Week 6 (Oct. 4 – Oct. 10)

Table of contents

To-do and Weekly Schedule

Reminders

  1. The syllabus remains open throughout the semester for comments. Use Hypothes.is group teaglobalhistory to leave comments and suggestions for improvement.
  2. Remember we have a “best-before” dates system, so if you skipped tasks or were swamped with course work, you can catch up: Did you comment on the “tea poems” post from your fellow students? And did you write your Sunday post (garden visit or using the new 10-on-1/1-on-10 technique)?
  3. If not, catch up, or share with me why you feel that particular task is not productive for your development as a writer, and we can look for something that better helps you develop your writing skills.
  4. Plan ahead: Get your Garden Hours in (generally Saturdays [and I think also Sundays?]: 12-2, more options during the week may come soon), and if you attend events for the campus community (e.g. from Center for Ethics, 40 Years of HIV and Aids Activism), or performances on campus: write your event responses.

By Monday, 11:59PM

Peer feedback

Make sure to keep reading and commenting on each other’s work! I notice in Hypothes.is some of you are not keeping up with this task and you’re missing out: helping others to identify where the strong areas are in their writing, and what parts they can develop more helps you to see your own writing differently, too. Remember to set the widget to the group teaglobalhistory, rather than “Public”!

PLEASE NOTE: If you’re lagging behind, or are shy in class, in particular in full-class discussions, or you feel there are students you’ve not spoken with much, you can “talk” with them by commenting on their blogs in the Hypothes.is comments 😀 . And you can (should?) respond to their comments, it’s polite to engage in conversation! That’s the reason there is a reply button in Hypothes.is.

This week posts for feedback are mostly on the Classic of Tea illustrations and the tea tasting, but there may be the odd earlier one, as students are sometimes catching up and of course they still can benefit from the feedback.

Like last week, below you find links to four blog posts from your fellow students. If one of the websites is your own, or it is twice the same person’s, refresh the page, and you should get new sites. [posts coming on Saturday!]

  • Post 1:
  • Post 2:
  • Post 3:
  • Post 4:

Leave feedback, questions, thoughts, insights about the contents of the posts of your fellow students using Hypothes.is group teaglobalhistory. You can ask for clarifications, point out similarities and differences with the material you covered, or with your interpretation. This should encourage you to return with different eyes to the original materials.

Use tags in Hypothes.is: question: If you have a question (obvious); answered: if you gave an answer to a question; info: if you provide more information, looking up additional facts, drawing on knowledge from other classes; and other tags you can think of. This will help us to navigate more quickly to the questions that still need answering.

Use the “Architect’s Model” of giving feedback, and engage with concrete issues. Go beyond “Yeah, I agree,” “I like” or “I think the same”, and instead explain why you have that reaction, or if you disagree, you can try to persuade the original poster of your idea or interpretation. Look through previous weeks’ posts for some good examples if you want to up your game!

Checklist

I commented on four fellow students’ posts about the Classic of Tea illustrations or the tea tastings, using the group teaglobalhistory in Hypothes.is.
I made sure to leave substantial comments that move the discussion forward and help to create better insights, and go beyond a “nice” or “great”. I was specific!
I left comments that I would like to receive myself: thoughtful, helpful, kind, but also pointing out errors so they can be fixed.

By Tuesday, 12.30PM

Gather in TREXLER LIBRARY B01! Don’t come to Ettinger.

Kelly Cannon will guide us through an exercise to help you separate the wheat from the chaff in materials on the history of tea (and what to do with everything in between), and we’ll discuss where to start with looking for good, reliable sources for your projects this semester. It’s a wild world out there for tea history!

The exercise focuses on tea in Japan, and the way chanoyu or the tea ceremony, and in particular in relation to gender. We have not yet looked at this, but you’ll be able to dive into all things related to Japanese tea if you want starting this week.

  • Check which group you are in, using the Spreadsheet.
  • Go to our Subject Guide for the course, and at the top you see a list of articles (Numbers 1-5). Look through the article you’re assigned in the spreadsheet.
    • Reflect on your assigned source: what, if anything, makes it authoritative on the subject of chanoyu (and if applicable, in relation to gender)? What if anything detracts from it being an authoritative source? In short: strengths and weaknesses.
      • TIP: as always, it’s a good idea to write this down, just in case your brain decides to take a break during class and you can’t access that awesome info you came up with earlier! (Is it just my brain that does that??)
    • You may collaborate with the people in your group in advance.

