Today we worked on building textual support into your spiffy mind maps. Tonight, please focus on three of your strongest topic areas and do some brainstorming about each one.
Your essay prompt for this project is:
Identify a major theme that Sherman Alexie illuminates through his writing, and explain what strategies he uses to develop this theme.
In other words, what is Alexie saying about a particular topic, and how is he saying it? In class, I modeled some brainstorming strategies that will help you to discover a theme. We will work more on this in class tomorrow. To help you out, I've attached my notes from the few minutes I had at the end of class to start my brainstorm:
My topic: Living in between two worlds
My ideas/observations: It seems from many of the texts that it is really challenging to balance two different and often contentious parts of one's identity.
- My own "Wounded Knee and Little Big Horn"--(Res. Mathematics)--the idea that Indians are both the victors and the ones who have been defeated in historical battles.
- Battles reminds me of the fighting in various texts--both inner and outer fighting. Victor and Thomas fight--Rowdy and Arnold fight. There are "rules to fisticuffs" in True Diary Narrator uses his "white thumb and his Indian fingers to make fists, furious" (reservation math)
- Abuse--fathers abuse kids--fighting is generational.
- Seems that living in two worlds produces a lot of violence and anger--expressed outwardly and directed inwardly--self-loathing. Arnold (True Diary) feels like an "UFO".
Block C:
Today we did some writing in class to examine and analyze Alexie's language in True Diary. Tonight, I would like you to review the notes from our discussion and make some connections between Alexie's language and the experiences that Morgan Spurlock recounts on "30 Days." How do both "stories" connect? Think about what we talked about when we studied Big Fish.
Block E:
Today we did some in class writing to examine and analyze Alexie's language in True Diary. Then, we started to look closely at Alexie's poem "Reservation Mathematics" as part of our author study. Tonight, I would like you to fill in the bubble sheet that we started in class, paying close attention to the language of the poem as you make your observations.
Block F:
Today we used our time together to plan for your future. Scary and exciting stuff! Tonight, please write a one-page reflection on how it went today. Use these questions to start your reflections:
- What did you do with your time?
- What help do you need?
- What will you do next to prepare?
- How are you feeling about the process, and about the future in general?
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