George Lopez on Fast Food + Immigrant Labor

Here's a great George Lopez routine on immigrant labor in the fast food industry. I think Lopez is really funny, but I also find his stand-up work insightful when it comes to thinking about issues of labor and immigration in the U.S.

Thinking about today's class discussion, I wonder if what Lopez is saying contradicts Schlosser's emphasis on teens in the fast food workplace. Is Schlosser out of date on this topic?

Research Assignment #1

Due: Thursday 3/25
Requirements: 1 quotation

There are several steps to this assignment:

1. Critical Reading: Choose an issue, problem, or topic that interests you from your reading of Eric Schlosser's "Behind the Counter." Your topic may come directly from Schlosser, or it may be taken from class discussion or chosen in response to a classmate's blog entry. It is okay to use the same issue you wrote about in Response #2.

2. Independent Research: Using LexisNexis Academic or LexisNexis Academic (New York York News Search), find a good article that relates to your issue. In other words, find an article that provides new and useful information or a new and different perspective that helps you understand the issue better. In general, longer and more comprehensive articles are better sources for this kind of research.

3. Writing with Outside Sources: Write a blog post about your issue, using the article you found to address it. Remember to use your best skills in quoting and/or paraphrasing the source.

4. Citation: Cite your source at the bottom of the post using the following format

Last Name, First Name. "Title of Article." Title of Publication. Date of Publication.

Later in the semester we'll be using MLA format, which is very similar to this. You use MLA here, if you are already familiar with it.

Assignment: Comments

Due: Tuesday 3/23 by noon

Before class on Tuesday, please read and comment on one of your classmates blog entries for Response #2. Remember our discussion about commenting on blogs today: you should be opening a dialogue with your classmate about what he or she has to say, not responding to the form of the writing alone. Consider the observations made in the post and the conclusions that are drawn from them; consider the ideas, analyses, and responses presented in the post.

Your role as an active reader is to test what the writer has said against your own ideas, observations, analyses, and conclusions. Your role in providing written comments is to respond to the writer using what you've discovered in reading his or her work.

Grades + Feedback

By now, everyone should have received feedback on Response #1. It may be worth making a few comments about that feedback here.

This round of feedback includes a series of written comments that address each stage of the assignment (response to reading + field work) from a compositional perspective, considering topics such as organization, development, and the use of outside sources or experiential evidence. I've provided fairly extensive written feedback this time because this is the first graded assignment.

Following my comments, I've given a list of the compositional and the sentence-level issues I noted in the work. One example is listed for each sentence-level issue (usually the first one) but you should keep in mind that the same issue may occur several times in the piece. My advice for working through sentence-level issues (and therefore avoiding them on the next assignment) is to take printed copies of your assignment and my feedback to the Writing Center in E-111.

A few of you will discover that I've given you specific instructions for using the Writing Center, such as "I want you to visit the Writing Center *once per week* this semester." As I said in class, it's been my experience that students who follow these instructions show dramatic improvement in their work (and therefore in their grades!) over the course of the semester.

The grade for this assignment is shown at the bottom of the page. As it states on the syllabus, responses cannot be rewritten; however, all of your response papers for the semester will be averaged together (along with the overall grade for your blog) to account for 30% of your course grade. If you're concerned about your grade on this assignment, the best thing to do is to work out the issues I've noted in my feedback so that you can get a higher grade next time.

Logical Fallacies

The web site that Dr. Rizzieri presented during this weeks LIB110 can be found here. It defines and provides examples for a great number of logical fallacies (errors in reasoning) that frequently occur in advertising and in writing. They even show up in student papers! so it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the most common ones, such as "Appeal to Authority," "Post Hoc," and "Appeal to Tradition."

The Invincible Happy Meal 2

Ryan Vera, who is blogging for Dr. McCormick's "Eat, Read, Write" class this semester, passed on a link to this Morgan Spurlock video in a comment on my earlier post. In the video, Spurlock tests the decomposition time of various McDonald's foods against that of a hamburger and fries purchased from a mom-and-pop restaurant. The results are startling, particularly in the case of the french fries, and may give us some insight into the use of preservatives in the fast food industry. These foods are designed to appeal to our senses of taste and smell, so it's easy to forget that they're also designed to fit the needs of industrial production, to sit in warehouses for long periods of time, and to be transported over long distances before they reach the walk-in freezers of local franchises.

You can catch a glimpse of that production process in this post about a McDonald's factory in Russia. Don't miss the McDonald's Bun Guide and Bun Troubleshooting Tool!

McDonald's Training with the Nintendo DS

The Japanese branch of McDonald's is reportedly preparing to extend its collaboration with the Nintendo Company, expanding the use of the Nintendo DS portable game system to employee training.

McDonald's already has a "synergistic" relationship with the Japanese video game company as one of only two providers for its wireless "Nintendo Zone" service (available only in Japan). "DS owners who visit McDonalds shops with their system... have access to such free services as character distribution, digital stamp rallies, coupons for McDonalds food items, comic distribution, and exclusive game demos" (Nintendo Partners With McDonalds for New DS Service). The other provider is the "third sector" Tsukuba Express rail system.

Now, the fast food corporation is developing game software for the Nintendo DS that will be used to train its new employees. "Using the new DS software, McDonalds believes it can cut training time by half over conventional methods, in part due of the familiarity of the DS system" (McDonalds Uses DS To Train Part Time Workers). The US military has been using video games for combat training for decades (in recent news, see here). The corporate sector has made also been using games technology for training. But, to my knowledge, both military and corporate efforts have focused primarily on games developed in-house: this seems to be the first time that an existing game system will be used to train employees in partnership with the corporation that developed the game system. As such, the McDonald's-Nintendo partnership represents a significant new development for the gaming industry. One thing will remain the same, however: as legacy games, the end products of this collaboration will undoubtedly become the horrid "training videos" of the future.

I'm curious to see how far McDonald's will take this effort if it turns out to be successful, for example whether they will retool their own equipment along the lines of the Nintendo DS gaming system or its controller in order to create a more fluid transition for new employees. Again, such efforts have long been under discussion within the military-industrial complex (for example).

Finally, I can't end this post without making some kind of reference to the popular 1984 film "The Last Starfighter," in which a teen boy discovers that his favorite arcade game is actually a training tool that an alien civilization is using recruit pilots for a battle in space. (No kidding.) Imagine how he would have felt if he'd been training for a job at McDonald's all along.