Who’s in a fishbowl?

It’s fishbowl time!

We’ll take ten minutes to prepare and then we’ll break up into 2 groups. Group 1 will sit in the inner circle and group 2 will sit in the outer circle.  The students in the inner circle will conduct a 20-minute discussion, analyzing the strategies of Talese in “Frank Sinatra has a cold.” The outer circle will analyze the discussion, noting times when…

• Group members were/weren’t able to constructively disagree with each other in respectful but honest way.
• Group members were able to build on others’ ideas.
• Group members were able to avoid repetition and to move the discussion in fruitful ways.
• Group members referred to the text and backed up their opinions with evidence.
• Group members were able to make interesting connections to other works, other ideas, or other relevant references.

Afterward, we’ll debrief on how the process went.

Next, I’ll want to talk a bit about what I noticed from the Sanders in-class essays and get those back to you.

Then, I’d like to take a specific paragraph from FSHaC and see if we can steal it.  Here it is:

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra — A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

We’re going to take this paragraph, Analyze its structure, and reproduce it with completely new information.  In other words, we’ll figure out the organization of the syntax in the piece, and the use the same syntax while describing something completely different. We’ll put our new pieces here.

Here are some random suggestions:

• Someone is worried about graduating from HS and getting into college
• A 7-year-old deals with classroom drama
• A furniture salemsan hates his job
• A scuba driver is amazed by the beauty of the ocean

HW: Read Lars Eighner’s “On Dumpster Diving” and either do our normal thing of analyzing its rhetorical strategies and methods as a piece of participatory journalism.  Or…use a 12-panel comic book form (see Comic Life) to reproduce the piece with your commentary attached. See this to get a feel of the possibilities.

Image Credit: twostone-innnovation