Lesson Plan for Week 5: General Thoughts and Notes

Patrick Mooney, TA
Eng 193, Prof. Newfield
30 October 2012

1. Thought for the day:

   […] every word is at home,
   Taking its place to support the others,
   The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
   An easy commerce of the old and the new,
   The common word exact without vulgarity,
   The formal word precise but not pedantic,
   The complete consort dancing together […]

   -T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, lines 217-223 (sec. V)

2. Administrative matters:
   • The bookstore will begin returning books to publishers on 5 November.
   • A new document has appeared on the section website: How Your Grade Is Calculated (in Excruciating Detail). Let me know if you have any questions!
   • Return quizzes.
     • Discussion of grading on quiz 1:
       • There were six total correct answers on this quiz, so it is worth six points relative to the total number of points for all quizzes. The other two quizzes may have more or fewer correct answers. I do not yet know how many total points the quizzes will have, but will scale them all so that they are worth 15% of your total grade.
       • According to Professor Newfield's expressed wishes, I have penalized not coming up with the correct answer, but not providing extra incorrect answers.
       • This will continue to be the case for upcoming quizzes as well, provided that no one selects so many incorrect answers as to raise a suspicion that they are trying to game the grading system. If this becomes the case, I will begin to penalize incorrect answers.
   • Reminders about the upcoming paper:
     • Not hitting the bare minimum length for the paper (three full pages, not including the Works Cited page) — even by a very small amount (even by one line) — will result in a very heavy penalty.
     • There is a sample MLA-compliant paper posted on the section website, along with notes on areas where students commonly experience difficulty complying with the standard.
     • The section website also contains a set of research-related resources, if you are still looking for an article to disagree with.
       • It is necessary to disagree with a specific assertion that the article makes, but it is not necessary to disagree with the article in toto.
       • Remember that, while the model for political discourse involves jumping onto separate sides of a line and yelling and waving flags, the model for academic writing is the search for nuanced truth.
     • The section Twitter stream includes links to articles in Microsoft's knowledge base about how to change settings that commonly prevent MLA compliance.
     • The section Twitter stream also contains a link to a rather good article called "What Is Academic Writing?" It's primarily targeted at students taking freshman composition, but is a good resource for those who feel fuzzy on what the boundaries of academic writing are.
     • Other questions about the paper?
   • Other questions?
3. Questions for discussion:
   1. Near the beginning of Roman Polanski's Chinatown, J.J. "Jake" Giddes gets into an argument with a mortgage banker from The First National Bank and yells, I don't kick families out of their houses like you bums down at the bank do! Much of the plot of Chinatown involves Jake's attempt to perceive power relations between individuals far above the social levels at which he normally moves. How do these power relationships relate to property ownership?
   2. Chinatown is a movie about power dealings between white people, but the title of the movie and much of the characters' backgrounds involve relationships with separate, non-white communities. How do these communities relate? How is this similar to and different from the relationships between "Easy" Rawlins and the Los Angeles white community in Walter Mosley's Black Betty?
   3. The novels we have read and the movie we have seen so far in the quarter have been set in Los Angeles. How do the processes of detection that we have seen in these texts depend on a knowledge of Los Angeles and its power relationships?