English

Discussion Board

This assignment will be due every Friday (morning). So you will want to have it in by Thursday night. It is the third short weekly writing assignment that helps you prepare for class, show that you are reading, and participate in class. More specifically, this assignment will allow students to comment on relevant current (or historical) issues relating to our texts. I will provide you with a number of articles every week, which I expect you to read and write a short discussion board post on. This DB post must achieve the following goals: Identifymain ideas from at least two of the articles (which you must choose after you have read all of the assigned articles), and make at least one connection with the text we are reading that week. Optional: quotes (no citations necessary; connections with other Mosaic texts; connections with any outside material). Minimum: 300 words altogether (two paragraphs, each on one of the articles, about 150 words each).

Author Fun Facts:

This assignment is due roughly every other week (dates on BB). It is also short and designed to help you strengthen your understanding of our texts as created by people with real lives, personalities, and politics, people who existed at a particular time in a particular place.  What I want you to do is read up on who our authors were, their lives, their work, and their influence, and write at least 250 words about one particularly interesting fact about the author’s life. You should say what your fun fact is and go into a little bit of detail explaining it, and why this fact is interesting to you personally, the class, or the world at large. Please cite your sources by listing the URLs of the websites you used. (You will lose points if you forget to do this.) Remember to use good judgement in deciding which sources are credible. Wikipedia and Sparknotes may be used, as well as encyclopedias and you-tube videos with academic content. (These are all relatively credible, if not 100% scholarly, sources. You are welcome to use the library catalogue for articles, etc. also.)

This assignment will be evaluated in terms of accuracy, specificity, and reasons why this fact matters to you/us. Remember not to provide a biography; pick one fact about this author, after you have done your research, and explain why you chose this fact to talk about. I need to be able to tell that you really did spend some time reading about this author and thinking about them.