Poll for classmate project

Please take a few minutes to complete this poll for Raine's third quarter project.

Thank you!

Thursday in class

First, please take this poll.

Second, look through the Lepore article and, in your journal, copy down at least two passages that seem important, interesting, or surprising to you. Note at least one passage that seemed confusing or that you questioned.

Link to Jill Lepore's article "Birthright"

Here's a link to the excerpt of the Jill Lepore article I'm asking you to read for Thursday.

Quarter grade plan poll, blog details, and project proposal details

Please take the short poll on quarter grades. 

Also, with regard to blogs:

1. If you posted this week and your name doesn't appear on your post, please go back and sign the post or indicate your identity in the post title. (Also sign your comments if your identity is your whole blog group's.)
2. Be sure you have my gmail address (emajerus07 @) in your email notification box on your group's blog:

Your project proposal is due tomorrow in hard copy. One aspect of your proposal will be your proposed deadline. The latest possible date for your deadline will be Thursday, March 7, but you are welcome to propose an earlier deadline (and I recommend you consider it). You'll have at least three full class periods in this class to work on your project, and we'll have at least two days where we spend part or all of the period doing check-in/troubleshooting work in small groups and something along the lines of a "workshop" for your project.

The best way to look at your project is as an assignment for yourself. When you're getting an assignment from a teacher, what details and directions do you want? This is your chance to write those details and directions for yourself. You're letting me know what you plan to do and giving me the chance to give you some feedback, but you're also imagining the project you want to make happen and figuring out what you'll need to do to achieve that.

Wednesday in class and Thursday journal prompt

Today, at the start of class, share one of your two discussion questions for today in the "Working Doc" for your section (see "handouts, etc!" sidebar). Include it under "concrete discussion questions" or "larger questions," as appropriate.

Then, sign up for a snack to bring for Friday (or some other contribution our class).

For tomorrow, rather than creating discussion questions, write a brief reflection on chapters 13 & 14 based on the following prompt (feel free to go in related but slightly different directions, as your interests dictate): Reflect on how these chapters portray the kind of “passionate” love that we might be familiar with from media, literature, and history of our world in contrast to the engineered polygamous and relatively casual sex-and-romance world of BNW. In particular, consider how ideas of consent have evolved in American media and political culture in the past couple of decades and how consent is portrayed in these chapters, and what effects jealousy, anger, or other negative potential elements of “passion” seem to come into play in one world and the other.

Class norms and project ideas

I have collected and posted our class norms for both sections of Utopias & Dystopias, which you'll find in the sidebar. Since both sections chose "Address people by their preferred names" as a norm, I thought I would also share my explanation of why I chose "Dr. Majerus" as my preferred teacher name, for anyone who's interested. I wrote this for Nonfiction Writing blog last semester, so if you were in that class, you may already have seen it.

To remind you of what the current parameters for our third quarter project are, here's what I came up with:

Your project should:

• Relate to utopias &/or dystopias from a historical, philosophical, &/or literary angle
• Involve research and draw on at least four solid sources (writers with individual expertise and/or institutional support)
• Give you an opportunity to practice your writing, public speaking, and/or communication/design skills

We can adjust this if you have ideas or arguments for more, fewer, or different parameters.

The possibilities are wide open for what you can do. Here are a few ideas that might either give you ideas for a direction or spark your thoughts on another direction:

Think about issues that Brave New World has brought up that you're interested in and propose a literary, cultural, or historical project that arises out of our reading so far––or a project that combines literary and historical, philosophical, and/or cultural ideas. Consider a comparison between BNW and another dystopia you've read, such at Lois Lowry's The Giver, or explore Huxley's interest in Native American culture and communities and consider where you stand on the question of racism and Huxley's representation of Pueblo community in New Mexico. (One source to consider: Indian Country Today's story "Is Huxley’s Brave New World Racist?")

Explore other literary utopias and/or dystopias and create a project that engages with a book we will be reading later in the year, one you've read in the past, or one you're currently reading. Check out the  Literary Utopias section of our Uni Library class projects page for help.

Look through The Utopias Reader to get a basic introduction to some historical Utopian communities like the Shakers, the Oneida community, or Brook Farm and other communities that followed the philosophies of Charles Fourier. Perhaps you'd like to explore one of these in greater detail, or perhaps you'd like to do research on other or more recent social experiments in creating a Utopian community. For help with this, in addition to other search tools at your disposal, you can check out the Historical and Environmental Utopias section of our class projects page.

If you're interested in more philosophical ideas related to utopias, you can explore some manifestos or philosophical frameworks for imagined or real utopias, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's Communist Manifesto (which is excerpted in ) or the work of Charles Fourier (excerpt linked above). You can also explore the Philosophical Utopias section of our class projects page.

There are many creative project possibilities that span a wide array of imaginative realms. Think about everything we've talked about so far in class, what you know about the books we'll be reading, what issues and ideas arise from discussions of utopias and dystopias, from our culture's current (and longstanding) interest in dystopia, ideas of educational experiment and reform, and anything else we have touched on or are likely to. The range of options is wide open. I'm interested in your ideas and visions.