For Weds (11:45)

Hello all,

Today in class, we learned a little about the importance of sleep. Remember according to the NINDS, "The amount of sleep each person needs depends on many factors, including age. Infants generally require about 16 hours a day, while teenagers need about 9 hours on average. For most adults, 7 to 8 hours a night appears to be the best amount of sleep, although some people may need as few as 5 hours or as many as 10 hours of sleep each day. Women in the first 3 months of pregnancy often need several more hours of sleep than usual. The amount of sleep a person needs also increases if he or she has been deprived of sleep in previous days. Getting too little sleep creates a "sleep debt," which is much like being overdrawn at a bank. Eventually, your body will demand that the debt be repaid. We don't seem to adapt to getting less sleep than we need; while we may get used to a sleep-depriving schedule, our judgment, reaction time, and other functions are still impaired" (www.ninds.nih.gov).

We also discussed the Toni Morrison and Charlie Rose interview. I like that you all focused on the tone and content of the interview. The conversation between the two truly represents a friendly sharing of knowledge. Remember, for our reading on Weds of Beloved, you will want to think about issues that Toni presented during the interview. There is a great overview of the novel on Slate. In the article, Stephen Metcalf argues, "Morrison presents Sethe's turbulent inner life through a process both Morrison and Sethe herself call "rememory," a kind of psychic haunting in which the specifics of a traumatic incident are told and retold, even as the teller tries to block their full emergence into the conscious mind. The central traumatic episode of Beloved, to which the narrative returns again and again, is an infanticide: Twenty years earlier, Sethe beheaded her baby Beloved with a handsaw rather than allow her return to slavery. In Beloved, Morrison perfected a mode of narration, entirely her own but with roots in everything from the African griot to As I Lay Dying, built out of compulsive repetition, in which the onion, as it were, is constantly being both peeled and reconstituted; in which memories are constantly being both exhumed and buried; and in which the mind of the storyteller is both imprisoned and set free in the act of retelling. And so, like the return of Beloved, and the enduring curse of slavery itself, rememory is both a reconciliation and a vexation, both a healing and a wounding." Try and keep ideas like this in your mind as you are reading.

We moved from discussing the interview with Toni Morrison to thinking about conducting an interview for Project Three. Remember, you will be focused on having a conversation with someone that you find particularly engaged in an aspect of your topic. This exercise is not about mining the person for information; instead, the exercise is about having a meaningful conversation. We explored and listened to some StoryCorps interviews to help us understand our ultimate goal. Remember, you will need to select a person in the community who works with your issue. Arrange for an interview, and you will record it. We are using the Storycorps for our information, and we will be submitting our interviews for this National project. All the following information is from the storycorps website.(npr.org)

We also shifted and shared our Polished drafts of Project Two. You will need to conduct a self and peer evaluation on the texts. For both, you will:

1. Read the texts. Don't mark or create commentary. Just read the texts (your own text and your peer's text).
2. Following your reading, ask yourself questions. What did you learn? How did you learn it? Etc. Think about what the paper was trying to accomplish
3. Make a decision based on your reading: Was the text:
a. Good- focus and development was solid; however there were issues in the organization, style, conventions area
b. Okay-Some issues with focus and development; issues in relation to organization, style, etc.
c. Needs work-issues with focus and development which impede understanding; WTF moments in regards to organization, style, etc.
4. Make notes in regard to Focus, Development, Organization, and Style
5. Create a 2-4 Paragraph letter to your peer and your self that highlights Focus, Development, Organization, and Style. You will want to list two strengths with examples from the text and two areas for improvement with examples from the text.

You will need to have these letters and evaluations complete by Monday.

For Weds:

Read: Beloved Section

Write: Rhetorical anaylsis for Project Three

Do: Post Rhetorical anaylsis on Blog
Start thinking about who you will interview
Start reading peer and self polished drafts.

Take care, and thanks,

Kat