Day 2 - January 10

Objectives:

1) Before teaching students how to write well, I like to tell them what not to write and what I consider is bad writing. I use a special exercise: a list of sentences taken from former papers. students need to identify the mechanical errors and grammatical mistakes that can be found in almost each line.

2) After doing this, (and since this has already been done in English 1101), I move on to introducing Argument. Since I do not know the students yet and since I would like to break the ice a little bit, I ask students to take 5 minutes to tell a joke to their classmates. Usually, they found jokes about blondes. I find it a great excuse to introduce the notion of claim, implied claim, evidence and warrant. 

Application/Exercise:

One great example that I got from one student: "The Blonde in a cornfield: “Every morning, there was a blonde who drove her car by a cornfield. One morning, she saw another blonde who was rowing a boat in the middle of this cornfield. So, the first blonde stops her car, and starts yelling: “What the hell are you doing? You, moron, You're the reason for all these dumb blonde jokes! ». The blonde in the boat starts yelling back: “What did you say? Come say that to my face!” And the second blonde replies, “Oh, you can be sure, If I knew how to swim, I'd come out there and kick your ass!”


Since my students started to argue over the blondes being stupid, I used it to introduce Key Concepts:

Implied Claim: Blondes are stupid. (I also started to introduce the Types of Claims: Claim of Definition: who are blondes? or Claim of Value: the value of blondes?)

Evidence: One is rowing a boat; The other one is ready to swim.

Assumption/Common knowledge: No (sane) person would row a boat (nor swim) in the middle of a cornfield.

I also used horror movies, mentionning that a doll like Chucky is scary because people assume that dolls do not kill, that dolls are not mean.... 

Comments:

Very positive activity. and Great feedback from the students.