Week 8

Flood Rescue, Hurricane Harvey (abcnews.com)

  

Good evening.  Hope you are all well.

Today we pick up where we left off last week, with a focus on pulling together the views and insights you and your classmate(s) have shared through informal exchange or interview (essay 6).  The focus was on what you like to read or where you go for news and entertainment, and what each thought and felt on watching Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree" on youtube.  The idea is to shape an essay expressive of the intellectual and cultural interests, opinions, and values you and other college students may share.  In this way, you will create a portrait of yourself and another, and form a few conclusions about the worlds of information and ideas available to people today.

 We will continue with some verb form practices, including a writing using the subjunctive mood.  Below I discuss this practice at some length:

If we were given the chance to rewrite some chapter in life, or to relive some moment now resigned to the past, what revisions would we make, or what insight would we bring to  the moment now? What lessons are there in wondering, what if . . . ?  The possibilities are numerous.

For example, what if we could time travel? We can. We can pretend that we had been born in 
a different era and imaginatively enter into the lives of those who have lived before us. Thanks to
the research of scientists and historians of every stripe, the past unveils its secrets, and is now
recorded in layers of story and imagery, all adding to our knowledge of life on this planet.
We can learn how other human societies lived and what they believed, how they and 
other species met the challenges of life, how they at whatever time did navigate, nourish and 
reproduce themselves, defend themselves and their young. If you were given a day, week, month, or year to live wherever and whenever and however, what choice would you make?

We can say, had I known such and such a thing, I might never have done what I did. Sometimes we rewrite the past with our inner voice, as a means of understanding what has worked and not worked for us, thus reshaping our thought and behavior as we move forward in life. What if we are stuck in outmoded ways of thinking and behaving? What if the possibility for personal change were to be taken from us? Transformation begins with our thoughts, and with the language we use to express ourselves. Thank goodness we can imagine possibilities beyond the given or present!

For Week 10:  

Essay 7: In 350-500 words address an idea that you hold as an article of faith or philosophical belief, using narrative or descriptive examples to support and flesh out the basis of that belief.  Examples can be found (some 125,000)at thisibelieve.org.  There you can explore topics and examples going all the way back to the 1950s, when the project itself first began.The site supports an international forum of sorts on core values, and offers opportunity to upload your essay for publication.

The guidelines for writing the essay are much like those we have been following in class, keeping to 350-500 words in a voice that is personal and original. The following URL within the site describes in detail what the editors want in terms of style and development: http://thisibelieve.org/guidelines/. You may summarize and quote from any one of the published essays as a lead-in to your piece, though neither summary nor response is a required element of the essay. The topic you address should reflect your particular experience and corresponding beliefs or concerns–whether of religion, money, virtue, vice, growing up, growing old, love, death, sickness, health, the meaning of life, the nature of existence, the human condition, pleasure, pain, the fate of life on this planet, etcetera. Your statement of belief should be articulated in a sentence or two.

The final is week 11 and will be an essay assignment done in class, no use of the Internet allowed.  Any rewrites should be submitted by the end of week 10.