Junior final exam plan

You are to write a 1200-1500 word essay (formal 3rd person) or manifesto (informal 1st person) that narrows a particular theme in the class to one specific question and then synthesizes four class texts plus one outside text into a coherent position. 
Additional expectations include proper citations and works cited page. This is due ON PAPER in my office by the end of the English exam period. Here is the link for the course survey. I appreciate your anonymous responses to the class. Thanks. 

Project evaluation criteria below-

• Jenny Price's literary manifesto"Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A."and part 2               
• McKibben's "Global Warming's Terrible New Math" describes our current climate change plight in clear, direct, stark CO2 terms.
• An article in the NYT magazine about legal rights for animals based on Leopold's land ethic. 

• Chris Hayes' article on the New Abolitionism which compares fossil fuel holdings to southern plantation owners holding of slaves. A provocative economic/moral argument.
• Ted Kaczinsky, also known as the unibomber, wrote this environmental manifesto from his cabin off the grid in Montana.
• Here's a NYT magazine article and the website for The Dark Mountain Project which contains another manifesto about environmental despair and failure.  

 Evaluation Criteria---------------------------------------------------------

• Quality of thinking- 50 points
• Narrows topic to a productive, specific question
• Develops the idea and uses sources thoughtfully
• Shows effective choice of four (4) texts and passages
• Incorporates details/examples from sources sufficiently and effectively
• Goes beyond cliche/superficiality into substantive tensions/questions
• Arrives at a considered, personal, coherent conclusion 

• Quality of writing-50 points
• Effective, clear structure- either formal or creative
• Careful editing (MINIMAL WEAK VERBS)
•  Use of title, thesis & topic sentences- either formal or informal
• Uses specific details from text and personal experience to ground ideas in context.

Senior Exam-

Meet at 12:30 in room 223 (next to Mr. Hughes' office) with your presentation script, annotations, & a computer (for a course evaluation). I'm looking forward to some rousing, creative explorations of the texts and questions from the term. I'm also available Tuesday during class time to answer questions. If you'd like to take the class survey early- the link is HERE.

Google(Earth)

How does Google's Earth Day doodle show the relationship between (wo)man, nature, and technology?

Like housing projects named for features they displaced 'Fox Run' 'Oak Knoll' 'Falcon Ridge' (this article mocks this approach in Denver), Google's cyber nature passes easily for cute celebration of nature, but of course when we watch this, we're very much NOT watching any actual birds or beetles as your Vine videos suggested.

In the animation for Earth Day, Google creates a few small creatures, hummingbird, dung beetle, puffer fish, jelly fish, that turn and float and flutter. The pair of shivering monkeys seem different from the rest, staring out at us from their double oo station, the place all these cartoons are integrated into the name.  They're rendered in anthropomporphized letter O's subordinate to the all encompassing often dancing word Google. How many of you regularly click on the animation?  How many minutes have you passed idly watching this? How many human years have passed similarly? At what cost? 

In The Circle, Eggers opposes the utopia of the Googleplex corporate campus with kayaking on SF bay or later on Mae's boyfriend's off-the-grid hideout. Yet the real place we experience Google is on the screen, increasingly in all our screens as Google grows ubiquitous. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate their work. I hate using email programs that don't let you easily embed links or pictures. Their products are so intuitive they feel....ummm.....natural. On the screen, as we search, Google greets us daily with a cute, clever, animated version of their name created just for that day.  Each day they greet us with a combination of puzzle, cartoon, and lesson.

And the word Google- do you know the original meaning before it became a company and then a verb?  It meant 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially an incomprehensibly large quantity. An apt name, certainly, perhaps because of the incomprehensible encroachment it represents on our time and because of the way technology continues to replace the natural world in our lives, even as it evokes it like those awkwardly named housing developments.

Earth Day

While Earth Day now gets lost in the chaos of all the other awareness days and months, the early environmental movement used it very effectively. In this interview Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand talks about this campaign to make public the now famous first full image of earth published by NASA in 1972. Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson focused on creating the first Earth Day as noted in this history.  

