Really, truly, the last extra credit opportunity

Roger Bonair-Agard

This weekend there are going to be a couple of literary events that you may get extra credit for attending. You'll need to post, as a comment to this blog, a detailed account of your experience at the reading you choose to attend-- a review of sorts, as if for a newspaper like the Tucson Weekly.


One event, at which your teacher will be reading, is called "Arizona Writers for Justice," a response to the Ethnic Studies ban Friday (tonight) at 7pm at Casa Libre en la Solana (on 4th avenue). 


The other is called "Young at Art," an event put on by the University of Arizona's Poetry Center. The fantastic poet Roger Bonair-Agard will be performing there Saturday at three, as will a host of young local folk with lots of talent. 


Go to either or both, write a detailed (300 word) review about either or both, and post as a comment to this blog for extra credit.


Have a nice weekend!

Final Reflection: What Role Can and Should Race Play in the Classroom?

"The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created."

-bell hooks

 In class, we are going to read "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," and your reflection paper will be a response to this narrative. What can we do in a classroom setting to draw attention to some of the inequities that Peggy McIntosh brings up? Write your own manifesto on the role race can, can't and should play in the classroom.


I'd like for you to reflect on the experiences you've had with race in your life and over the course of the last couple of semesters you've had at school. Some questions you may ask yourself are: How do conversations about race usually go with your friends? Do you ever feel that the experiences you have match the way race is discussed? Are we able to discuss it in a refreshing way, or do we always say the same things? Are there dangers to discussing race? Is it possible to agree? What isn't being said? What would happen if certain things did get said? How does it feel to disagree on issues about race in class? What is a productive way to integrate discussions about race into social and academic settings? What were some problematic or memorable conversations in class this semester? Are there any topics you'd like to continue dissecting after the class is over? What would you do if you were going to make race a topic in a class you planned to teach? 


I'd love to take some of your responses to the department to let them know your opinions on how classes involving race and ethnicity function in a university context. Given the recent Ethnic Studies Ban enacted for Arizona high schools, this is a hot topic and your feedback is invaluable. Your final for this class is due Wednesday, May 4th, the last day of class. You cannot pass the class without completing this assignment.


800 words
Times New Roman Font
Double Spaced
Due in class on May 4th
100 pts


(**Bring food if you want! We can have a mini-party).

Creative Revision Ideas

Please post, for the benefit of your peers, the idea you are proposing for your creative revision. A video? A school curriculum? A commercial? Three sentences including information on:

1. What your controversy is
2. What your project is going to be
3. What audience you are most concerned about reaching

Remember, your edited proposal is due Wednesday, April 20th. The projects (and your five minute presentation to the class) are due starting April 27th, depending on the day you sign up to present.

Last Extra Credit!! Kara Walker

Kara Walker's work is known for provoking a strong emotional reaction in her viewers. It could be argued that her work is an attempt to force us back into the reality of what the ante-bellum south was like to live in. For that reason, we must consider not only the gruesome nature of her compositions, but the way in which those depicted events may have impacted the lives of those who actually lived through them.


For your extra credit assignment, please take a look at some examples of Flash Fiction, a kind of story writing that is meant to communicate a character's entire world in around 1,000 words or less. One of the most famous stories is a six word fiction by Ernest Hemingway that reads: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The website "Brevity" publishes examples that you should take a look at to get a sense of how these kinds of narratives operate.


Now that you have a sense for the medium, write a 500 word short story from the point of view of one of Kara Walker's characters. Take a look at her work and be sure to mention the title of the image you are working with so that it can be referred to alongside your creative work.

Cover Memo

Due on the date of your Presentation (April 27th-May 2nd) as part of your Creative Revision Portfolio
Creative Revision, Presentation and Cover Memo: 100 pts


Today in class we will work to refine your proposal ideas so that they can be "packaged" for presentation to a real or hypothetical institution that could potentially sell, distribute, showcase or otherwise validate your idea. We'll work with peers and as a class. Here is the assignment sheet for the cover memo you will eventually want to create, which will serve as the first page of the portfolio of materials you turn in on the day of your presentation:

The cover memo is a letter to the institution that will be (realistically or hypothetically) responsible for dispersing your work to the public. If your revision was to make a video, perhaps you should address the memo to The Sundance Channel about an independent film or TV series you’d like to propose to them, based on your project. If it’s a commercial, address it to a non-profit organization (think along the lines of Mother’s Against Drunk Driving) that may find use of your advertisement, because they have similar values as those comprised by your argument, and may wish to fund you. 

