My classes with Delanie and Estefania were pretty similar this week. Since Delanie is working on representations of home in film, I showed her a memorable clip from Treme (here, if anyone’s interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt38De7v08k) and asked her to watch it a few times and analyze the scene in a formal paragraph, as if it were a body paragraph in a longer essay. I pointed out a few cinematography-type things to look for that I remember neglecting when I first wrote about film. She made really interesting observations in her paragraph and our discussion, but could have used stronger topic and concluding sentences to speak to an overall “thesis” about the scene. She also included some unnecessary summary. For homework, she’s choosing another scene to complete the same assignment and practice writing about film.
I had to spend a little more time in my meeting with Estefania talking about Credit/Non and finalizing her syllabus. Then, I had her re-read an article she’d sent me, “San Antonio Rose” by Mimi Swartz, and analyze the author’s language in a response paragraph. I tried to point to the ways language can inspire action/change since our course is (at least in part) about politics. On her assignment sheet, I used some of the definitions of “rhetoric” on this website that Prof. Wood sent me via email (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/). She did well but also was missing any sort of connecting theme in her observations, which we talked about, and then I asked her to do the same assignment using a chapter from Eleanor Roosevelt’s book You Learn By Living, which I think has some really powerful writing in it.