Lesson Plan for Week 7: General Thoughts and Notes

Patrick Mooney, TA
Eng 193, Prof. Newfield
18/19 February 2014

Thought for the day:
1. Every time a student sits down to write for us, he [sic] has to invent the university for the occasion — invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like History or Anthropology or Economics or English. He [sic] has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes — to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and an experimental psychologist the next […] I am continually impressed by the patience and good will of our students.
  
  -David Bartholomae, "Inventing the University"
Return of papers and discussion of what was/was not successful on the papers:
- Many people wrote very good papers. Even people who were less successful are doing some things well.
- On the other hand, everyone has some room for improvement, and I see helping you improve to improve your writing as a primary part of my job. Please see me if you have questions or want advice!
- As discussed on my grading rubric, one of the things that hurts your grade is problems with formatting or grammar.
  - I do not personally believe that there is a necessary correlation between intelligence and knowledge of the minutiae of English grammar, but part of my job is to prepare you for life in the "real world," and you will encounter many people in your professional lives who do believe that this correlation exists. Some of these people will serve gate-keeping functions by making choices about whether, e.g., you will be hired or promoted, so it is worthwhile to learn to write clean, error-free prose.
  - If you are having trouble with the mechanics of writing, you may want to take your paper to Campus Learning Assistance Services, or to a friend who is knowledgeable about English grammar and punctuation. I am also happy to discuss these issues with you!
  - One of the opportunities that you have in college that you will not have later in life is the opportunity to receive free writing tutoring! Take advantage of this opportunity while you have it.
  - I did not fully enforce the grammar/formatting limitations while grading this paper, but did point them out. I will fully enforce these penalties on the next paper.
- Overall statistics for (my) students' grades on this assignment:
  - Mean: 85.13% (a middle B)
  - Median: 85.00% (a middle B)
  - Mode: 85.00% (a middle B)
  - Standard deviation: 5.12 percentage points
- If you have additional questions about your grade, you might find it worthwhile to take another look at my grading rubric.
- If you do not believe that the grade you received is a fair assessment of the work you performed, then you should look at the dispute procedure on my grading rubric. Essentially, I want a copy of your paper with my comments on it, plus a written explanation, based on my grading rubric, of why you think you should receive a higher grade. We will then schedule an appointment to discuss your grade. If we still do not agree on what your grade should be after this conversation, then you should speak to Professor Newfield.
- If you have questions about the details of how your grade is calculated, you should see this document.
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?