Be sure to LOOK INTO THE PUBLICATIONS, ORGANIZATIONS and INSTITUTIONS that you may potentially “pitch” your creative project to, so that you are sure that the kinds of things they publish or promote actually fit with your subject and aesthetic.

In the form of a formal letter, your memo needs to include:

The name and address of a person at an institution to which you can pitch your project

“Dear XYZ,” or “To Whom it May Concern,”

A brief introduction of who you are, and how you heard about them

A short summary of the information indicating why this project is important, listing off significant statistics and ideas that will hook them into caring about your topic (use three to five points from your documented argument).

A description of what you did for your creative revision

A conclusion summing up why your work will help their institution

More info on who you are and why they should care

Sincerely, Your Name, and signature, and (fake if you want) contact info.

Discuss potential institutions, given the medium you chose for your project, with your incredibly diverse, intelligent, innovative, manipulative peers. REMEMBER: for assignments like these (and proposals), if you follow the basic format requirements, you will probably do very well grade-wise. This letter is sort of like a short rhetorical essay, where the issue at hand (instead of euthanasia or media corruption of feminine beauty ideals) is that you need to inform this institution or change their mind about YOU. Here is a sample:

**

Ralph P. Jones, Director

Jones Gallery

72 Atlantic Avenue

New Haven, NY 11212

(228) 253-0807

Dear Mr. Jones,

I am a freshman at the University of Arizona, with an interest in social justice and visual arts. I have visited your gallery often during my frequent visits to New York, and based on the mission statement for your institution, and the aesthetic of the artists you’ve shown in the past, I think I have an exhibition idea that may interest you.

Summer squash has been an endangered vegetable since 1863, when Thomas Mann first suggested that its rind may be useful as fertilizer. Ever since his article was published in the famous Berlin newspaper, Das Zeit, farmers around the world began to overproduce this vegetable, even in climates where it may not be able to ripen fully, in order to capitalize on it’s rich skin. Today, summer squash has been morphed into a specimen wholly unlike it’s former self. The rind is tougher, the flesh less sweet, and the nutritional value has plummeted to provide about 10% of the vitamins and minerals it once contained. Some summer squash is riddled with blemishes, so that shoppers now avoid it in supermarkets, lowering its production rates in states like Iowa, Nebraska and North Carolina where it grows in abundance. And despite all of this, recent chemical fertilizers have eclipsed the agricultural need for summer squash in terms of cost effectiveness and availability. Its genetic nature was forever changed in service to an historical fad. 

I’d like to propose an historical exhibit charting the biography of this once-gorgeous vegetable, from its many, sustainable uses in the North American continent during the 1600’s, through the hellish years of Mann’s manifesto, to the paltry speciman that it is today. The portraits, reproduced from archives and also taken by myself, respectively, will comprise a show entitled “Ode to a Squash from Another Summer.” The objectives of your gallery, to “encapsulate the very essence of light and motion,” through the exploration of vegetables throughout history, will be well served by this educational and also evocative collection of stark, black and white images.

As I said, I am a scholar at the University of Arizona. I have been interested in photography since age three, when my father handed me a disposable camera, and have participated in group shows, one solo exhibition, and numerous online photography journals since my junior year of high school. My subjects are often human, but as my workshop teacher, Judith Tanzman once told me, my strength is in bringing a wealth of emotional truths and motions to the quiet world of still life. I hope you’ll consider the enclosed materials, which should give you a sense of the exhibition I am proposing.

Sincerely,

Aisha Smith

1234 Tucsonita Lane

Tucson, Arizona, 85716

(123) 456-7890

Final Assignment

Creative Revision 

aka: Your pitch to change the world

CASE ONE: While trying to figure out a way to solve issues like poverty and unequal punishment in the so-called "war on drugs," David Simon decided that instead of writing a long editorial to the New York Times, he would better reach his audience by creating a TV show. He used HBO, a network known for taking creative risks. Members from the cast will, for example, go speak to students at Harvard about the causes of poverty to be sure that the show's intentions are being thoroughly understood and discussed.

