22.1: The Classroom Lecture and Activity

Classroom Lecture and Activity:

Course Objectives

1. Develop students’ writing process in composing formal, college-level essays using various rhetorical writing modes 
2. Enhance students’ abilities in organizing, developing, and revising their essays 

SLOs-Process  

1. Engage in a recursive process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading  
2. Engage in a reflective process of evaluating their own drafts and those of others
3. Revise work to enhance coherence and clarity while communicating with relevant discourse communities   

Turning in a Final Draft

Final drafts are the last stage of the writing process and are usually turned in for a grade. This makes this final stage more high stakes than the rest of the writing process. However, if you prepared, your final written essay will effectively reflect your ideas.

Before submitting a final draft of an essay whether that be a short essay or a longer research essay, you should double check several things.

1. Due date. If the due is already upon you as you grow through this list, you haven’t given yourself enough time. Here is a tip: if an essay has a due date, always be ready to review your final draft 48 hours before. This way, if you need to make any additional major changes, you will have time. This means putting the wrong date in your calendar, but it is great safety net especially for longer essays. Some instructors don’t allow revisions after an essay had been submitted as a final draft. Some instructors also take off points or lower the grades on late work. Keep this in mind as you start and finish your research essay.
2. Assignment Guidelines: Double check that you have met the minimum requirement for the assignment. These could things like, using MLA instead of APA, word or page count, formatting, source requirements and submission guidelines. Remember if you haven’t completed the minimum assignment guidelines, the essay may not pass just based on that. Here’s a tip: Get help early in the research essay process if you don’t understand the assignment or have questions. Remember: there are many different types of research essays that you may be required to write in your classes, so it is important to not assume that the guidelines will be the same. Some research essays require you to conduct interviews or short surveys. You will need to make sure you have cited all this information correctly and submitted anything that you needed to pertaining to it.
3. Revisions and Editing. At this point in writing a research essay, you have gone through multiple big revisions. Big revisions involve looking at the essay through these following categories: Focus and Thesis, Development, Analysis, and Original ideas; Source engagement, Structure and Organization, Style and Formatting. If you haven’t had a chance to revise your essay, you should refer to a lesson that focuses on revising. At this stage of the research essay, the last task to do is to edit. Separating the revisions from editing can save you a lot of time depending on how effective your writing fluency is. Sometimes, you do need to do some sentence level editing as you revise. However, if you only focus on grammar, especially when you don’t particularly need to, getting to a final draft could take longer. As you edit, you should be looking not just for spelling errors or comma mistakes, but for word choice effectiveness, complicated sentence structures, missing or repeated words. Word choice is important because a word can be grammatically correct, but create the wrong tone, have a connotation that you don’t want to convey, or misrepresent ideas from a source.
4. Fresh Pair of Eyes: Once you get to a final draft, and have done all you can, having someone read it over or out loud to you will give you a chance to see how your words are coming across to a reader. Booking an appointment with a writing tutor a few day before the due date of the final draft the perfect chance to do this. While the tutor can’t give you a grade, they can offer some comments and possibly some final suggestions for your paper. Tutoring sessions are normally 45 to an hour so if you have an essay that is ten pages or longer, be prepared to have to come back for an additional session. This is also why step one is so important.

Classroom Activity

There are 2 final drafts below. Using the sample rubric and assignment sheet, ‘grade’ the essay. Do any of either of the essays need revision? Write a short explanation for your reasoning.

Criteria

Excellent

Sufficient

Adequate

Lacking

Deficient

 

Focus	Has a clear detailed thesis and clear main points are sustained throughout the essay.	Generally presents clear main points that are sustained throughout the essay.	Lacks clear thesis statement, but does have a few main points. Slightly off topic.	May occasionally present main points that lack clear purpose or distract the reader.	Does not have a thesis statement. Overall, essay has no clear purpose. Does not attempt to answer prompt.
Development	Excellent use of detailed examples, instances, and scenarios to fully support main ideas. Analysis and explanation are logical and show critical thinking	Generally, offers adequate support for main points; incorporates sources in a responsible way that clearly furthers student's ideas. Adequate analysis.	May occasionally include information that strays from otherwise consistently supported main points. An attempt at analysis	Main points are not matched with supported examples, instances, or evidence. Some examples are confusing.	Has very little support for main points. Examples are confusing. Does not meet word count requirement.
Grammar and Mechanics	Correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation shows evidence of editing. Appropriate vocabulary with complex sentence structure.	Generally, presents smooth, easily-understood sentences, with few serious grammatical and mechanical problems throughout the essay.	May occasionally contain wordy or awkward prose with some grammatical and mechanical problems, though errors do not frequently inhibit readability.	Some confusing language. Clear lack of editing. Over use of simple sentences.	Many grammatical and mechanical errors that inhibit readability. Uses other weak stylistic choices that do not reflect awareness of a reader and/or purpose.
Organization	Uses a structure that promotes clarity of expression, effective seamless transitions with paragraphing order that highlights the rhetorical mode.	Generally, uses organizational choices that foster sense that essays are cohesive units; and some ineffective transitions and focused, ordered paragraphing	May occasionally present paragraphs that lack clear purpose, focus, or logical breaks. Repetitive transitions.	Uses organizational choices that frequently disrupt clarity; presents paragraphs that often lack logical breaks, purpose, or focus.	Lacks proper paragraph breaks. Does not have ordered paragraphs.
Documentation	Integrates all sources correctly and smoothly. Sources support ideas and do not overpower student’s ideas. Offers correctly formatted Works Cited page that reflects cited sources	Generally, integrates sources smoothly. Demonstrates the ability to distinguish student’s ideas from source’s ideas and to distinguish student’s words from source’s words.	May occasionally include errors in citations, but errors do not interfere with reader’s ability to identify sources. At times, misrepresents the writer.	Overuse or Underuse  of sources, errors in citations, and inability to distinguish students’ ideas from sources used.	Shows inability to use sources correctly or does not use sources. Lack of understanding of the source.

