additional
exercises compiled by Glen Rodgers for the 1998 "First
Seminar" Workshop
Comparing
Student Summaries
For our next meeting, read the first chapter of the text
and then write the best one-page summary of it that you can.
Make sure that it fits on a single page. Prepare to submit it
in printed (word-processed or typed) form with a cover sheet
that has your name, date, and honor pledge. At the beginning
of the second class session I collected the summaries, turned
back the cover sheets, put a number on each summary, and asked
the departmental secretary to make 15 xeroxed sets of them.
The sets were ready by the end of the class period, and I distributed
them to the students. The assignment for the next class was
to read the summaries and be prepared to critique them, which
we did. This exercise provided students with a range of responses
and solutions to a common writing task, and let them see how
their efforts compared to those of their classmates. Students
could see immediately that some summaries were better than others,
and why they were better. Critiquing the summaries anonymously
provided an opportunity to discuss a whole range of writing
issues -- style, balance, accuracy, clarity, sentence structure,
spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the like. I felt, and the
students confirmed, that it was an insightful exercise.
"What
If" Writing Assignment
During a class period we brain-stormed as a group in order
to identify a critical moment in human history that we would
"re-write" in order to speculate about what might have happened
since. For example, in my LSW we chose European colonization
of Africa and Asia as a pivotal "event" in human history. We
then re-wrote that history so that Khmer, Indonesian Srivijayan
and West African empires had first colonized Europe. Students
were then asked to write a story about any character or group
of characters in any part of the world in the current age that
reflected how things would have been different with this change
in history. The stories were all over the place, very creative,
funny and generated a lot of class discussion in the end.
Family
Members Interviewed
In a Freshman Seminar unit on Community and Performance,
I developed an exercise in which students interviewed family
members and turned the interview into a monologue that they
then performed for the class. The exercise had four components:
1. We read and viewed FIRES IN THE MIRROR by Anna Deveare Smith,
a performance piece in which Smith goes into a community after
a public disturbance (in this case the riot in Crown Heights,
Brooklyn in 1992) and interviews diverse members of the community
and then performs selections from the interviews. In this first
component, we discussed process and outcome as they related
to community culture and complexity. 2. We developed an interview
process, designing questions to elicit information about an
important memory or event. The students practiced their interview
techniques on a non-student member of the campus community and
reported the results in class. 3. Over fall break, the students
conducted their family member interviews, recording their information
via notes, tape recorders, or video cameras. They then returned
to campus, developed a three-minute structured monologue that
they memorized, staged (using simple costume pieces and physical
movements), and performed for the class. 4. Finally, the students
completed a writing assignment in which they assessed their
own performance, the success (and difficulty) of the interview
process, and the forms of communication they used to complete
each stage of the exercise.
Martin
Luther King essay contest
The college has a Martin Luther King celebration at the
beginning of second semester. Part of the celebration is a student
essay contest. Students submit an essay about King. The winning
essay is read at the MLK celebration and receives a cash prize
of $250. Let's incorporate entering this contest as part of
the writing/speaking aspect of the course.
A
Day in the Life
An idea that worked for me was having my students read an
article about an architect -- actually a profile of Frank Gehry
from The New Yorker -- and then write a first-person piece about
"a day in the life." The purposes that this assignment served
were to encourage close reading of the article (they began by
going through it and marking passages that directly or indirectly
indicated how he spent his time), bringing creative insight
and intuition to the assignment as a necessary means of filling
in the gaps, and requiring them to synthesize the information
into a structured, cohesive narrative.
Self-introductory
speech or descriptive essay
My Most Memorable Experience: describe your most memorable
event or experience from high school. Set the scene for us:
where, when, who was there, what happened, what part did you
play in this event, and why this event/experience is so important
to you. How did it change or impact your life? Or, how or what
did the event contribute to the person you are today?
Setting
Goals
Read the sections of the Allegheny College Course Catalogue
entitled "Campus Life," "Scholarship Funds," and "Prizes." Decide
which organizations you want to join or activities that you
wish to participate in during this academic year. Determine
which 3 awards or prizes you are going to receive sometime during
the next four years. You may discover that you must be a member
of a particular organization or declare a certain major to be
eligible for an award. Also, you may opt for more than 3 prizes.
Write a 2-page essay that (a) introduces yourself and your interests,
(b) lists the activities and/or organizations you intend to
become involved with and why you want to participate in them,
and (c) the awards or prizes you shall receive and why these
prizes are important to you.
Locating
and Evaluating Internet Sources
Assuming that students needed only a brief review of how
to use a browser, most of a 75-minute class was spent with Helen
McCullough, A-V Resources specialist, learning about search
engines. The assignment, begun in class, asked students to use
either supplied keywords or a search plan of their own to locate
two internet sources appropriate to a given course and to write
a 400-word annotation of each site, using the criteria listed
in Evaluating Resources, a Brief Guide, a section of which is
given below.
-
A good starting point
for evaluating sources was written by D. Scott Brandt,
Purdue University Libraries. It's title, Why we need
to evaluate what we find on the Internet, is self
descriptive.
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The Wolfram Memorial Library
at Widener University offers Teaching Critical Evaluation
Skills for World Wide Web Resources Be sure to look at
the checklists for evaluating different types of web sites
such as personal home pages and informational sites.
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Thinking Critically about
World Wide Web Resources written by Esther Grassian, UCLA
College Library, provides a list of guidelines to assist
in evaluating web sites. ·
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Evaluation of Information
Sources offers a list of dozens of web evaluation links.
Check the section labeled selection criteria for specific
sources to see what makes a site cool enough for Cool
Site of the Day.
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Citation Formats. This
isn't an evaluation resource. It's a compilation of citation
formats for electronic resources from Emory University
Health Sciences Center Library. If you decide to cite
a web source you'll need to do it in the correct format.
This guide will help you do that.
