Hey class,
By now you should have received by email a link to join the Google Group email list, so I can email you all as a single group. You should also have soon thereafter received a link to the course Google Drive folder. If so, your first bit of homework is already complete!
As I have decided we will discuss setting up your blogs on Wednesday, don't worry about doing that for now.
I do need you, however, to quickly upload your summer essays to Google Drive under "Submitted Student Work." Be sure to create a personal subfolder using your full name. Please be reminded that I only accept work as a Google Doc file (no Word, PDFs, or Pages!). So copy and paste if necessary. This is in order to make giving you detailed feedback much more easily and to avoid having to repeatedly search for and save files on my hard drive.
What I would like you to focus on instead is being well-prepared for our first Socratic Seminar on Wednesday.
As I mentioned in class, we will be holding roughly 20-30 minute Socratic Seminars on most Wednesdays this year. These seminars are a forum for you to discuss texts, course concepts, and their relationships to key historical and current events in the United States. Socratic Seminars are not generally intended to be argumentative--we will have lots of debates, don't worry!--but instead are meant to be supportive and collaborative. Ideally, they will help you discuss key ideas and relate them to your lives (or future lives), and thereby help you understand American political life in more depth and in a more meaningful way. Effective participation does not necessarily entail persuading others as to the veracity of your perspective; instead, it will involve active listening, supporting and building on the ideas of others, drawing connections between ideas, and posing effective questions to keep the discussion lively. As I will be (mostly) taking a back seat, it is incumbent on you to put a lot of thought and effort into your preparations.
Specifically, our first Socratic Seminar will center on the recent protests and riots in Ferguson, MO, which followed the police shooting of an apparently unarmed black 18 year-old youth. I strongly recommend you research the key events of the past two weeks using various news sites. You should also familiarize yourself with the shooting of Trayvon Martin last year. It will be especially interesting to compare the reporting of different news organizations, such as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and RT News.
Our discussion will seek to analyze and evaluate the claim by Theodore H. White on pg. 17 of the Patterson (10th Ed.) text, namely that America is “in search of itself—a country striving to realize its common principles.”
Think seriously about Patterson's claims about obstacles to American idealism and consider the Ferguson protests in that context, trying to draw connections between the two.
You will be responsible for reading, annotating, and creating notes on:
I will make a copy of Patterson Ch.1 for those who have not yet purchased the new volume. You will find it on Google Drive under "Course Readings". You should outline the entire chapter if you have not already.
Be sure to bring the readings and notes to class on Wednesday!
You must also bring a set of questions, as detailed in the document, Socratic Seminar Questions, which can be found in Google Drive under "Writing, Questioning, and Documentation." You must prepare at least two of each type of question, and be sure to give your own questions serious thought before we hold the seminar.
I strongly recommend you consult the following documents found in the same folder to help you prepare:
I will discuss how you will be assessed in detail on Wednesday in class. Prepare well! =)
By now you should have received by email a link to join the Google Group email list, so I can email you all as a single group. You should also have soon thereafter received a link to the course Google Drive folder. If so, your first bit of homework is already complete!
As I have decided we will discuss setting up your blogs on Wednesday, don't worry about doing that for now.
I do need you, however, to quickly upload your summer essays to Google Drive under "Submitted Student Work." Be sure to create a personal subfolder using your full name. Please be reminded that I only accept work as a Google Doc file (no Word, PDFs, or Pages!). So copy and paste if necessary. This is in order to make giving you detailed feedback much more easily and to avoid having to repeatedly search for and save files on my hard drive.
What I would like you to focus on instead is being well-prepared for our first Socratic Seminar on Wednesday.
As I mentioned in class, we will be holding roughly 20-30 minute Socratic Seminars on most Wednesdays this year. These seminars are a forum for you to discuss texts, course concepts, and their relationships to key historical and current events in the United States. Socratic Seminars are not generally intended to be argumentative--we will have lots of debates, don't worry!--but instead are meant to be supportive and collaborative. Ideally, they will help you discuss key ideas and relate them to your lives (or future lives), and thereby help you understand American political life in more depth and in a more meaningful way. Effective participation does not necessarily entail persuading others as to the veracity of your perspective; instead, it will involve active listening, supporting and building on the ideas of others, drawing connections between ideas, and posing effective questions to keep the discussion lively. As I will be (mostly) taking a back seat, it is incumbent on you to put a lot of thought and effort into your preparations.
Specifically, our first Socratic Seminar will center on the recent protests and riots in Ferguson, MO, which followed the police shooting of an apparently unarmed black 18 year-old youth. I strongly recommend you research the key events of the past two weeks using various news sites. You should also familiarize yourself with the shooting of Trayvon Martin last year. It will be especially interesting to compare the reporting of different news organizations, such as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and RT News.
Our discussion will seek to analyze and evaluate the claim by Theodore H. White on pg. 17 of the Patterson (10th Ed.) text, namely that America is “in search of itself—a country striving to realize its common principles.”
Think seriously about Patterson's claims about obstacles to American idealism and consider the Ferguson protests in that context, trying to draw connections between the two.
You will be responsible for reading, annotating, and creating notes on:
- The section in Patterson Ch. 1 on "Political Culture: Americans' Political Beliefs," and
- The article by Kareem Abdul-Jabaar about the Ferguson riots, "The Coming Race War Won't Be About Race" (click the link to open)
I will make a copy of Patterson Ch.1 for those who have not yet purchased the new volume. You will find it on Google Drive under "Course Readings". You should outline the entire chapter if you have not already.
Be sure to bring the readings and notes to class on Wednesday!
You must also bring a set of questions, as detailed in the document, Socratic Seminar Questions, which can be found in Google Drive under "Writing, Questioning, and Documentation." You must prepare at least two of each type of question, and be sure to give your own questions serious thought before we hold the seminar.
I strongly recommend you consult the following documents found in the same folder to help you prepare:
- a) Bloom's Critical Thinking Question Stems, which will help you formulate higher-order questions,
- b) Questions to Support Discussion, which will help you keep the conversation going if it seems to be hitting a lull, and
- c) the Socratic Seminar Rubric.
I will discuss how you will be assessed in detail on Wednesday in class. Prepare well! =)