Great Read

Dr. Kyburz shared this great article with me today during our meeting and wanted to share it with all of you. Enjoy!

Rational Argument Day 2

             After spending a day or two reading my sources and writing down my ideals about the topic on paper, I finally sat down to write my first draft. I have come to the realization that writing while powerful is the most difficult thing to do while enraged about a certain topic. This is dangerous. If you are trying to raise awareness about a subject, the way you act while writing it can make or break the receptiveness of the audience. I wrote three pages using various pieces of evidence from my three sources and was confident it was a disorganized mess. Just passion poured onto the page. After meeting with Dr. Kyburz I was thankfully able to hear how my passion was coming off to fresh eyes. She pointed out that this is what a rational argument is supposed to do. Its supposed to challenge us as a writer to figure out how to objectively put our ideas down. Ironic however that my paper is about bias in higher education and I am letting my own positions about this subject affect the effectiveness of this argument. Edit number two is well underway and feel confident in creating a great paper.

Rational Argument Day 1

I come into class today not knowing what I would write about for this rational argument, the last paper of the semester. I have written this whole semester about the wrong doings of funding among schools and the injustices it has done in our society. I decided to continue with this idea of attacking the education system after speaking with my professor as she had asked what was on my mind and the only thing I could think about were these injustices. This whole semester all I have heard about were the interactions some of my friends have had with these bias instructors. I decided to focus on this very topic for my rational argument as a way to draw attention to the subjective way professors have become over the years.

Celebration of Scholarship

Today was celebration of scholarship at Lewis University, the halls were filled with posters and classrooms were packed for presentations! The talk that I went to was entitled: "Let Your Life Speak: Connecting the Personal with Public Advocacy". Andrea Holm was the first to present and she read from part of her essay entitled "Other People". She mentioned how she never truly had to check her white privilege before until she enrolled in a sociology class. The part that she read focused on a teacher who was laid off and he struggles of facing life without a paycheck and finding a new job all while taking care of a family. She mentioned that her motivation for minoring in social work was because of this very story!

Multimodal Presentation

https://spark.adobe.com/video/KmQ7jgEKQn7q4

Free Write: Argument Essay

This current project of the summary and analysis has gotten me to reflect a lot about how I used to write argument essays. Coming into any English course in college, every student has had an extensive history of teachers beating into them what structure essays should have. This has conditioned us to pull out that format every time we have to start a new essay. I was guilty of this when starting this assignment. I immediately thought back to my teachers in high school and could almost hear their voices saying: "It should be a five paragraph essay format where you present a new idea and argue that till the end of the paragraph. The conclusion should be a summary of all arguments put together." This, I have realized being a student in Dr. Kyburz's class, is not how it should be at all. I need to have a more open mind when writing and not limit myself to a template I learned a couple years ago. I need to write and just see where the argument takes the paper instead of where the paper can take the argument.

Art In Island

        My generation is unfortunately very into technology which consequently has caused us to stray from tradition, which is something I repel. Maybe it was how I was raised or what my parents chose to entertain me with as a child, but attending museums was something I looked forward to, even something we planned our family vacations around. One of the first quotes in this article talked about the may hours one can stay in a museum and "You don't even have a single proof of you being there". If this doesn't sum up my generation in a single sentence. As distant as I try to make myself from identifying with this generation, I am an advocate for ANYTHING that will change them. I think the idea of a selfie museum, which encourages not only the attendance of museums but the interaction with art, is an effective way to accomplish this change. This museum called "Art in Island" takes about two hours to get through but all throughout there are 3-D approximations of paintings, museum goers are encouraged to touch and sit on. This would be an awesome way to trigger interest for some students to start learning about the "traditional" ways of the past.

Public Discourse

In relation to my microtheme which centered focus onto the importance of music as part of education; I have found an article about promoting STEM education and cutting liberal arts funding all together. This article posed a vicious attack about the importance of focusing getting a job in something that will ensure a salary upon graduation. There were several statistics posed on salaries compared by major. It also highlighted that when it comes to funding it is all about dividing up a pot of money among majors. Some even get a "premium". While I do not agree with this stance it is important to acknowledge the arguments that have been posed. These positions reflect the motivation behind the content of my microtheme.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html?_r=0

Microtheme Drafts

         Below is a link to the four drafts of the microtheme constructed for my writing class. The progression of each draft is notable. It is clear that in the beginning of this assignment I was very much stuck on the idea of writing a persuasive essay. It is clear that a microtheme uses very clear and concise language to bring a single idea to the audience. My microtheme focuses on fine arts and music education in schooling.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B62KM8pC3s-2N05TUFJwVnRjNWM

Friday Freewrite!

1. Through this course, and maybe especially through the work of writing your Microtheme, what are you learning about yourself as a writer?

             I am learning a lot about myself while constructing my Microtheme. The topic that I chose was about the arts and education. I did not realize how passionate I was about music until I started writing this and all of my paragraphs were very argumentative and had such direct claims that could lead to a very bias persuasive essay.

2. More broadly, what are you learning about yourself, in general?
   
              In general, I have admitted that when it comes to writing I have a very close minded format in how I approach different topics. I feel that all throughout school it was drilled into our brains about the five paragraph structure and all the exceptions to those rules if the type of essay was changed. This I realize is the one way to ensure that a person will not grow as a writer. That is what the past two projects in this class have taught me. I was finally reintroduced to feeling uncomfortable in a writing class just because of these new forms of presenting an idea to an audience.

3. Can you say that your work on the Documentary Project and/or the Microtheme has taught you anything about the nature of knowledge and/or truth?

