Group Work for Presentations

At the end of Tuesday's meeting, I asked you to write down, in your own words, one thing that startled or intrigued you from chapter eight of Schlosser's Fast Food Nation; then I asked you to choose a quotation from the chapter to represent what you'd written and to do five minutes of freewriting on your chosen topic and quotation. Finally, we broke into groups, and each member explained their thoughts to the group.

For today's class, in preparation for our presentations, we'll be working in the same groups. I am asking these groups to choose from among what the individual members produced last time and work together to frame a problem-posing exercise. Groups will spend the first 10 minutes of class getting organized and quickly sketching out their presentations. After this, we'll take 15 minutes for the groups to firm up their presentations, and each group will present their work in a "dry run" and get feedback from the class. Finally, we will have open lab time for groups to polish and develop their presentations (using freewriting, discussion, PowerPoint etc.) and for individual class members to come up with questions for the presentations.

You will remember the problem-posing method from our work earlier this month. As a reminder, here are the steps:

1. Define the problem. What interests or troubles you in this chapter? What form does the problem take? What are its causes? What are its consequences? Who does it affect, and how? Does it relate to any larger social, cultural, or political issues? How so?

2. Give a quotation to support your definition and explain how the quotation relates to your definition. Be sure to choose the best quotation, not the first one you come to. As we discussed in class, a good quotation relates directly to your point (in this case, your definition of the problem) but includes new information or a new point of view that enriches your point. When you explain your quotation, you should discuss how it relates to your point and explain anything in the quotation that the reader may not understand (such as who is speaking, who the speaker represents, or the speaker's role in the problem). You may need to "unpack" the quotation by discussing key words or phrases, but you should do so in your own words by relating them to the point that you are making or to the speaker's point; please do not provide dictionary definitions.

3. Personalize the problem. Relate the problem to your personal experience or knowledge from outside the class. What have you learned or experienced in your own life that allows you to see this problem clearly as you read the chapter? Describe your experience and explain how it relates to and clarifies the problem.

4. Describe solutions to the problem that have been tried and failed. What solutions to the problem are offered in the chapter or in other reading you have done for this class? What solutions do you know of through personal experience or outside reading? Describe the solutions and explain why they failed.

5. Invent your own solution. If you were given unlimited resources and connections, how would you solve this problem? Who would you work with, and why? Exactly what steps would you take? How would those steps lead to a solution? What specific outcome would you expect?

Evaluation Questions for Presentations

Please answer the following questions as each group presents their problem-posing exercise.

1. Define the problem.
A. Do you understand the problem this group is presenting?
B. Where could this group benefit from development or clarification in their presentation of the problem? Be specific: list words, phrases, or ideas that need work.
C. Is there any aspect of the problem that this group has not considered or explained?

2. Give a quotation to support your definition and explain how the quotation relates to your definition.
A. Did the group choose an effective quotation to represent their problem?
B. Does the group provide enough context for you to understand the quotation or give it the proper weight? Be specific: What else would you need to hear in order to understand the quotation? Did the group provide any context that you didn't need?
C. Does the group adequately explain the quotation and how it relates to the problem they are presenting? What could this group do to develop and clarify their explanation?

3. Personalize the problem.
A. Does this anecdote or personal experience help you to understand or identify the problem?
B. Would you say that this "personalization" relates directly to the problem, or is the group using a comparison to make their point?

4. Describe solutions to the problem that have been tried and failed.
A. Did the group present solutions to the problem or previous conditions where the problem didn't exist?
B. What solutions or previous conditions might the group have presented?

5. Invent your own solution.
A. Does the group's solution address the problem directly, through its real causes?
B. Do you think the group's solution would work?

Persuasive Paragraphs Example

Here is a link to the model paragraph we looked at during today's class; although this paragraph is about a short story, it would be a suitable model for the body paragraphs of any college-level persuasive essay.

In class, we outlined the paragraph, noting how the main claim is broken down into smaller, more specific ideas with textual support and new perspectives or ideas at each turn. The following outline is based on our collaborative work in class:

I. Major Claim: Miss Brill's Sunday visits to the park help her to cope with loneliness

A. She enjoys these outings

B. Her time at the park gets her out of her apartment

C. Her time at the park provides her with company

1. Listening to other people makes her feel included in their lives

2. She notices other people, and feels that they might notice her

E. These visits to the park give her a sense of imagined community, even family

F. For these reasons, her trips to the park allow her to escape the isolation of her life

For the sake of brevity and focus, I have left off the transitional sentence at the end of the paragraph--however, the transition is an important part of the paragraph and not to be neglected.

This model paragraph comes from the web site of Randy Rambo, an instructor at another college. You can find Mr. Rambo's remarks on paragraph organization here; the main page of his site also lists a number of other composition-related topics that you may find useful.

