Student Directions: Phoning It In

Phoning in Your Topic

The purpose of this assignment is to:
Give you practice identifying received ideas
Give you practice describing a received idea and your reaction to it
Give you access to your fellow students' similar projects

Your formal essay assignment, which is due next week and for which you have a separate handout, asks you to "respond to a received idea."

This short homework assignment, which you will complete by phone, asks you identify a common saying and your reaction to it.

I will collect phone messages and post them on our class blog at http://biggerclassroom.blogspot.com.

First, choose a received idea, something that people often say. Choose something that interests you, either because you think it's right, or you think it's wrong, or because you like the saying, or hate it, or because you have an understanding of it that might be different from other people's. Take a few minutes to jot down some notes saying what the idea or saying is, and what your personal reaction or understanding of it is. You might want to practice saying your response out loud once or twice before you call.

Then, from a touchtone phone,

• call our Gabcast message center at 1-800-749-0632 anytime before midnight on Saturday, September 8th.
• When you are asked for the channel number, type in 12483.
• When you are asked for the password, type in 3848. (It requires that they be entered rather quickly, if you have trouble, just stay on the phone until you're asked again for the channel number and password.)
• After the tone, leave your message.
  Remember to say your first name or initials as part of your message so I can tell who has completed the assignment.
  

This recording will be publicly accessible once I've posted it to the blog, so please don't reveal anything that is too private for people outside the class to hear.

This assigment is for credit, and will be assigned the same amount of credit as a reading reponse journal assignment.

Excerpt from Essay Assignment on Examining Received Ideas
Essay 1: Examining Received Ideas
Topic: In this essay,
you're asked to examine “the standard view” on a topic of your choice, question
it, analyze
it, and persuasively express your own view on it.
Here are
some prompts to get you started on identifying standard views:
“Americans
today believe that...”
“Conventional wisdom has it that..”
“Common sense
seems to dictate that...”
“The standard way of thinking about ___ is...”
“It is often said that...”
“My whole life I have heard it said that...”
“You would think that...”
“Many people assume that...”
“I've always
believed that...”
“When I was a child, I used to think that...”
“Although I should know better by now, I cannot help
thinking that...”
“At the same time that I believe _____, I cannot help
thinking that...”
“Everybody knows that...”
“My mother always told me...”