Goals

• Discuss the Rose essay (and Levitt editorial) in terms of the questions/issues list we generated last time.
• Add to this list of questions/issues as appropriate.

1. Get back into the Web Forum and post a response to the following question: How has schooling affected your use of language? What effects has your use of school language had on your family life, the way you perceive yourself, your sense of your own identity (however you want to define that), etc.? If you feel that your use of language has NOT changed much since you came to school, how do you explain this?
2. Review once again the list of issues/questions we've generated, and decide which one of these you find most interesting or useful at this point. (This decision will determine how you are grouped in next class's small group activity.)

YOU WILL PROBABLY WANT TO HAVE AVAILABLE SOME COPIES OF YOUR INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO USE THE WEB FORUM. STUDENTS INVARIABLY LOSE THIS HANDOUT.

Activities
Daily. For their daily, have students quickly re-read the editorial from the Boulder Daily Camera, written by CU professor Paul Levitt. Then have them write in response to the following: In a sentence or two, describe the argument is Levitt making about "the unprepared undergraduate"? Have you ever read or heard this argument before? Based on your own experience and observations, do you agree with Levitt? Or do you disagree with him? Finally, how does he differ from Mike Rose ("The Politics of Remediation," which you read for today). Rose also writes about the underpreparation of college students, but he does so in a somewhat different way. How would you explain the difference? [Give students at least 15 minutes to re-read the editorial quickly and to begin answering as many of these questions as possible. This writing will serve as the basis of the following discussion.]

Discuss Rose Essay - The ensuing discussion might establish the thesis and main points of Rose, then go on to examine how there are other positions on this issue of students' lack of preparation. Rose takes a sympathetic view which places a good deal of responsibility on the university, but others (like Levitt and Rodriguez) could be said to take very different approaches. [You will want to come to class with a set of discussion questions which help to generate a discussion between Rose and other related texts: Levitt, Rodriguez, Tannen, hooks, etc. Also frame the discussion in terms of one or more of the issues/questions you generated as a class last time. When you put the list back on the OH, you might decide that there need to be some additions, based on what these two new readings (Levitt and Rose) bring to the conversation.] IMPORTANTLY, THIS DISCUSSION (IF WELL EXECUTED) WILL MODEL THE PROCESS OF SYNTHESIS FOR STUDENTS.

Extension of Last Class's Discussion - After this discussion of the two new readings, you might find yourself with some extra time on your hands. It would be a good idea to prepare a short list of discussion questions that follow up on last class's discussion of course readings, so that you can extend and complicate that conversation.

In the last five minutes of class, explain the purpose of the Web Forum Assignment for next class (getting students to begin thinking about their own experiences having to do with school language, and generating some ideas that classmates might draw on in writing their own essays).