For Tuesday: Rogers, "One Person Means Alone" (pp.207-223)

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: Several times the author is asked “yi ge ren,” or, “Are you one person”? What are they really asking her here, and how does it relate to the Chinese concept of guanxi? What makes being alone so vitally different in China than in America?

Q2: According to the essay, why does Chinese society place less value on personal privacy, especially in intimate situations (using the bathroom, showers, etc.)? In America, we might assume bathroom privacy is a universal concern…why isn’t it in China?

Q3: On page 219, the shopkeeper calls her a “poor foreigner,” but Rogers adds that “[it] was the last time she’d refer to me as a foreigner. I’d always be one, but the next time I came in to buy something, she called me Luo Yi Lin, the name I’d been given by a Mandarin tutor just after I’d arrived to China.” What makes her suddenly belong in this society? What is she able to do that makes her more than a “lost tourist” or a “foreigner” here?

Q4: One of the reasons Rogers worries about being too intimate with her students and colleagues is because she’s a lesbian in a society that may or may not be accepting of it. Do you feel she has the right to preserve some of the privacy/intimacy she would keep hidden in America? Does entering a new culture with new rules force you to “out” yourself? Why or why not?

For Thursday: Tower, "No Amount of Traffic" (pp.243-253)

Here's a link to the essay in Outside magazine: https://www.outsideonline.com/2086161/no-amount-traffic-or-instagrammers-or-drunks-can-take-magic-out-semi-wilderness

Definitions: trodden, vehement, preternaturally, postrandial, “gourmandizing pantomime”

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: At the end of the essay, Wells asks, “what do we want from the woods? Primitively put, we want the woods to put in us a feeling that doesn’t happen indoors” (253). What experiences does the modern world of “indoors” and “technology” not give us that we seek outside? Do you think people who grow up in more urban areas even know what to look for when they go outside? You might consider the question he asks earlier, “Am I getting it?”

Q2: In the previous essay, Santillan realizes, “if you don’t lose yourself, you’re never going to find yourself.” But getting lost is easier said than done. How hard is it to get lost in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park? Why might the park rangers and the National Parks Service not want you to get lost, and have a “finding yourself in nature” experience?

Q3: Wells writes that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has transformed “from an actual place to an abstract pop phenomenon” (249). What do you think this means? How does a place stop being a place and become something else? How does this change how people visit and experience the park?

Q4: Tower has a very humorous and poetic way of describing the place and the people in it. Discuss a brief passage (or even a sentence) that makes you see the place in a different light, either as a way to make fun of it, or to appreciate what it actually is (in his mind).

For Tuesday: Kushner, The Land of the Lost

For Tuesday: Kushner, The Land of the Lost (pp.138-147)

NOTE: Here is the article if you don't have the book: http://www.davidkushner.com/article/land-of-the-lost/

I. DEFINITIONS (define all of the following, but feel free to look up other words as well that you don't know):

phenomenon; languish; detrimental; cognition; tempestous 

II. Answer TWO of the following in a short paragraph each—a few sentences. Remember, give a thoughtful and useful reponse rather than just an ‘answer.’ These are not yes or no questions, and I’m not looking for a specific answer...I want to see how you respond to these questions and what you think the essay is getting at. The more work you put into these questions, the more you’ll have to say/write in your larger papers.

Choose TWO of the following:

Q1: Why does the essay suggest that “Compulsive use of mapping technology may even put us at greater risk for memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease” (140)? How could a technology aid designed to help us get around actually impair or ability to move around?

Q2: Based on the essay, why did Icelanders find Santillan such a fascinating character? Are they making fun of him? Feeling sorry for him? Or something else? What did he come to represent for the Icelandic nation (and perhaps, for the author)?

Q3: For ancient cultures, the author explains, “time reckoning and direction were intertwined” (146). How does this work, and why might this be an important way of seeing the world? Why have we lost this in our own society?

Q4: Scientists now call the phenomenon of dying based on bad GPS directions “death by GPS” (140). Why do you think people would ignore common sense and logic and drive to their doom based on digital directions? Do you most people are more—or less—likely to do this? Or is Santillan an exception?

Welcome to the Course

Welcome to the Fall 2018 semester and Freshman Composition I! 

This is a first-semester writing course that attempts to teach you the fundamentals of college-level writing, which consists primarily of writing for an audience, understanding context, responding to appropriate research, and controlling tone and rhetorical purpose. To do this, we’ll read and discuss several ‘real-world’ conversations so you can understand why these issues matter in our society (and many others). I also hope to make you a more critical reader as well, since books, essays, and stories create the blueprint for our own ideas and responses (esp. in writing). For this class, we’ll focus our writing on the loose theme of travel and culture, and how other cultures, languages, and contexts challenge our understanding of the world—and quite often, ourselves. 

MOST IMPORTANTLY, be sure to buy the two books for the course! We'll be using the first, Best American Travel Writing 2017 almost immediately, so you don't want to get behind. Consult your syllabus for questions about the required work and the class schedule, but feel free to e-mail me with any questions at jgrasso@ecok.edu.

See you in class!