Brand's life fascinates me for his role on Ken Kesey's magic bus, his founding of the Whole Earth Catalogue, his life on a houseboat in Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, and now his latest venture, The Long Now foundation. This organization is trying to help us understand the world across incomprehensible time scales.

This year NASA is celebrating Earth Day with the #GlobalSelfie project. I hadn't heard of it until I did a bit of research for this post, so I don't know if it's really working.  And while crowdsourcing is amazing, I'm less sure about selfies.

As we move toward your final projects and the end of this class, I'm weighing the balance between hope and despair in these conversations. Climate change conversations tend to produce fatalism, and this bleakly hilarious viral video w/ 8 million views tries to make humor out of it. Yet this seems to be a long way from the 60's hope that an image could change how we think about our relationship to the planet. As I write this on a bright spring morning, everything seems momentarily right with the world. I believe these questions are the most important ones we face.

I hope this term has increased your appreciation for them. We're all going to have trouble doing homework today as the pull of the sun and warmth and first signs of spring call us back after the long, cold winter. Who couldn't love these days?  I want to believe we act more out of love than fear, and I hope we can enjoy spring and consider these ideas in our final days and projects.

Calendar

Dear seniors (and friends)- It's finally nice outside and we're all distracted, 
but it ain't over 'til it's over.... Here is a calendar for the last two weeks.

Monday 4/14                       Wednesday 4/16               Friday 4/18
triptych presentations          Final proj assigned           Final groups- short planning time
ITW quiz/discussion           Jigsaw presentations         Jigsaw presentations
**quiz on 'Allegory of the Cave' too!                          ITW blog due (see other post)
                                                                                      hw-Read scenes 1 & 2 

Monday 4/21 (45mins)       Wednesday 4/23              Friday 4/25
reading/performing Arcadia in class------------------------------>
Arcadia quiz                      hw-start final
hw- read to Act 2 sc 6       

(Seniors only)
Monday 4/28                     Wednesday 4/30
review rehearsal day           12:30-2:30 Presentations in Lecture Hall.

Reading Jigsaw

While we read Into the Wild, here are a few short but important readings that pull offer some key ideas about ways of thinking about nature and place.  In groups you will carefully read and discuss one set of readings.  Make sure you understand them and be prepared to lead a discussion addressing difficult ideas, images or words, 2-3 key passages, and then a couple of guiding questions that connect this reading to other readings/ideas from the course. 

You need to turn in a annotations for key passages, an outline of key ideas, a set 5-7 discussion questions including questions linking your texts to others in the course. 

1. Garret Hardin "The Tragedy of the Commons" with 2 key passages to discuss with 10 examples
and this article, too.

2.  Dr. Seuss' The Lorax vs the American Forest Products Council's The Truax, this comic and then perhaps an excursion into chat/blogs like this

3. Richard Louv introduction and excerpts from Last Child in the Woods and this one about NDD and ADHD and follow up article

4. Aldo Leopold "The Land Ethic" and the AL Foundation page

5. Joyce Carol Oates "Against Nature"

6. Sandra Steingraber Living Downstream excerpt with/against video Frontiers of the Future

The coming weeks

You were to have read up to chapter12 in Into the Wild for today, and I'd like you to finish chapter 17 by Friday.  Over the weekend, please read the last 17 pages and complete/post your triptych. By Friday, April 18th write a blog post responding to one of the following questions, or see me if you have another idea you'd like to pursue.

• Search "Chris McCandless" in Youtube and watch a few of the many videos.  Consider how they represent and respond to his life and death. Compare and contrast these and offer your own response.
• Read this New Yorker article by Krakauer that considers new evidence about McCandless' death. Why does this matter? How has the author's perspective changed in the 21 years between the two articles? What is your response?
• Assess McCandless' life and death for yourself. Identify and rank the most compelling explanations Krakauer offers, and then explain what you think the story suggests about your/our relationship to nature.