How to Write a Prospectus

Due: on blog, Monday 11/1

A prospectus is a proposal for a research paper, written in advance in order to demonstrate your grasp of the topic and your vision of the research paper. In terms of the writing process, a prospectus gives you the opportunity to focus your thoughts in a finished piece of writing before you get started. Writing a prospectus can help you to develop a sense of what questions will guide your research, what the major points your argument will be, and the order of those points; in a persuasive essay (such as the one you will be writing for this class) the prospectus can also help you to clarify your position before you get started; and finally, it can help you to arrive at the tone of your work and some language for your position early in the process. In terms of class work, the prospectus allows your professor and classmates to give you feedback and suggestions before you begin the research paper itself.

The prospectus is a brief assignment (300 words) intended to provide an overview of your essay. For our purposes, the prospectus will have three parts:

1. Introduce your topic and discuss its importance. A topic is a general area of research such as "genetically-modified seeds," "mercury levels in seafood," or "the locavore movement." Topics tend to be broad, and they can be thought of as the general "field" in which you will ask specific questions. This section of the prospectus should introduce your research topic to your readers in a way that will allow them understand it even if they've never heard of it before; it should be like a summary or overview of your topic, providing specific information without overdoing it. In addition, this section of the prospectus should try to catch your readers' interest by convincing them of its importance -- why it matters to you, why it matters to them.

2. Introduce your questions and a working thesis. Here you provide specific questions that you will be asking about your topic: the questions that will guide you in your research and argumentation. For example, "What are the health effects of high mercury levels in freshwater fish? Why the mercury levels so high? What, if anything, is being done about this problem?" Think of these questions as possible topics/major points for your essay. Introduce them in an order that makes logical sense so that there is a sense of organization and "logical flow" to this section of the prospectus; say a bit about each question, why it matters, how it grows out of the previous question or leads to the next one. Conclude this section with a 1-2 sentence statement or your working thesis for the research essay -- the thesis that you think you will use in your final paper, given what you know right now.

3. Discuss specific tools and sources that you will be using to conduct your research. Don't just say "the web": tell your readers what sites or kinds of sites will you be looking at, who they are written by or written for, and why you've chosen them. Similarly, tell your reader what specific databases you will be looking at and why; what specific subject areas, fields of study, or authors you will consult in your book research. Doing this portion of the assignment well will help you to strategize about your research, making it easier to do that research.

Union Vote at Minnesota Fast Food Restaurant

This afternoon's New York Times has an article on the ongoing unionization efforts at a Minneapolis, Minnesota franchise of Jimmy John's, a Subway-like fast food chain with 1,000 locations nationwide.

Homework for Thursday, 10/21

In preparation for peer review on Thursday, you must bring a working outline and one completed body paragraph for essay #1. If you missed class today, please consult with one of your classmates regarding our discussion of the writing process, paragraph structure, and using quotations.

This assignment will be worth a quiz grade.

Essay #1 Topics

I gave these out this afternoon in ENG101. If you missed class, please consult with me regarding any questions you have about the instructions or the essay questions.

Essay #1 Topics

Due: before midnight on Tuesday, 10/26, by email

Please write an 5-7 page persuasive essay on one of the following topics; please refer to the Style Sheet attached to the syllabus for instructions on how to format the essay. The essay should take a position on your topic in a thesis statement, develop that thesis through detailed explanations of several major claims, and provide support for each major claim. You are encouraged to use personal experience to support your argument, but you must use textual support from Schlosser and at least one piece of independent research gathered through the library’s subscription databases or book research; in addition, you may use support from the annotated bibliography packets. You must provide MLA in-text citations and a “Works Cited” entry for all references.

1. In “Your Trusted Friends,” Eric Schlosser discusses “the explosion in children’s advertising” that has taken place in the past three decades (42), noting that besides conventional advertising fast food restaurants use a number of specialized tools and “marketing alliances” to entice children and gather information about them and their food preferences (48). More recently, according to Schlosser, this advertising has been extended to the hallways and even the classrooms of public schools. Should these industry practices (or one particular such practice) be regulated? Banned? Allowed to continue without interference?

2. In “Behind the Counter,” Eric Schlosser describes efforts to unionize McDonald’s restaurants over the past 50 years and the company’s organized resistance to such efforts in the form of “flying squads” and restaurant closures (76). But Schlosser also describes other, more “passive” forms of resistance to unionization in the fast food industry, such as “de-skilled” systems of production and the franchise structure of fast food corporations (70). Which of these two forms of resistance, active or passive, does more to thwart employees’ efforts to organize for better working conditions and higher pay?

3. A persuasive topic of your choice, based on the first four chapters of Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. If you choose this option, you must present your topic to me by emailing a paragraph-length proposal before noon on Wednesday, 10/20. (Please use the phrase “Ethics of Food paper proposal” as the subject line of your email.)

