Teaching – Page 19

ENG 1103: Looking Ahead to Your Literacy Narrative and Check, Please! Lesson One

Posted on January 21, 2025 by janemlucas

Helen Keller, https://www.biography.com/activists/helen-keller

As you look ahead to your literacy narrative, consider how “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day Language Came into My Life” demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. Together, David Sedaris‘s essay and Helen Keller’s chapter show us that the stories we recount–for our purposes, ones of learning to read or write, or speak a second language–may be humorous or serious and may consist primarily of scene or may be composed of roughly equal parts scene and summary.

Also, Sedaris’s and Keller’s stories show us two narrators whose temporal distance from their narratives differ significantly. In “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Sedaris recounts struggling to learn French “[a]t the age of forty-one” (166). His essay was published in Esquire magazine when he was forty-three, which means that he was chronicling an experience only two years in his past. In contrast, Keller writes of the life-altering experience of learning sign lanaguage “three months before I was seven years old” (par. 1), more than fifteen years before she published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903). The term for a narrator such as Keller is adult retrospective narrator.

Author David Sedaris in New York on August 3, 2018 / Robert Deutsch USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2018/08/03/david-sedaris-hates-word-awesome-but-loves-sequined-culottes-calypso-bookmark/900667002/

As an adult, Keller places the reader in the world of darkness she inhabited as a young child, but that childhood experience is informed by her adult perspective: “I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it [the arrival of my teacher] connects” (par. 1). Keller depicts herself as a girl of almost seven, learning her first sign-language words from Annie Sullivan, but Keller’s observations about that experience are ones that could only come from an adult.

Sometimes students choose not to write about experiences in the distant past because they don’t think they remember enough about incidents that occurred long ago. Know that the more you write about a memory, the more likely you are recall sensory details that pull you back to that moment–and those same sensory details will place readers in that moment with you when you recreate it on the page. Also know that what you don’t remember can become part of your story, just as what Keller doesn’t remember becomes part of her story in these lines: “I learned a great many new words that day. I don’t remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them” (par. 9).

Works Cited

Keller, Helen. “The Day that Language Came into My Life.” The Story of My Life. Pine Valley Central School, https://www.pval.org/cms/lib/ NY19000481/Centricity/ Domain/105/The%20Day%20Language%20Came%20into%20my%20Life.pdf.

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.

https://checkpleasecc.notion.site/Check-Please-Starter-Course-ae34d043575e42828dc2964437ea4eed

Tomorrow, at the beginning of class, I will collect your worksheets for the first Check, Please! lesson. If you were absent on the day that I distributed copies of the worksheet or you have misplaced your copy, download the file from Blackboard and print it.

My sample assignment for lesson one appears below, as well as on the worksheet, itself.

Check, Please! Lesson One

In the first lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at Washington State University’s Center for an Informed Public, introduces the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”

One of the most useful practices presented in lesson one is what the author terms the “Wikipedia Trick.” Deleting everything that follows a website’s URL (including the slash), adding a space, typing “Wikipedia,” and hitting “enter” will yield the site’s Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia entry that appears at the top of the screen may indicate the source’s reliability or lack thereof.

The most memorable segment of lesson one is the short, riveting video “The Miseducation of Dylann Roof,” which begins with the narrator asking the question, “How does a child become a killer?” Produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it documents how algorithms can lead unskilled web searchers down paths of disinformation. In the worst cases, such as Roof’s, algorithms can lead searchers to the extremist propaganda of radical conspiracy theorists.

Work Cited

Caulfield, Mike. Check, Please! Starter Course, 2021, https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/updated-resources-for-2021/.

Check, Please! worksheets are designed to be handwritten, and I prefer for you to complete them by putting pen to paper. If, however, you wish to type them, you are required to follow MLA style manuscript guidelines. See the sample file posted in the Check, Please! folder on Blackboard.

Next Up

Tomorrow’s class will be devoted to planning and drafting your literacy narratives. Next Wednesday, January 29, I will return your handwritten drafts with my notes, and you will have the class period to begin revising your narratives on your laptops and tablets. After that class, you will have an additional week to continue your revision work. The due date for posting your revisions to Blackboard and to your WordPress blogs is Wednesday, February 5 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, February 7 (before class).

