Lesson Plan for Week 9: General Thoughts and Notes

Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared but that of the man who has prepared and is never taken.

—E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ch. 12 (see this quote with slightly more context)

• If you'd like to know your grade going into the final exam, you can turn your paper in early to my mailbox (South Hall 3431) by noon on Monday 17 March, and I will email you before I go to bed the night before the final with your grade up to that point (and give you your paper back with comments after you turn in the final exam).
• Remember that quiz 3 is this Thursday!
• What do we want to do next week with our last meeting? Should we have a discussion of Sara Gran's novel, or should we do another peer-review writing exercise, or should we do some other third thing?
  • Sections 50898 (Tuesday 5 p.m.) and 50955 (Wednesday 5 p.m.) will be having a discussion of Sara Gran.
  • Section 50963 (Wednesday 6 p.m.) will be doing a peer-review feedback exercise.

• Group (WRG) discussion:
  • What do you see as the primary benefits for the detective after which your WRG is named, as a protagonist in the story in which he/she appears?
  • What drawbacks does your group's detective have as a protagonist?
  • What makes for a good protagonist in a detective story, anyway? What about other elements of fiction — what works, and what doesn't, in the stories that we've seen so far this quarter?
• Other discussion questions:
  • Is Ghost Dog a detective story?
  • What is Professor Newfield's "point" in assigning this film?
  • What does the film contribute to the course's large-scale concerns? To the quarter-long conversation about detective fiction?