Two from WNYC: Coca-Cola + How Soda Works

Two radio segments from the WNYC. The first comes from the Leonard Lopate Show, where journalist and author Michael Blanding discusses the history of Coke, the marketing of Coke from its invention just before the turn of the century (1880s) to the present, and the corporate structure and questionable business practices of The Coca-Cola Company. Where is Coca-Cola made and who makes it? What is the environmental impact of world Coca-Cola production? What exactly are we funding and participating in when we pick up a frosty bottle of Coke? Hear Blandings discuss these questions and more in this brief radio interview (28 minutes), which draws on his new book The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink.

Then hear Dr. Kelly Brownell, co-founder and director of the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and author Darcy O'Neil discuss the history of soda from the 1800s to the present in this brief radio interview (30 minutes) from the Please Explain series. Along the way, the pair note the historical relationships between soda, patent medicines, and addictive drugs; the technologies that led to the widespread consumption of soda at the turn of the last century; the relationship between obesity and soda today; and more.

Response #3: Description of a Blog Project + Your First Post

I love obsessive behavior. There's something about a singular commitment to one object or idea that, at its best, raises human idiosyncrasy to the level of art. Motomachi's vending blog is one example: four years old last month, the blog uses daily photographs and comparisons to track the changes in one beverage vending machine somewhere in Japan. Without offering much in the way of commentary, the project manages to inspire observations about the cyclical nature and the major tropes/themes of beverage advertising, the mysterious systems that function around us and provide the everyday context of our lives (in four years, for example, Motomachi has only once seen the machine being refilled), and the role of vending machines in Japanese culture.

There's a similar kind of obsessiveness at work in Chris Harne's Condiment Packet Gallery, a collection of 724 (and counting) scans of condiment packets. The project began in November of 2003 and has expanded dramatically since that time thanks to reader submissions. Harne's goal is to build an exhaustive collection of the packets that fit his criteria (which mostly amount to excluding sugar and salt packets). In building this collection, Harne has managed to evoke a powerful sense of variety in sameness: all of the packets "look alike," yet together they reflect strong differences in national and period style, brand identity, and the colors, themes, and other design elements associated with different kinds of condiment. Harne's collection also inspires me to reflect on the "single serving" lifestyle that has become characteristic of American culture--the intense focus on the individual as the unit of American life (as opposed to the family and other forms of collective) and our tendency to focus on the present moment in isolation rather than situating the present in terms of the past that led up to it and the future to which it leads. In many ways, the fast food industry is the ultimate expression of these national tendencies and--as the international sections of Harne's collection remind us--their most exportable form.

Assignment: Response #3

At the beginning of the semester, I suggested that you find some kind of independent project that would drive your blog. This could be a weekly writing project or it could be something else that helps draw you into the themes of the course and makes your classmates want to check in with your work. Whatever you choose to do, the project should be something that you work on regularly, and it should involve some writing even if it relies primarily on other media. Motomachi's vending blog and The Condiment Packet Gallery provide good models for such a project--although, again, yours should involve some writing. Without copying Motomachi or Harne exactly, you could learn a lot from the ways they've constructed their projects so that they are (1) creative enough to provoke a reader's interest and (2) easy to maintain.

Both of these projects could easily be incorporated into a staple form of the blogosphere, the "regular feature"--a recurring theme that bloggers revisit each week on a particular day. In fact, although these sites are devoted entirely to the projects I've described above, they could still be considered regular features: Motomachi updates every day, and Chris Harne posts his new-found packets every Monday. Having a regular feature can give your blog a sense of continuity and create a shared sense of event among your readers. It can also help you to keep your blog active because it allows you to build it into your routine.

For ENG101 Response #3 (due on your blog before class T 10/12) I want you to write a 300-word description of a weekly blog project that you will do for the rest of the semester. The response should:

1. Describe your project in detail
   
2. Explain how you came up with the project and how it relates to your everyday life
   
3. Explain the themes of your project, what you hope to learn from it, and what kind of thoughts you hope it will inspire in your readers
   

Be sure to use good organization in your response, dividing it into appropriate paragraphs with strong topic sentences. Please label this post with the following words: response, project. All of your blog project posts should be labeled: project.

If you need more inspiration, you might take a look at these other blogs, all of which are devoted to specific projects:

• Miss Q's Fed Up with Lunch: Miss Q is a teacher who decided to eat lunch at the school cafeteria every day in 2010 and blog about her experiences;
  
• Andrea Joseph's SketchBlog: not related to the course themes, but a good model for how to use art and writing together in a blog; and
  
• Slice: this is now a semi-professional blog, but it started out as a personal project to review all of the major pizza restaurants in New York City.
  

On Thursday 10/14, I will give you 1/2 hour of class time in the computer lab to work on the first post for your blog project. Make sure that you bring whatever you need--images you've made or found, text that you've written--to class that day on a USB drive or as an email attachment. After that, I will give you some time to look at each other's projects and offer comments.