 

Writing Prompt: In the Ted Talk, "What if you could help decide how the government spends public funds in your community?" Shari Davis explains the idea behind participatory budgeting. Make an argument for what you think are the most important things on which the local government should spend the participatory budget. Keep in mind that most PB funds are around one million dollars. Make sure to be clear on what issues you are talking about in your thesis and explain why these are most important. The argument should then show how you would utilize the funds.

 

STUDENT SAMPLE 1

Emily Lopez

Professor Al-Amin

English

 

Participatory Budgeting

 

As a community one of our most pressing matters that need to be addressed and included in the public budget is adding more community centers to our neighborhoods. Community centers provide a wide range of resources from food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and education, to domestic violence assistance and substance abuse prevention. These centers are here for the benefit of the people and are worth the investment to support the youth, and keep crime rates below twenty percent. In that matter, our public funds should be used to host fundraiser events for the community centers, to add more athletic opportunities, and create hands-on opportunities for the people to learn.

The way we achieve this is by understanding our democratic rights here within our community. There is a process called Participatory Budgeting where members of communities decide how the public funds are spent. The New York Times calls this process “revolutionary civics in action.” It truly is revolutionary since it brings communities together, exercises our democratic rights, and creates more equitable issuing of public resources. These meetings that discuss the public funds are often held at community centers. While these centers provide a space for such important meetings, they also act as a hub of activity for people of all ages. In order to keep the community centers strong and independent, we would first invest in organizing fundraiser events throughout the year. Some examples include, breakfast with Santa, ice skating, movies in the park, easter egg hunts, and fall fests with hayrides and pumpkin carving booths. In tango, we would put the funds towards advertising these events through email, keeping the website updated, staying active on social media, and printing flyers too. These events will raise money to create self-sustaining centers so we will maintain our flexibility when deciding how we want to spend the future public funds.

We would not only spend the funds on advertising and hosting community events, but to commercialize what sports are offered too. Athletics are a great way to help children burn their built up energy, keep them off the streets, and practice their social skills. To encourage this, we would finance indoor and outdoor basketball courts, swimming pools, and running paths so they can be accessed all year round. We would also put money into buying sports equipment for the fitness gyms to offer as many sports as possible to appeal to a larger crowd. These centers are not just catered to the youth, they offer adult activities like intramural sport teams, water aerobics, physical therapy, first aid training, and more. A recent survey conducted under The Sports facilities Companies showed that adults under sixty five who exercise regularly save over one thousand two hundred thirty dollars in medical costs annually. So while partaking in the sports alongside their children, parents, retired individuals, and anyone interested, can donate their free time to coach youth teams, or even teach too.

Luckily, the teaching isn’t entirely dependent on volunteers. Community centers create jobs for people to coach and teach as well. Whether it’s fun culinary classes for parents and their kids, organizing book clubs and tutoring the youth, learning is prioritized and delivered within these centers. A national evaluation discovered that over forty percent of students who attend community center learning programs improve their core curricular grades like math and reading. And with this increased adult supervision, working families have one less thing to worry about. These programs reduce the gap of mischief from when the children leave school to when they return home with their parents; community centers have been shown to reduce crime. One twenty year study conducted by New York University observed two hundred sixty four cities' community nonprofits, focused on crime prevention, substance abuse prevention, job training, and youth programs. The results revealed every ten new nonprofits reduced the homicide rate by nine percent, lowered violent crime by six percent, and decreased property crime by four percent.

Now some people believe these funds should be put towards neighborhood schools instead. Fear not, there would be room to directly fund schools in the future due to the self sustaining outcome of these fundraiser events. Not only are community centers able to stand on their own after we invest in them, but they can partner with schools and act as a facility to host after school activities for the students. This would include educational electives like SEL, financial literacy, and self defense classes with sports teams to keep our kids off the streets.

These changes are urgently needed. Crime rates are steadily increasing, but it’s clear to hinder these unlawful acts is to add more community centers to our neighborhoods. The addition of these centers will help children burn their built up energy, keep them off the streets, and practice their social skills. This is not only to help us, but to help the future of our families, friends, and our community as a whole. If we want future generations to flourish, this is the first step.

