Category: article review

 

will create a presentation to defend or argue against reading a particular American novel. The presentation should be made as if addressing the board of education. Your selection should come from books that are typically included on the “frequently challenged books” list.

Research and presentations should cover, at minimum, the following subjects:

$ Brief biography of the author
$ Discussion of work – not just a summary, but brief analysis
$ Why is work typically challenged?
$ Significance or not of author and/or work, both socially and historically – why should we or should we not be reading the work?

 

 

 

 

https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/apc/ap03_frq_english_lang_23013.pdf

Essay Prompt Reminders:

• Read the prompt carefully. Make sure you answer the key question being asked in the prompt.
• Read and annotate the given passage carefully.
• Spend 5–7 minutes planning your response before you begin the actual essay in order to organize your ideas efficiently.
• Craft a well-organized and well-developed essay. Your essay must have a strong introduction with a solid thesis; a body that uses topic sentences, transitions, and relevant textual evidence to support the thesis; and a meaningful conclusion.
• Analyze—do not summarize. For example, do not simply identify a metaphor and summarize what it means. Explain why the author chose to use it and how it achieves the author’s purpose.
• Use precise diction and active voice for clarity.
• Vary your sentence structure to add interest and show a command of language.
• Stick to an objective, scholarly third-person point of view (unless the use of first-person or second-person point of view is a rhetorical strategy on your part).

 

 

Part I asks you to read four passages from our reading and then to identify the author, work, character(s), and situation. Next, you will be asked to respond to two analytical questions about each excerpt.
A. The manuscript pages were heaped in random order in the mute girl’s attic quarters. These flimsy pages represented Kien’s past; the lines told stories that were sometimes clear, but most were at best obscure and as vague and pale as twilight. They told stories from the precariously fine border dividing life from death, blurring the line itself and finally erasing it. Ages and times were mixed in confusion, as were peace and war.

1. Identify the author, work, character(s), and situation. (Three points)

 

2. How does this passage comment on the structure of the novel in which it appears? Provide an example from the novel of the novel’s unusual structure. (Eight points)

 

 

3. What role does the deaf-mute woman play in this novel, and why is it important that she is deaf and mute? In what ways is she allegorical? (Eight points)

 

B. The bag of ice slipped in my arms. I leaned down to catch it and as I pulled it closer to me, I thought I felt my brother’s breath upon me. This was not the warmth I’d felt earlier, but a chill now at the center of my spine. The feeling was so confusing and frightening, I ran.
,

1. Identify the author, work, character(s), and situation. (Three points)

 

 

2. Why does the narrator feel her brother’s presence at this moment? Why doesn’t she fully mourn or even acknowledge his loss before this incident? (Eight points).

 

 

 

 

 

3. How does the narrator’s tendency to become her lost brother affect her gender identify? NB: Gender identify is the sense of being a man or a woman or non-binary. A strong answer will quote a scene to back up your point. (Eight points)

 

 

 

 

C. He left the door and came back to Kien, putting out his hand to pull him up. “Be quick. What the hell are you doin?’ We’ve got to get to the shelter. Listen, I was only going to screw her until Vinh. You could have her back after that. Hell, you’re really soft. A little bourgeois softie, aren’t you?”

1. Identify the author, text, characters, and situation. (Three points)

 

 

2. What are two aspects of this speech and the actions preceding it that probably offended the Vietnamese Communist officials who banned this novel? Why would they find these elements offensive? You may use bullet points. (Eight points)

 

 

 

 

 

3. How do the incidents occurring right after this scene change the protagonist’s relationship with his girlfriend? Be specific. (Eight points)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lit 237 4 Mid-term

D. I walked the three long blocks down Orange to Euclid. The liquor store was on the corner. The screen door was closed and the store looked dark. I stepped into the cool and quiet inside. There was a tall man with thick hair standing behind the counter. He had a newspaper open across the counter and was leaning over it, reading. As I walked by him, he looked up and said, “Hi, there.” I turned my head toward him and said, “Hi, there,” in the same tone of voice. Then I laughed to myself, thinking, You bird. You parrot. You Polly. I mouthed the words Polly, Polly, Polly, as I walked between the tall shelves of bottles, making my way slowly toward the freezers at the back of the store.

1. Identify the author, text, characters, and situation. (Three points)

 

 

2. This passage features a newspaper and is about literacy. What does this excerpt indicate about the narrator’s complicated attitude toward learning English and becoming Americanized? (Eight points)

 

 

 

 

3. What are two other moments in the novel when the narrator discusses the process of becoming literate in English? You may use bullet points. (Eight points)

 

EXTRA CREDIT: What are the “Three Don’ts” of Vietnamese Communism (consult The Sorrow of War)

 

EXTRA EXTRA CREDIT. For the two daily edits, type out the sentences correctly, fixing the punctuation. (Two points each)
1. Koala bears are not actually bears, rather they are marsupials.