English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Posted on January 20, 2025September 24, 2025 by janemlucas

To honor Martin Luther King, Jr., today, I am asking you to you engage in a close study of his epistolary essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Although I could ask you to listen to a recording of it, I ask that you to read it instead. King’s gift for oratory is well known, but for students of writing, closely examining his words on the page is a more pertinent exercise than listening to his voice.

What makes King’s letter an effective piece of writing? With that question in mind, consider these words: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait” (par. 11). Here King is addressing his initial audience, the eight white Birmingham-area clergymen who criticized his protest as “unwise and untimely” (par. 1). He suggests to those men that waiting to act isn’t difficult when you yourself aren’t the victim of injustice, when you haven’t, in King’s words, “felt the stinging darts of segregation” (par. 11). The sentence is notable not only for the contrast it illustrates between King’s reality and the lives of his readers but also for the words that King uses to show that contrast.

Consider King’s sentence and the paraphrase that follows:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”
Maybe it is simple for people who have not experienced segregation to say, “Wait.”

King’s sentence is stronger than the paraphrase that follows it because of the “stinging darts.” Writing that someone has not “experienced segregation” is abstract. Readers do not feel the general experience in the second sentence, but they feel King’s “stinging darts.” Sensory details strengthen sentences by appealing to readers’ senses, and figurative language invigorates writing by making the unfamiliar familiar. King’s white readers have not been the victims of segregation, but his choice of words makes them feel the sting.

While King’s “stinging darts” sentence—a relatively short one—is laudable, the long, winding sentence that follows is nothing short of staggering.

It starts with these words: “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim.” King presents those atrocities in an introductory dependent clause, one whose full meaning depends on an independent clause that follows. But rather than immediately turning to an independent clause to complete the thought, King expands the sentence with this series of dependent clauses:

when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters;
when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;
when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;
when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you;
when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”;
when your first name becomes “n—,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”;
when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments;
when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–(par. 11).

The independent clause that readers have been waiting for, the statement that completes the thought is this: “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait” (par. 11). Those words could have immediately followed the first dependent clause, but instead King offers nine more dependent clauses, ten darts that sting his readers.

Ten dependent clauses connected by semicolons followed by a dash and an independent clause, a total of 316 words: That is not a structure I recommend for the sentences you write in English 1103, but it’s a valuable model, nevertheless.

I hope that you, as citizens, will continue to study the words of his letter. As your writing teacher, I hope that you will return to the sentence that I have examined in detail here. Along with showing his readers why his nonviolent protests could not wait, that sentence of King’s demonstrates how to develop a piece of writing through the accumulation of detail—not just the when, but the when and when and when . . . .

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” California State University, Chico. https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, we will turn to briefly to “Letter from Birmingham Jail” before you begin planning and drafting your literacy narrative.

English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: Two-Letter Words, B-E

Posted on January 17, 2025January 17, 2025 by janemlucas

The first Scrabble blog post of the semester featured playable two-letter words beginning with “a.” Learning those two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and can increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.

Here’s a list of the playable words beginning with “b,” “d,” and “e.”

ba: the soul in ancient Egyptian spirituality
bi: a bisexual
bo: a pal
by: a side issue
de: of, from
do: a tone on a scale
ed: education
ef: the letter f (also eff)
eh: used to express doubt
el: an elevated train
em: the letter m
en: the letter n
er: used to express hesitation
es: the letter s
et: a past tense of eat
ex: the letter x

Next Up

Class will not meet on Monday, but in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., you will read his “Letter from Birmin g ham Jail.” Though his epistolary essay is not a literacy narrative, it’s a valuable piece of prose for writers to study, in particular its sensory details and figurative lanaguage. Pay close attention to the long sentence that dominates the eleventh paragraph. I will address that sentence in detail in Monday’s post.

English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Sedaris and Keller Follow-Up

Posted on January 16, 2025 by janemlucas

Yesterday morning in class, as models for your own literacy narrative, we examined David Sedaris‘s “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day Language Came into My Life,” Chapter Four of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life.

In groups of three, you and your classmates collaboratively addressed the following questions:

Which of Helen Keller’s paragraphs present scene, and which provide summary?
Where does Davis Sedaris first shift from summary to scene?
Where does Sedaris use figurative language?
Where does he employ hyperbole?
Bonus: Where does Keller include a biblical allusion?