By Thursday, 12.30PM

Selecting a starter pack for the first project/paper/essay – start this well before class so you get a chance to browse the starter packs at leisure, over a cup of tea.

We will also look at techniques for analysis and project management tips for a piece of writing larger than a blog post.

WHY? One of the main goals of the First Year Seminar is to set you up for writing analytically, and in the college environment, that usually means writing papers or essays. We will now shift gears to move to that next level, and develop an idea, find materials, and write a first essay connected to the history of tea.

To get you started, I offer here a few “starter packs” with materials that fit together around a theme. You don’t have to use all of the materials offered, and you can add other texts we have covered, or find new ones (e.g. through the library). This is why they are called “starter packs”: to help you on your way with some materials around a central theme, but how you draw this out into a longer piece of writing is up to you: what are the themes and ideas that interest you? How can you use texts, objects, or art to support the ideas you express in your writing? The fun part of writing is that you get to decide what you write about, and how you draw connections between materials.

If we have not yet covered the materials you want to work with in class, you can use the analytical techniques we have seen so far, and through conferences with me and Brianna explore possible themes to write about. Developing ideas is part of the writing process. Remember the Writing Center and the Writing Assistants are always able to help you with this, too, in other courses!

WHAT? Pick one of the following four starter packs. You will get a chance later in the semester to explore the others, and more! You will be taken to a new webpage with all the bibliographical details and, for materials not in Trexler library, PDFs. You will use these to write and rewrite a 3-5 page essay over the next 2 weeks. It will have a “full scholarly apparatus”, that means: footnotes and a bibliography, and in our class we use the Chicago Notes and Bibliography Style, 17th edition.

WHEN? Schedule for the next two weeks:

  • Week 7: (Oct. 11-Oct. 17)
    • throughout the week: mandatory meeting No. 2 with Brianna
    • Tue: Library session 2: Using Zotero for references and citation management
    • Thursday: “Project Lab Time”
    • Sunday: First draft due
  • Week 8: (Oct. 18-Oct. 24)
    • Tue: peer reviews of the draft in class, and rewriting based on feedback
    • Thursday/through the week: rewriting and reflections, conferences with Dr. D to prepare for a mid-term grade about your work in the course as a whole so far.

I will not introduce new course content to the group; instead you will work independently through the materials of your choice and/or find new ones in the library, and I will help you understand them and guide you. This is what it means to do research and writing at college level, and if it seems difficult, that is the point: you will learn how to pick a topic, find materials, read “with and against the grain” (that is: analyze), and then write about what you find interesting, intriguing, remarkable, in an essay where you try to persuade somebody about your interpretation of the body of materials. None of this is “easy”, but you can do it! Brianna and I are here to help you with this, and we’ll break this elephant down in hunks, chunks and bites. (More details on this to follow.)

By Sunday Oct. 10, 11:59PM

BEST-BEFORE DATE EXTENDED (I didn’t get to round these up in timely fashion for you, mea culpa!)

Peer feedback: catching up!

I’ve collected here posts that have fewer feedback comments from peers than average, because random sometimes means that this happens. (It can also happen because some of you are behind on your commenting/feedback duties!) So jump in and help your peers to see their writing through readers’ eyes.

Remember you can always rewrite a post based on feedback from your peers. I encourage you to add a short description at the end of the post how you rewrote it, or what you did with the feedback, and then alert me or Brianna to your revised post. You can also use this in your (upcoming) reflections as evidence of growth as a writer.

What if you think you don’t have anything nice to say and you’d rather not comment than come over as mean? Sometimes, a student is in a hurry to post something, or is just not motivated to write and “phones it in” (it has happened in other classes, so why not here?). Perhaps you don’t want to be negative. But you can turn your criticism into encouraging feedback:

  • suggest checking the requirements of the post (and leave a link to the assignment) and leave a suggestion where they can expand or make changes.
  • start with “what I find interesting about your post is…” and fill out the sentence. Then suggest briefly how they can expand on that part.
  • sometimes, we just need somebody to tell us what we don’t know: that we’re not working as hard as we should, or that we actually can do better/more. And if you leave a suggestion where to start (e.g. “you can probably add an example here and analyze that using the X technique”), that’s really useful.
  • provide a link to another post about the same text or topic that you found was really well done, or funny, and suggest they try something similar.

[randomized posts coming soon!]

Slides

Where to get help