Congratulations on surviving your first week of college! I hope it’s been a good week, and I hope you’ll enjoy some much-needed rest over the Labor Day weekend. I think our first two days of class went really well, and I was especially happy to see how well prepared you were to discuss the reading assignments on Thursday. As the semester progresses and your schedules get busier, it will get harder to keep up with the reading assignments, but please don’t neglect them — they are absolutely essential to your success in this class.

Next week, we will continue our discussion about what it means to be literate in today’s society, and we will spend some time working on specific aspects of your literacy narratives. Here’s what you need to do for each class session:

• On Tuesday, we will discuss “Sponsors of Literacy,” by Deborah Brandt (pages 331–52 in Writing about Writing), and “Mother Tongue,” by Amy Tan (PDF linked on the Readings page). Please come to class ready to discuss these articles. In addition, please write down three different ideas for your literacy narrative and be ready to share them with your classmates. You don’t need to draft full essays for each idea; a few sentences about each potential topic will do. By the end of class on Tuesday, you should be ready to settle on a specific idea for your narrative.
• On Thursday, we will explore the connections between literacy and technology. Please read “Pencils to Pixels,” by Dennis Barron (WAW, pp. 422–41), and be ready to discuss the ways in which technology has influenced your literacy. We will spend part of class workshopping the introductions to your literacy narratives, so please bring two printed copies of your introduction to class. These introductions will still be rough, but they should show your progress on the assignment. Shoot for 150–250 words.

Oh, and one last thing: If you haven’t added your introduction to the previous post on this site, please do so today! I’ll see you in class on Tuesday; if you have any questions before then, please feel free to email me.