 

Works Cited

Colin, Chris. “What if Public Funds Were Controlled by the Public?” The New York Times Article, 2022,

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/us/participatory-budgeting-shari-davis.html

Accessed on September 20th, 2023

 

City of Chicago, “Community-based initiatives.” Chicago, 2023

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/public-safety-and-violence-reduction/home/community-based-initiatives.html

Accessed on September 20th, 2023

 

Jumpsix2, “The Positive Impact of Community Recreation Centers.” The Sports Facilities Companies, 2016

https://sportsfacilities.com/the-positive-impact-of-community-recreation-centers/

Accessed on September 20th, 2023

 

STUDENT EXAMPLE 2

Danielle Apolonio

Professor Al-Amin

English

 

Participatory Budgeting

 

Many people question whether the government utilizes the public funds for the right purpose or whether if they squander it. In the Ted Talk, Shari Davis made some compelling points about Participatory Budgeting, she starts by explaining the meaning of PB which is a process that brings the community and the government together to create solutions within the community. Davis further explains why it is a great process to use, by using an example of her launching “Youth Lead the Change,” within this group everyone had a role to play because she valued their expertise whether if they formerly incarcerated, sexuality or simply just age. Participatory Budgeting can ease corruption whilst increasing people's faith in the government, create a safe space for youths' creativity and productivity by allocating funds to improve school conditions and invest in entrepreneurs in the community.

 

Shari David explains why participatory budgeting is essential for the community, in simpler terms it aids in bringing the community and the government together whilst keeping them involved in changes within the community. I totally agree with Shari’s points, with the people and the government working hand in hand. the people get the front seat get to see the impact on the community, and if there is any misuse of the funds, whilst ease the level of corruption. Anyone that is dishonest about past reform within the community should be removed. This is where real democracy come in and the community hold a meeting and nominate who seemed fit for the role to represent the community of which it stands. However, they should educate and create more room for roles in the office such as communication advisors, community managers and secretaries for those within the community so that they may become more active. Also, with the media included they can document events to have as proof in case any misguided information monetary donation is not used as planned.

 

Through Participatory Budgeting, the community can allocate funds to improve school conditions by donating computers. This is a wonderful use of resources; I have always believed in investing in the youths of tomorrow, in addition creating after school vocational training programs such as culinary, technical or any relevant trade that educates kids from young. This is a practical route to take and introduce to the youths, this give the child time to put their creativity to use whilst find something that they are genuinely interested in. On Chicago’s Report Card website, the dropout rate is at a whooping 8 percent, whereas the graduation rate is at sixty-nine percent.  The kids should be given the opportunity to make a choice to expand their expertise and knowledge by doing after school programs.  Many kids drop out if school, due to its mundane programs that does not grasp their attention.  For example, many kids aren’t keen to mathematics, but for those who are they are places is activities and games to enhance their skill rather than left out like the ones who aren’t. Many teachers don’t have the equipment or time to help each student find what they are interested with in the school hours, because they have a lesson plan to follow and objective to achieve at the end of a class or semester.

 

Lastly, investing in entrepreneurs within the community. Most entrepreneurs are already invested in the growth of their community. Many shows support buy supporting the non-profits within the community. They believe that giving back to the community keeps it relevant in hopes to save it from gentrification. Entrepreneurs are understanding of all concepts of business, hence the reason to keep the money flow local. For example, if the money within the community they can expand their business and hire from that same community, which in return the person takes his pay to maintain his livelihood in that same neighborhood which doesn’t allow gentrification to happen. It is truly best if you utilize those that grew up within the area since they know what is truly needed for growth and improvement and has the community's best interest at heart.

 

Although Shari Davis advocates for the use of Participatory Budgeting to basically reform the City Hall, Davis states “We’ve got to open the doors to city halls and school so wide that people can’t help but walk in,” she basically welcomes all perspectives because it’s the only way for us to succeed together. For example, when young people were being criminalized and placed in the justice system for placing their arts on walls, which is legally known as vandalism. She states that creating art walls gave them a safe space to practice their craft. I understand why Davis thought this was the best route for the kids, however as I stated in my second paragraph the best route would’ve been after school art class. This would give the child the tools and time to improve their craft.

 

Shari Davis advocates for Participatory Budgeting to be use for parks, youth groups and for new members of the city hall that looks more like her, whereas I lean more towards easing the level of corruption, trading schools and investing in entrepreneurs. We both want what’s best for our ward, however I believe my reason are essential for the growth that the community can eventually see in the years to come. In conclusion, Participatory Budgeting plays a key part in reaching goals within the community.

 

Works Cited

https://www.ted.com/talks/shari_davis_what_if_you_could_help_decide_how_the_government_spends_public_funds?language=en-   -Davis,Shari. “What If You Could Help Decide How The Government Spends Public Funds” 2020

https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/school.aspx?source=studentcharacteristics&source2=dropoutrate&Schoolid=150162990250526 – Illinois State Board of Education 2022