitchen. His essay, turns out, is pretty significant, a character- and image-driven piece that defines a tradition and comments on social dynamics and gender roles. Another piece that you should read that we didn't have time for is Grace by Kevin Kling. It's on Moodle and my website. Go find it. Go read it. I bet both Kling and Barry wrote a blog post just like this one before they wrote those essays.

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Other work: Remember that you won't get class time to work on your blog study. Because your only other homework is this really fun and awesome blog post, you should be tracking your blog and keeping up with your journals. Don't procrastinate on this. Just don't. You'll regret it so hard come January if you do.

BLA reading.

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What else? Happy Thanksgiving! Check each other's blogs over break--comment and joke and enjoy. I'll probably be blogging, too.

BLA Ideas

Remember how you need to find a book to read for term 2 BLA? Remember what I told you about how to find the right kind of book? Remember the criteria for it?

• It must be nonfiction
• It must be argument-driven
• It must be book-length (as in, continuous, not a collection of short works)

BLA does stand for Book Length Argument, after all, so you must find just that. I spent the last ten minutes sniffing around for some books to add to my list. Here's what I found:

Blink, Outliers, Tipping Point (pretty much anything Gladwell)
The Silenced Majority
The New Jim Crow
The Swerve
Plutocrats
Twilight of the Elites
The Price of Inequality
What's the Matter with White People
Better Off Without 'Em
The Party is Over
Half the Sky (yes, this is what the documentary is based on, but don't assume they're the same)
The Digital Divide
The Shallows
Distracted
Eating Animals
The Ethics of What We Eat
Who Stole the American Dream
American Lion: Andrew Jackson
The God Delusion 
The Purity Myth
Culture of Fear 
Brightsided
Nickeled and Dimed
The Beauty Myth
The Body Project
 

Politics? Pop culture? History? Economics? Food? Digital things? There's something for everyone, people. Something for everyone.

I have plenty of copies of Omnivore's Dilemma, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, The Gatekeepers, Outliers.  And I have maybe a few copies of Fast Food Nation, Savage Inequalities, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Nickeled and Dimed.

By Tuesday 11/20, you need to know which book you want to read and who else is in your group. I will be back that day and I will ask you. There will be a sign-up. It will be great.

Don't hastily choose a book just cuz other people are or just cuz it's one I have. There are a lot of interesting books out there. Look for them. Just remember the criteria and the examples I offered--not every nonfiction book will fit the bill. If there's a book you're interested in and it's not on this list, you should definitely run it by me.

YEA BOOKS!