Soda and Food Stamps

The New York Times reports this morning that New York State and the City of New York are petitioning to bar food stamp recipients from using their benefits to buy sodas and other sugary drinks. The request, filed with the US Department of Agriculture on Wednesday, would prevent people enrolled in the food stamp program from using their benefits to purchase the beverages for two years, with the possibility of a permanent ban to follow. You can read the full article here, and a Times editorial in support of the measure here.

The move comes on the heels of New York City's failed attempt to impose a tax on all sodas and sugary beverages earlier this year. You can read a Times article about the soda tax by the prominent food writer Mark Bittman here, and a New York Observer editorial in favor of the tax here. During the debates over the proposed soda tax, critics argued that the state and city governments were disingenuous in their claim that the tax was about the health of the citizenry, and that that tax was simply a way to replenish government coffers that had been depleted by the financial crisis. The current petition seems to lay that criticism to rest--or at least to suggest that if the money raised from taxation was a factor, the health of citizens was also a primary concern.

For a different and more complex take on these issues, see Christopher Bonanos' New York Magazine editorial "Taxa-Cola: Why Tax Soda that We Already Subsidize?" here. Bonanos takes issue with the proposed soda tax on the basis that the root of the problem is not consumer's desire for soda but the federal subsidies and other measures that make high-fructose corn syrup so cheap to begin with: "We pay federal taxes to make that can of Mountain Dew cheaper than it should be, encouraging us to buy it. Then we are scolded by public-health authorities for doing so. Then New York proposes another tax, to discourage us from buying it." In other words, according to Bonano, the tax is a small-scale, local attempt to fix a large-scale, national problem--and an attempt to fix that problem by focusing on individual consumers rather than the system that produces it in the first place. Although Bonanos is writing about the soda tax, it would be easy to extend his argument to the current effort to ban the purchase of soda with food stamps.

ENG103: Annotated Bibliography Packet #2!

Annotated Bibliography Packet #2 is now available. You can pick it up in a box outside the door of my office, M109-E. The outer office (M109) is open during the day Monday-Friday.

Cola for Babies? Check Your Sources

In class last week, a number of small discussion groups were talking about the ethics of "cradle to grave" advertising, which Schlosser discusses in section I.2 of Fast Food Nation, and I was reminded of this advertisement, which caused a flurry of discussion when it appeared (yet again) on the web last spring:


As you can imagine, this ad provoked sharp responses wherever it was posted, ranging from diatribes against corporate cynicism to reflections on the strange naïveté of mid-twentieth century America. Writers wrote, bloggers blogged, comment threads spun out their webs of irritable disagreement and knowing consensus.

The problem is, this is not a real advertisement. A little online research reveals its actual source and the fact that it's a Photoshop mock-up. But there is internal evidence too, which active, critical readers of the ad should have caught.

Imagine the embarrassment you would feel if you were the author of this editorial--or one of the many people (for example, this neuroscience blogger and this forum contributor) who have reposted it and passed it on.

Response #2: Problem-Posing Assignment

Please use the following steps to address this week's reading assignment. Think carefully; be detailed and thorough in your responses. Usually I will ask you to turn the exercise into a response paper by translating each step into a well-developed paragraph; but for this week, you may choose to post your work either in prose paragraphs or numbered steps.

Here are the steps:

1. Define the problem. What interests or troubles you in this chapter? What form does the problem take? What are its causes? What are its consequences? Who does it affect, and how? Does it relate to any larger social, cultural, or political issues? How so?

2. Give a quotation to support your definition and explain how the quotation relates to your definition. Be sure to choose the best quotation, not the first one you come to. As we discussed in class, a good quotation relates directly to your point (in this case, your definition of the problem) but includes new information or a new point of view that enriches your point. When you explain your quotation, you should discuss how it relates to your point and explain anything in the quotation that the reader may not understand (such as who is speaking, who the speaker represents, or the speaker's role in the problem). You may need to "unpack" the quotation by discussing key words or phrases, but you should do so in your own words by relating them to the point that you are making or to the speaker's point; please do not provide dictionary definitions.

3. Personalize the problem. Relate the problem to your personal experience or knowledge from outside the class. What have you learned or experienced in your own life that allows you to see this problem clearly as you read the chapter? Describe your experience and explain how it relates to and clarifies the problem.

4. Describe solutions to the problem that have been tried and failed. What solutions to the problem are offered in the chapter or in other reading you have done for this class? What solutions do you know of through personal experience or outside reading? Describe the solutions and explain why they failed.

5. Invent your own solution. If you were given unlimited resources and connections, how would you solve this problem? Who would you work with, and why? Exactly what steps would you take? How would those steps lead to a solution? What specific outcome would you expect?