Here are the answers to those questions:

The first, third, and ninth paragraphs of Helen Keller’s chapter provide summary. The majority of the chapter’s paragraphs–six of the nine, or two-thirds–present scene.
Sedaris’s first shifts from summary to scene when his French teacher says, “If you have not meimslsxp or lpgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room” (167).
He employs similes when he writes “not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage at a fashion show” (167) and “like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets” (168). Also, he includes a metaphor when he writes, “everybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (167).
Sedaris turns to hyperbole when he writes that one student had “front teeth the size of tombstones” (168). Due to our time constraints, I did not ask you to address figurative langauge in Keller’s chapter, but note that she uses it as well when she writes, “I was like that ship before my education began” (par. 3).
In the final paragraph of Keller’s chapter, she presents a biblical allusion with the words “like Aaron’s rod, with flowers” (par. 9). That line from the book of Numbers refers to the sprouting of flowers from the staff of Aaron. For Aaron and his brother, Moses, that flowering signified that their family was chosen to do the work of God. Similarly, for Keller, the blossoming of the world through language served as a revelation: the knowledge that words could give meaning to all that she could neither hear nor see.

For that exercise yesterday, I asked you to focus first on summary and scene because they are important methods of treating time in narratives. Simply put, scene shows the reader what is taking place, while summary tells the reader what has happened over time. Secondly, I asked you to examine details of language. Scene is to time what concrete details are to the senses. The specifics of figurative language–what the metaphors and similes show us–allow readers to experience a story as if they are looking over the narrator’s shoulder.

As you begin planning your own literacy narrative, look back at these notes and reread “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day that Language Came into My Life.” The acts of rereading model essays and analyzing their elements will strengthen your ability to craft your own literacy narrative.

Works Cited

Keller, Helen. “The Day that Language Came into My Life.” The Story of My Life. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, look to the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts devoted to Scrabble tips.

English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day Language Came into My Life”

Posted on January 15, 2025January 15, 2025 by janemlucas

This morning in class, as models for your own literacy narratives, we will examine David Sedaris‘s “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “The Day Language Came into My Life,” the first pages of Chapter Four of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life.

In groups of three or four, you and your classmates will collaboratively address the following questions:

Which of Helen Keller’s paragraphs present scene, and which provide summary?
Where does Davis Sedaris first shift from summary to scene?
Where does Sedaris use figurative language?
Where does he employ hyperbole?
Bonus: Where does Keller include a biblical allusion?

The first two questions focus on scene and summary because they are important methods of treating time in narratives. Simply put, scene shows the reader what is taking place, while summary tells the reader what has happened over time.

The last three questions focus on details of language. Scene is to time what concrete details are to the senses. Such details allow readers to experience the story as if they are looking over the narrator’s shoulder.

Together, Sedaris’s essay and Keller’s chapter excerpt demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” offers a quirky look at the challenges of learning French from a sarcastic, soul-crushing instructor. Keller’s story poignantly recounts learning to make meaning through the sign language of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, learning that certain finger positions mean “water” for those who cannot hear it, and for others, like her, who can neither see nor hear it.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, look to the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts devoted to Scrabble tips.

English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: “What’s in a Name” Follow-Up

Posted on January 14, 2025March 21, 2025 by janemlucas

Last Friday’s blog entry offered bonus points to any student who posted a response that identified the classmates whose names are also common nouns, which makes them playable Scrabble words.

Congratulations to Brady Battista for correctly identifying the playable name, which appears below in bold.

Jake D’Aquino: all right, fine

For her efforts, Grady will receive five bonus points for the first Check, Please! worksheet, which is due at the beginning of class on Wednesday, January 22.

I may offer additional bonus-point opportunities, so be on the lookout for those. Reading all of the notes that I post for you here, on my blog, will ensure that you see those chances to raise your daily grades.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, we will examine David Sedaris‘s “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life” as model literacy narratives.

English 1103, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Collaborative Writing and David Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day”

Posted on January 13, 2025January 13, 2025 by janemlucas

For this morning’s class, I had planned for us to examine David Sedari s‘s essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” as a model for your first major writing assignment: a literacy narrative, which is an essay that recounts an experience with literacy, such as reading, writing, or–as in the case of Sedaris’s narrative–learning a second language.