                 I can say with extreme honestly that my work on the Documentary Project and the Microtheme has taught me a surprising amount about knowledge and truth. Each project however has taught me truth in their own way. The Documentary Project taught me knowledge and truth by listening to everyone else who had watched an eye opening video and watching one of my own that there is so much out there. Cartel Land for example informed so many of us about this drug war that goes on everyday we are carrying on with our lives. As far as working on this project, I learned of a more objective way to write and had to restrain my own analysis of the film to remain true to exactly what it portrayed. With the Microtheme I learned of how many controversial subjects there really are out there and the safe way to teach others about your newfound injustice. After learning the correct way to write about our subjects, it opened my eyes to how much potential our seemingly insignificant words can have!

Microthemes

            So far, I am feeling really good about my draft. Initially, when I sat down to start writing this microtheme I was focusing too much on the point of view from a persuasive essay which it is not. My topic definitely works for me because of how passionate I am about this topic. I'm having trouble forming the second paragraph and making a very objective view point. I am looking at the example microtheme and seeing how the edits morphed the paper into a great microtheme to figure out what I need to do. I feel that I have a better handle on this microtheme now but there is still a long way to go. 

       

     Example Paper:

        Edits:
  - Use a different word for "Five-paragraph essay" this has become too redundant.
  - Keep it to one question in the second paragraph.
  - Change additional questions into statements: "Is it because there are so many other important things to high school students that they don't have time or interest to learn this technique?"--> There are so many other important things to high school students that they really do not have the interest or time to learn this technique.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Blog: Arts and Ideas Events

               Documentaries introduce a new aspect of rhetoric that is hardly touched on in the typical writing class. However underestimated this is, it provides a new learning experience. Documentaries reframe an understanding about how to formulate questions and problems to explore in academic writing. First, a review of a documentary eliminates the opinions and analytical writing encouraged for other forms of writing. By changing the rules for what can be talked about or in what manner they can be mentioned, expands the linear way of thinking most students are used to while writing. Second, a new objective question must be formulated to appeal to a broader audience. This audience is much different than writing an essay on a specific topic and having an idea of what kind of person could be reading it. The recent project that our class completed opened my eyes to how much flexibility and power writing has to it. An essay could be constructed geared towards one topic or audience and with a few edits could be morphed into an entirely new paper. I valued this experience and feel that documentary writing should have been integrated into English classes sooner.

Read Review and Compare

            I read a review given by the New York Times about the documentary I watched called After Innocence. As I read, obviously I noticed that the tone for their audience was slightly different than the review I wrote. I was writing with the mindset to communicate and inform my class as to what this documentary was about. I could imagine having a larger audience than just a class, the reviewer would need to create a broader summary allowing more to become interested. One aspect that was similar was that both reviews focused largely on how badly the judicial system failed the wrongly convicted. I asked many questions on how this would be fixed in the future and what efforts were being made to do this. The New York Times talks about the attorneys and lawyers who were afraid to admit they made a mistake and what society owes these prisoners. There were not points in the review where our responses seemed to diverge. Again I feel the the difference between an informal and a published review is simply the audience.

After Innocence Reflection

      1. One scene that specifically got to me was when one of the wrongfully imprisoned subjects charged with murder by the name of Nick Yarris described his time in prison and how it had an effect on his life afterwards. Nick explained that for the first two years of his incarceration was kept in solitary confinement and wasn’t allowed to talk that entire time. They could do whatever they wanted to him and whatever he said just didn’t matter. He explains how loud the world was, that he could hear the tires on the road not just their engines. The smell, he described, was overwhelming after breathing refiltered air for so long. He became allergic to the world and struggled to breath with the ease everyone is used to. It was funny to learn that he drives a jeep with no doors and windows to embrace the freedom of being able to be outside. The tire cover on the spare tire on the back of his jeep even says, “Eight thousand fifty seven days” which is the number of days he spent in prison. “Family is everything” was the only thing he had to say. Today, he works as an advocate against the Death Penalty and is still waiting for the real murderer’s DNA to be entered into the national DNA Databank.

          2. I was surprised to hear that ninety percent of cases do not even use biological evidence, most often any biological evidence that is obtained is usually destroyed. I learned that there is something called the innocence project and their mission is to help cases similar to these and to get innocent people off of death row. They receive thousands of letters from inmates that express their need to be exonerated and have their charges expunged.

      3. After viewing this documentary, I was left with such a helpless feeling. After these men were exonerated from their crimes, they were pushed out into the world they had been kept from for so long. For some, this was for decades. Nothing is how they remember it and nothing they do will make up for the time they had lost with their families. One man went as far as to say that “it was almost easier in prison than it is out here”. It made me think about how many things we take for granted on a daily basis. Being able to walk outside or even applying for any job we want. It’s harder to think about the fact that among the 150 that have been freed during the time of this film, there are still thousands still stuck behind bars serving time for crimes they haven’t committed. With the way the judicial system works it is just not easy to get changes passed as one would dream of.

      4.  Some concepts in the film that I may want to research or write about in the future circle all of the ideas expressed in the documentary. I would be interested in learning more about how many people are wrongly incarcerated and of that number how much money is wasted housing these prisoners each year? Additionally, how often are eyewitness accounts used as evidence in trials against accused people? In the documentary, this proved to cause a man to be incarcerated for twenty two years all because one woman’s account of what she thought she saw was wrong. The other topics of interest this film brought up was treatment of the imprisoned. More than one account was that the officers are specifically supposed to just break down inmates to confessing, why aren’t these prisoners being encouraged to build themselves back up and become an asset to society once they are released? If they were treated like this would that stigma of being a convict ever diminish in our society? Most of the people exonerated in this film end up searching for a job their whole life and waiting for evidence to expunge their record. I would be interesting in learning how the system works and why it is that they still are stuck with this record until the real convict is caught and put in prison.