CASE TWO: While trying to figure out how to end crime in New York City in the 1980s, the creators of the "Broken Windows" theory came up with a simple plan: clean up broken glass and erase all graffiti from the subways every single day. The crime rate went through a revolutionary shift and New York's crime rate-- for both murder and petty crimes, has been much better ever since.

CASE THREE: While trying to figure out why anti-smoking campaign tend to fail for teenagers, Malcolm Gladwell realized that these campaigns have never truly delve into the reasons why people decide to smoke in the first place. He had a hunch, and interviewed all of his friends and acquaintances, and found that everyone he knew who chose to smoke had a distinct memory of a favorite person-- an especially unique aunt, cousin or friend-- who smoked, but who also had a way of engaging with life that they found special, unique, full of some intuitive wisdom that was both risky and life affirming. Which is to say that the psychological underpinnings for smoking were entwined with that person's deepest sense of self and their understanding of how to live their life. Understanding the full complexity of this, Gladwell argued, should change the way we approach anti-smoking campaigns. 

For your Creative Revision, I'd like to invent a solution to the problem at the root of your controversy. Solve it and begin designing a way to put this plan into motion. The plan and any subsequent materials that you use to illustrate this plan will be part of what you present for your final presentation and turn in for your final project. This plan must involve working with other people through the form of an interview, a survey, or some mode of public engagement that you come up with on your own.

The first due date for this assignment is Monday, April 18th. You will need to type up a one-page, single spaced proposal explaining the way in which you plan to invent a solution to your controversy's problem. Depending on the extent of the plan you come up with, your Creative Revision may be more of an elaborate plan in which various elements are explained and illustrated, much like a portfolio that you'd give to your boss in order to illustrate an advertising campaign. Or, your plan may be feasible enough to begin work on before the assignment is due, in which case you'll be presenting a finished project to the class during your presentation. The second due date is Wednesday, April 27th, when the class will begin presenting these ideas. 

In the proposal, you'll need to include a thoughtful consideration of the following:

• What have you come to understand in the past few weeks about the way you are able to communicate with other people about your controversy? Are they bored by it? Confused? Do they tend to know more about it than you? Do they need so much background information that you end up giving a history lesson?
• In plainest terms, and in your own opinion, what is the biggest problem at the heart of your controversy?
• Who is the most prominent victim of this problem? Identify five specific characteristics of this person or persons (ie: they wear ____, they listen to ____ on the radio, etc.)
• Who can help alleviate the problem? Identify five specific characteristics of this person or persons (ie: they wear ____, they listen to ____ on the radio, etc.)
• Who then will your target audience be as you work to solve it? Identify five specific characteristics of this person or persons (ie: they wear ____, they listen to ____ on the radio, etc.) How can they best be reached? 
• What will your "public intervention" be? An interview? A survey? An experimental performance piece on the mall? You and a bull horn? You dressing up as someone else to see how they are treated throughout the course of a day? BE CREATIVE.
• What do you want them to do once you've gotten them to think about the issue?
• Write a detailed description of the most ideal consequence of your bringing this issue to the attention of your desired audience.
• Explain what steps you will take to demonstrate the legitimacy of your proposal before your presentation is due.

It is important that you realize that your proposal is like the assignment sheet you are drafting for yourself, and you get to determine the way in which you will ensure to have done sufficient work. If your proposal is insufficient, you will need to revise it so that you are holding yourself to a high (or if you tend to go overboard, reasonable) enough standard.

Two Arguments: One Good, One Bad

Your assignment for next Wednesday (April 6th) is to find two opinion pieces: one well composed, and one poorly composed. Check out book reviews on Amazon.com, film reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, editorials and columns on the New York Times, letters to the editor in the Arizona Daily Wildcat or Tucson Weekly, etc. Even videos and blogs and Youtube commentary can work, especially if you're looking for some poorly argued opinions... Then, summarize each text, pointing out what was strong about one and weak about the other. Be sure to quote from each. Meanwhile, keep in mind this question: what is it that can make a person change their mind? What doesn't work in an argument?  Should be around 200 words or so.


Remember, this is required. 


Have a good weekend! See you Wednesday. Go see Cornel West (extra credit opportunity posted below).