Because our discussion of your collaborative writing from last Wednesday consumed most of today’s class period, we did not examine “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” We will, however, study both Sedaris’s essay and Keller’s, “The Day Language Came into My Life,” on Wednesday. In the meantime, review the notes I’ve included below on your collaborative writing from last Wednesday. Though that collaborative writing was not a literacy narrative, the specificity that it required is essential to storytelling. Aim to include as many significant concrete details as you can in your literacy narrative as well as your other writing.

Though the story itself is of primary importance in a literacy narrative, errors of form will distract the reader from the narrative and may jeopardize your credibility. (Readers may ask themselves why they should continue reading if you have overlooked matters of punctuation, spelling, grammar, or mechanics).

The notes that follow address both the content (what is included) and the form (the presentation of the content). As the semester progresses, return to these notes. Some serve as reminders of practices to engage in; others demonstrate what to avoid.

Content

The first paragraph should address each group member’s specific experience with one of the habits. Such details as “listening, taking notes, and trying to absorb the material” are examples of what constitutes engagement, but they do not speak to the particular experiences of any students. The addition of just a few words, such as “in my sophmore-year history class,” begins to give readers a sense of place.
The second paragraph should offer a close look at one student’s experience with the habit. Think of the first paragraph as a bird’s eye view and the second paragraph as a close-up. When one group writes that a student “asked the teacher if he could crumple his [paper] plane into a ball,” readers find themselves there with the students in Ms. Marinelli’s sixth-grade science class. Note how that paragraph that features the paper-airplane exercise functions as a narrative in miniature.
One of the second paragraphs that students composed on Monday ends with these words: “On the contrary, in our English class we are learning about limiting distractions, thinking critically, and activly listening to improve engagment and learn to the best of our ability.” The misspellings are errors that I will address when I turn matters of form. Here, under the heading of content, I note the sentence because of the risk of such content. Though the writers may not have intended to be ingratiating, the sentence comes across as sycophantic. In other words, the words come across as an attempt to curry favor with the professor.

Form

When you compose a paragraph in an academic essay, the first line should be indented five spaces or one-half inch. Note that blog posts are an exception to this rule. In the versions of your paper assignments that you post to Blackboard, the first line of each paragraph should be indented. On your blog, the paragraphs will be block style.
Use active voice. The clause “thoughts are tossed around all the time” should be rewritten as “my family members and I are always tossing around ideas.” Note that the revision changes the voice from passive to active by letting the family perform the action (tossing around the ideas).
The clause “[h]e feels like his openness is self-made” should be rewritten as “[h]e feels as if his openness is self-made.” Use “like” when a noun follows to form the comparison; use “as if” when a clause follows.
The “sentence” “[a]lso problem solving and using these problem solving techniques in real life scenarios” is a sentence fragment because its meaning depends on the previous sentence. It is not a complete thought. It should be written something like this: Problem-solving and applying problem-solving techniques to real-life scenarios are additional ways to engage in learning.
Note that the example above adds hyphens to “problem-solving” and “real-life.” [R]eal-life” and the second instance of “problem-solving” need hyphens because they are compound adjectives. The first instance of “problem-solving” needs a hyphen because it is a compound noun.
“[A]ctivly,” “crutial,” “effectivly,” and “engagment” are all misspelled. The correct spellings are a-c-t-i-v-e-l-y, c-r-u-c-i-a-l, e-f-f-e-c-t-i-v-e-l-y, and e-n-g-a-g-e-m-e-n-t. Because you cannot look up spellings in class when you are not permitted to use your laptops or smart devices, I do not deduct points for misspellings in in-class exercises. That said, when you are working in groups, you should be on the lookout for misspellings when you proofread your work.
“This individual classmate” should be rewritten as “one individual classmate.” In formal writing, “this” should be used to refer only to something at hand.
“~~This~~ The student then felt they had to step up” lacks subject-verb agreement. It should be rewritten as “the student then felt that she had to step up.” Unless the individual in question is nonbinary, the pronoun for the subject is the singular he or she.
“Meanwhile the other group members such as [name withheld] and myself” should be rewritten as “meanwhile the other group members, such as [name withheld] and I.” The word “members” should be followed by a comma, and the correct pronoun is the subctive “I” not the reflexive “myself.” Writers and speakers often use “myself” when they are unsure whether to use “I” or “me,” but “myself” is not a substitute for either. “Myself” is used in the object position when the subject and the object are the same. For example: I revised the sentence myself.
In the phrases “throw it the furthest” and “threw it further” and the clause “throwing his plane the furthest,” “further” should be replaced with “farther,” and “furthest” should be replaced with “farthest.” “Farther” describes literal distance. “Further” describes figurative distance, meaning more, as in I wish we could discuss the matter further.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, we will examine David Sedaris‘s “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and Helen Keller’s “The Day Language Came into My Life.”