2. My favorite Mediterranean spread is hummus it is very garlicky.

 

EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA CREDIT: Why do you think Le Thi Diem Thuy named her novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For? In other words, what does this title mean, in the context of the novel? Please, no Internet balderdash: I’m looking for YOUR interpretation. (Seven points)

 

 

 

The article posted below is an excellent example of ANOVA as well as the use of an index comprised of
several variables. The index used is the Index of African Governance, also known as the Ibrahim Index of
African Governance (IIAG) and the Youtube video (also posted below) gives a good explanation of this index.
Your assignment is to review both the article and the Youtube video and then use a similar approach to create
a mini-index of two of the pillars of public administration. The pillars that we discuss in public administration are
constructs or concepts that may mean different things to different people. If you are to use them in research
you need to define them in a way that they can be operationalized. Your conceptual definitions should have at
least three dimensions that can be operationalized (measured), and at least one of your indices should be
informed by a Christian worldview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPlNIs2K5gs
http://iresearcher.org/IR%20Template%20-%20Sow.pdf
http://jibe-net.com/journals/jibe/Vol_2_No_4_December_2014/6.pdf

Adapted from the “Prospect” article on mycourses.
Critics of the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett argue that in his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back , he continues to fail to address what is known as the “Hard Problem” of consciousness: “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” as David Chalmers puts it. Dennett says his “refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate.” He realises that—as in politics—if you debate on your opponents’ terms, you have already lost. To win, you must set the agenda. His bet is that if you understand consciousness in the right way, the Hard Problem will be exposed as an artefact of an outmoded way of thinking—a pseudo-problem comparable to the fruitless quest in the early 20th century for the élan vital that animates matter.
“As language became more complex, we gained the capacity to mean things by what we said and to understand what others meant.”
This approach, however, leaves Dennett almost completely silent on the very thing that characterises consciousness: subjective feeling. This is partly why Dennett is often accused of effectively denying that consciousness exists, of claiming that we are no more aware than zombies. Dennett has denied this.
In this book, Dennett argues that we must understand how consciousness emerged through the process of evolution. To do this we must understand how random, uncomprehending, Darwinian evolution could possibly have given rise to creatures such as us, who are capable of top-down, directed, comprehending action. In his deliberately dizzying summary, we need to see how “a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things.”
How do we manage that? Any adequate answer must account for how more can come from less, how effects can be greater than causes. More specifically, features we take to be essential to consciousness could have emerged prior to consciousness: Dennett argues that there can be reasons without reasoners, design without designers and competence without comprehension.
That there are reasons without reasoners is evident from the animal kingdom. Dennett compares the ornate towers of Antoni Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família in Barcelona with the fantastical shapes found on termite castles. There are reasons for both existing, but only “Gaudí had reasons for the shapes he ordered and created; there are reasons for the shapes created by the termites, but the termites didn’t have those reasons.”
There is something of a taboo in philosophical circles about spelling it out in these terms because the orthodox view is that science has no place for reasons or purposes. “Teleological” explanations that appeal to ends are supposed to be redolent of pre-scientific Aristotelianism. But Dennett argues that “Darwin didn’t extinguish teleology; he naturalised it.” Darwin showed that there certainly are reasons why organisms do things, but that it isn’t necessary to attribute intention or planning for those reasons to exist. Nature contains design without necessarily having a designer.
Perhaps more significant is that there can be competence without comprehension. Nature displays this in abundance. The kingfisher doesn’t understand how to time its dive into the water to catch its prey, while allowing for the distorting refraction of light—but, boy, it’s brilliant at doing it. Humans are also familiar with competence without understanding. Turing showed how to build a computer that could do any algorithmic task without having any conscious idea what it was doing. We find riding a bike as easy as, well, riding a bike, but few of us know how we manage it.
But how do we get from such unthinking processes to the highly-thought through decisions familiar from everyday life? According to Dennett, the key step was the evolution of language. Animals and plants exchange information all the time. Words, though, add new levels of flexibility and complexity. They can be combined in almost infinite permutations, placing few limits on the information we can convey. Crucially, language didn’t need to start out—indeed it could not have started out—as the rich human artefact it has now become. Early humans didn’t need to understand the primitive language they used any more than bees understand their honey dances.
As language became more complex, we gained the capacity to mean things by what we said and to understand what others meant. Dennett’s most striking thesis is that it is precisely this ability to track other people’s “states of mind” through language that allowed us to track our own—and hence for our highly developed sense of self to emerge. He claims that every organism, even a single cell, has rudimentary selfhood. But when we start communicating richly, we need to be aware of the boundaries of our bodies and the boundaries of our minds—which thoughts are ours and which are other people’s. Words, he argues, “turned our brains into minds—our minds—capable of accepting and rejecting the ideas we encounter, discarding or developing them for reasons we can usually express.”

Prophet of rationality: Daniel Dennett ©Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images
These minds, however, are not quite what we generally assume them to be. The unified, central-controller self is a “user-illusion.” We tend to think, as Descartes did, that we have privileged access to our own consciousness—“I think, therefore I am”—but in fact our self-awareness is limited, biased and partial. The self is not so much a thing as a “centre of narrative gravity,” a story we tell ourselves to make more coherent the jumbled reality of our minds. Asked why we do what we do, we are quick to find reasons, when “the most honest thing to say is often ‘I don’t know; it just came to me.’”
Whether you buy Dennett’s account or not, it illustrates just how much you can offer by way of a theory of consciousness without addressing the Hard Problem. This certainly isn’t the last word. Dennett modestly describes it as “the sketch, the backbone, of the best scientific theory to date of how our minds came into existence, how our brains work all their wonders.”