Regular Assignments for Reading and Discussion

Discussion Prompts

When it is your group's turn to do discussion prompts, you will do this assignment individually. (In other words, it is not a group assignment; the group is simply the set of students whose turn has come up to do this assignment.)

The assignment consists of three steps:

• Choose a quotation of about 10-30 words from the reading or readings for the day. Put that quotation in your Commonplace Document, with a citation of the page or line number(s).
• Add whether you want to address the quotation as a point of repetition or a point of uncertainty. (You will see during the semester that these are the two starting points Timothy Corrigan offers for thinking about films; they work well for developing all kinds of analytical thinking.)
• A point of repetition will lead you to invite the class to think about a pattern that your quotation represents. For example, if your quotation mentions a shirt, you might invite us to think together about other moments in the text that address clothing.
• A point of confusion should express some difficulty of reading the passage that goes beyond simply defining words. (In other words, don't simply say that you don't know what a word means.) Rather, the confusion should involve ideas: for instance, why does the author say this when the rest of the text seems to say the opposite? Why would a character take this unexpected action? Why does a poem about beauty include an image of violence?
• Explain for at least 75 words what you want to propose for class discussion about your chosen point, in terms of either establishing a pattern of repetition or exploring the confusion.

Commonplace Notes

This is a simpler assignment, one you will do for most class days. It is inspired by the tradition of commonplace books, which often consist simply of a series of quotations organized by category, based on passages the writer encountered in their reading life.