English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: “What’s in a Name?”

Posted on January 10, 2025March 21, 2025 by janemlucas

(L-R): Jake D’Aquino, Kaitlyn Degraw, Brady Battista

To help us put names with faces, I have included the picture above with of all of you in a caption that list your names. Below the picture, I have included a list of first names that are also common nouns, making them playable in Scrabble.

Al: a type of East Indian tree
Alan: a breed of hunting dog (also aland, alant)
Alec: a herring
Ana: a collection of miscellany about a specific topic
Ananda: extreme happiness
Anna: a former Indian coin
Ava: at all, of all
Bailey: an outer castle wall
Barbie: a barbecue
Belle: a pretty woman
Ben: an inner room
Benny: an amphetamine pill
Bertha: a style of wide collar
Beth: a Hebrew letter
Biff: to hit
Bill: to charge for goods
Billy: a short club
Bo: a friend
Bobby: a policeman
Bonnie: pretty (also bonny)
Brad: a small nail or tack
Brock: a badger
Carl: a peasant or manual laborer (also carle)
Carol: to sing merrily
Celeste: a percussive keyboard instrument (also celesta)
Chad: a scrap of paper
Charlie: a fool
Chase: to pursue
Chevy: to chase (also chivy)
Christie: a type of turn in skiing (also christy)
Clarence: an enclosed carriage
Dalton: a unit of atomic mass
Dagwood: a large, stuffed sandwich
Daphne: a flowering shrub with poisonous berries
Davy: a safety lamp
Deb: a debutante
Devon: a breed of cattle
Dexter: located to the right
Dom: a title given to some monks
Don: to put on a piece of clothing
Donna: an Italian woman of repute
Erica: a shrub of the heath family
Fay: to join together closely
Florence: a former European gold coin
Franklin: a nonnoble medieval English landowner
Fritz: a nonworking or semi-functioning state
Gilbert: a unit of magneto-motive force
Gilly: to transport on a type of train car
Gabby: talkative
Graham: whole-wheat flour
Hank: to secure a sail
Henry: a unit of electric inductance
Herby: full of herbs
Jack: to hoist with a type of lever
Jacky: a sailor
Jake: okay, satisfactory
Jane: a girl or woman
Jay: any of various birds, known for their crests and shrill calls
Jean: denim
Jenny: a female donkey
Jerry: a German soldier
Jess: to fasten a strap around the leg of a bird in falconry (also Jesse)
Jill: a unit of measure equal to to 1/4 of a pint
Jimmy: to pry open
Joannes: a Portugese coin (also johannes)
Joe: a fellow
Joey: a young kangaroo
John: a toilet
Johnny: a hospital gown
Jones: a strong desire
Jordan: a type of container
Joseph: a woman’s long cloak
Josh: to tease
Kelly: a bright shade of green
Kelvin: a unit of absolute temperature
Ken: to know
Kent: past tense of ken
Kerry: a breed of cattle
Kris: a curved dagger
Lars: plural of lar, a type of ancient Roman guardian deity (also lares)
Lassie: a lass
Laura: an aggregation of hermitages used by monks
Laurel: to crown one’s head with a wreath
Lee: to shelter from the wind
Louie: a lieutenant
Louis: a former gold coin of France worth twenty francs
Marcel: to make waves in the hair using a special iron
Marge: a margin
Mark: a line, figure, or symbol
Martin: any type of the bird also known as a swallow
Marvy: marvelous
Matilda (a hobo’s bundle (chiefly Australian)
Matt: to put a dull finish on (also matte)
Maxwell: a unit of magnetic flux
Mel: honey
Melody: an agreeable succession of musical sounds
Merle: a blackbird
Mickey: a drugged drink
Mike: a microphone (also mic)
Milt: to fertilize with fish sperm
Minny: a minnow
Mo: a moment
Molly: a type of tropical fish
Morgan: a unit of frequency in genetics
Morris: a type of folk dance from England
Morse: describing a type of code made of long and short signals
Mort: a note sounded in hunting to announce the death of prey
Nelson: a type of wrestling hold
Newton: the unit of force required to accelerate one kilogram of mass on meter per second
Nick: to make a shallow cut
Norm: a standard
Pam: the name of the jack of clubs in some card games
Parker: one who parks a motorized vehicle
Peter: to lessen gradually
Pia: a fine membrane of the brain and spinal cord
Randy: sexually excited
Regina: a queen
Rex: a king
Rick: to stack, hay, corn, or straw
Roger: the pirate flag
Randy: sexually excited
Sal: salt
Sally: to make a brief trip or a sudden start
Sawyer: one who saws wood
Shawn: past tense of show
Sheila: a girl or young woman
Sol: the fifth note on a diatonic scale (also so)
Sonny: a boy or young man
Sophy: a former Persian ruler
Spencer: a type of sail
Tad: a young boy
Tammie: a fabric used in linings (also tammy)
Ted: to spread for drying
Teddy: a woman’s one-piece undergarment
Terry: a soft, absorbent type of cloth
Tiffany: a thin, mesh fabric
Timothy: a Eurasian grass used for grazing
Toby: a drinking mug in the shape of a man or a man’s face
Tod: a British unit of weight for wool equal to twenty-eight pounds
Tom: the male of various animals
Tommy: a loaf or chunk of bread
Tony: very stylish
Vera: very
Victoria: a light, four-wheeled carriage
Warren: an area where rabbits live, or a crowded maze-like place
Webster: one who weaves
Will: to choose, decree, or induce to happen
Willow: a tree or shrub
Willy: to clean fibers with a certain machine

