Miriam helps Mrs. Miller by forcing the widow to face her demons and listen to her desires. Most of the classes split into smaller groups to discuss this individually. During the course of the discussion, I asked you to pause and take stock of the conversation: was everyone speaking? Were people asking follow up questions? Were people furnishing evidence to back up their ideas? At the end, I asked each person in each group to go around and summarize what he or she took away from the group's conversation. These sorts of summaries are critical to taking good notes, and to clarify our own thinking. When the groups had finished, each group wrote a response on the board to the original statement, explaining why there was agreement or disagreement with the statement.
In some ways, what you informally presented in this statement was a thesis. Even if people disagreed with the idea, they could tell from the phrasing and clarity whether or not is was a compelling thesis.
In the days ahead, we will be working on thesis writing carefully. I provided two handouts today:
- The first is "What Makes a Good Claim?" and you can find that on the wikispace. Here, we looked at the 5 crtiteria any good thesis must meet: arguable, text based, focused, provable, and answers how or why. Study the examples provided.
- The second document is tonight's homework, "The Quotation Sandwich." There, I ask you to develop an original claim about the short story "Miriam" and to support it with one quotation sandwich. We'll workshop those in class tomorrow.
In none of the sections did we get as far as I had hoped--your discussions were just too good.
HOMEWORK:
- Do 5 new wikispace sentences.
- Using the worksheet from class, practice making an original claim about the story “Miriam” and backing your claim up with three different sandwiches.
You spelled Criteria wrong, spelling it, crtiteria. This is in the first number point under the "two handouts" section.
ReplyDeleteCarol Walker