Bonus Point Opportunity!

Students who correctly respond to the playable first names and last names question below will earn five bonus points for their first Check, Please! assignment.

How many students in English 1103.19 have first and/or last names that are playable Scrabble words? Keep in mind that only playable first names appear in the lists above. Some students may have playable last names.

Directions for Finding and Submitting Your Answer

Review the list of playable first names, compare it with the students’ first and last names in the photo captions above, or on the class page, and determine which of the students’ first and last names are playable in Scrabble. If you aren’t sure whether a name is also a common noun, you can consult the Scrabble website’s dictionary
Compose a response of one or more complete sentences that includes (1) the number of students with playable names, and (2) the first and last name of each student with a playable name. Indicate which name, first or last, is playable.
Post your comment as a reply to this blog post by 9:00 a.m. on Monday, January 13.
To post your comment, click the title of the post, “What’s in a Name. . . . ,” then scroll down to the bottom of the post. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a white rectangular box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and hit return. Voila! You have submitted your answer. Good luck! I will make the comments visible before class on Monday, January 13.

Next Up

For class on Monday, you will read David Sedaris’s essay “Me Talk Pretty On Day.” In class we will study Sedaris’s essay after we examine some of the collaborative writing that you composed on Wednesday.

English 1103, Scrabble, Teaching

ENG 1103: Parallel Play and Two-Letter Words Beginning with “A”

Posted on January 9, 2025January 14, 2025 by janemlucas

Parallel play increases your score through the points you earn by spelling more than one word in a single turn. In the first play of the hypothetical game pictured above, the first player or team would score sixteen points by spelling enact with the t on the center double-word square. With the second turn, the other player or team could take advantage of the opportunity for parallel play. If the team knew that aa is a type of lava, they could earn twenty-four points with four words: whoa, he, on, and aa.

Aa is one of sixteen playable two-letter words beginning with a. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the others that follow in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.

aa: a type of stony, rough lava
ab: an abdominal muscle
ad: an advertisement
ae: one
ag: agriculture
ah: an exclamation
ai: a three-toed sloth
al: a type of East Indian tree
am: the first-person singular present form of to be
an: an indefinite article
ar: the letter r
as: similar to
at: in the position of
aw: an expression of sadness or protest
ax: a type of cutting tool (also axe)
ay: a vote in the affirmative (also aye)

Important Note about Challenges

If you think that the opposing team has played a word that isn’t permissable, such as a misspelled word or a proper noun, tell me that you have a challenge. I will consult the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary to determine whether the word in question is playable. If the challenged word isn’t permissble, the team that set it down loses a turn. Conversely, if the challenged word is playable, the team that called the challenge loses a turn.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, look to the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review this post devoted to Scrabble tips.

English 1103, Teaching

ENG 1103: Habits of Mind

Posted on January 8, 2025 by janemlucas

College writing offers you the opportunity to develop skills, such as supporting arguments with evidence, writing effective thesis statements, and using transitions well, but it also gives you the opportunity to develop habits. Successful college students develop certain habits of mind, a way of approaching learning that leads to success.

In 2011, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP) identified eight habits of mind that successful college students adopt.

In class on Monday, you began an exercise focusing on four of the eight habits of mind. Today in class, you will address one of those habits in a collaborative piece of writing.

The paragraphs that follow include the descriptions of the habits that you examined (and the ones you will examine today), as well as the questions that you answered in writing (and the ones you will answer in writing today).

Curiosity

Are you the kind of person who always wants to know more? This habit of mind will serve you well in courses in which your curiosity about issues, problems, people, or policies can form the backbone of a writing project.

WRITING ACTIVITY: What are you most curious to learn about? What experiences have you had in which your curiosity has led you to an interesting discovery or to more questions?

Openness

Some people are more open than others to new ideas and experiences and new ways of thinking about the world. Being open to other perspectives and positions can help you to frame sound arguments and counterarguments and solve other college writing challenges in thoughtful ways.

WRITING ACTIVITY: In the family or the part of the world in which you grew up, did people tend to be very open, not open at all, or somewhere in the middle? Thinking about your own level of open-mindedness, reflect on how much or how little your own attitude toward a quality like openness is the result of the attitudes of the people around you.

Engagement

Successful college writers are involved in their own learning process. Students who are engaged put effort into their classes, knowing that they’ll get something out of their classes—something other than a grade. They participate in their own learning by planning, seeking feedback when they need to, and communicating with peers and professors to create their own success. Write about a few of the ways you try (or plan to try) to be involved in your own learning. What does engagement look like to you?

WRITING ACTIVITY: Write about a few of the ways you try (or plan to try) to be involved in your own learning. What does engagement look like to you?

Creativity

You may be thinking that you have to be an artist, poet, or musician to display creativity. Not so. Scientists use creativity every day in coming up with ways to investigate questions in their field. Engineers and technicians approach problem solving in creative ways. Retail managers use creativity in displaying merchandise and motivating their employees.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Think about the field you plan to enter. What forms might creativity take in that field?

Persistence

You are probably used to juggling long-term and short-term commitments—both in school and in your everyday life. Paying attention to your commitments and being persistent enough to see them through, even when the commitments are challenging, are good indicators that you will be successful in college.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Describe a time when you faced and overcame an obstacle in an academic setting. What did you learn from that experience?

Responsibility

College will require you to be responsible in way you may not have had to be before. Two responsibilities you will face as an academic writer are to represent the ideas of others fairly and to give credit to writers whose ideas and language you borrow for your own purposes.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Why do you think academic responsibility is important? What kind of experience have you already had with this kind of responsibility?

Flexibility

Would your friends say you are the kind of person who can just “go with the flow”? Do you adapt easily to changing situations? If so, you will find college easier, especially college writing. When you find, for example, that you’ve written a draft that doesn’t address the right audience or that your peer review group doesn’t understand at all, you will be able to adapt. Being flexible enough to adapt to the demands of different writing projects is an important habit of mind.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Describe a situation in which you’ve had to make changes based on a situation you couldn’t control. Did you do so easily or with difficulty?

Metacognition (Reflection)

As a learner, you have probably been asked to think back on a learning experience and comment on what went well or not well, what you learned or what you wished you had learned, or what decisions you made or didn’t make. Writers who reflect on their own processes and decisions are better able to transfer writing skills to future assignments.

WRITING ACTIVITY: Reflect on your many experiences as a writer. What was your most satisfying experience as a writer? What made it so?

Next Up

Friday marks the first Wordplay Day of the semester. To prepare for class, review the Scrabble Ground Rules posted in Blackboard, as well as the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the Scrabble blog entry that I will post tomorrow. Most weeks of the semester, on Thursday or Friday, I will publish a post devoted to Scrabble.