assignments ENGL 101/144 Writing Rhetorically: BOOK CLUB PRESENTATIONS @ THE MYS
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OVERVIEW: If you’ve read carefully enough, you will notice that you and your book club groups are responsible for presenting at the Midyear Symposium for 1st and 2nd Year Students (MYS). This is an annual event at the University that features the work of over 500 students around the last day of classes of the fall semester. This year, the MYS falls on a Monday, 11 December 2017.
What You’ll Present
During the MYS, you and your book club group will be responsible for a 12 minute presentation. You should expect to present for the entire 12 minutes. You will be asked to give a general overview of the book, and you will be asked to give special attention to the thematic significance of the book as well as the ways the research you did over the course of the semester helped you to determine that theme.
Who’ll You Present With/To
You will present with some member of our class, but you will also present with other students from other classes presenting on other topics. Your audience will be other students, other faculty, University Administrators, and other members of the BSU community. It’s a big day on campus, and you should feel free to invite your parents. You should most definitely invite your book club facilitators.
When You’ll Present
All of you will be scheduled during one of the two hours that are devoted to ENGL101/144. You will not need to miss any other classes or any other obligations to participate. Participation is required, and failure to do so will seriously jeopardize your grade for the book club portion of ENGL101 and ENGL144.
Workshop/Dress Rehearsal
Once you finish your book you will work on your book club presentation in your book club. I would also suggest that you use the open times after ENGL 101 on days you don't have book club to prepare. Check the syllabus for when you will do a dry run of your presentation in our class. I will give you feedback to help you improve your presentation so that it is at its best when we present it to the entire University the following Wednesday.
I know that this might seem like a rather intimidating way to end the semester. As long as you put in the work and time to make these presentations strong and interesting, you will do very well. You will be presenting in front of people who want you to do well. Additionally, this is a first opportunity to start to become involved in meaningful academic co-curricular activities like Undergraduate Research. You can put this presentation on a resume. I will show you how to do this in class. It is my hope that this experience will launch many of you into a very successful, academically rich life at BSU. I always look forward to these days.
DETAILS: As I mentioned in the overview, you have 12 minutes to present. You should use exactly 12 minutes, not more and not less. During those 12 minutes you need to make sure you address the following:
1. A brief, and not boring summary of the plot of your novel. Too much summary is boring.
2. A brief overview of the important themes of the novel. In other words, what is the thesis, essentially, of the novel? What is the author trying to get you to think about and understand by writing this particular story? This is the most important thing that people should learn from your presentation. It is also the best opportunity to be creative.
3. Figure out a way to include all the research I asked you to do this semester. It is related to what you need to do in number two. Here again, how you present this information to your audience, how you connect it to the theme/thesis/big idea of the novel can be as creative as you want to make it.
That is what you need to include in terms of content during your 12 minutes. As for presentation, how you develop this content into 12 minutes is up to you. Here are some ideas gleaned from previous years:
These are just some of the things I’ve seen over the years. I’ve also seen a lot of basic powerpoint presentations. And those work too, and a lot of them just, well, they just suck. It's not always the case that groups that do powerpoints phone it in, but it is true that the group that phone it are always the ones that "just do a powerpoint." You are a clever bunch and sort of a bunch of clowns--I mean that in the best way. So I look forward to what you might come up with. As with the first presentations in class, there will be voting by your classmates and suitable prizes for the best presenters.
Here are the categories:
OTHER THINGS:
What You’ll Present
During the MYS, you and your book club group will be responsible for a 12 minute presentation. You should expect to present for the entire 12 minutes. You will be asked to give a general overview of the book, and you will be asked to give special attention to the thematic significance of the book as well as the ways the research you did over the course of the semester helped you to determine that theme.
Who’ll You Present With/To
You will present with some member of our class, but you will also present with other students from other classes presenting on other topics. Your audience will be other students, other faculty, University Administrators, and other members of the BSU community. It’s a big day on campus, and you should feel free to invite your parents. You should most definitely invite your book club facilitators.
When You’ll Present
All of you will be scheduled during one of the two hours that are devoted to ENGL101/144. You will not need to miss any other classes or any other obligations to participate. Participation is required, and failure to do so will seriously jeopardize your grade for the book club portion of ENGL101 and ENGL144.
Workshop/Dress Rehearsal
Once you finish your book you will work on your book club presentation in your book club. I would also suggest that you use the open times after ENGL 101 on days you don't have book club to prepare. Check the syllabus for when you will do a dry run of your presentation in our class. I will give you feedback to help you improve your presentation so that it is at its best when we present it to the entire University the following Wednesday.
I know that this might seem like a rather intimidating way to end the semester. As long as you put in the work and time to make these presentations strong and interesting, you will do very well. You will be presenting in front of people who want you to do well. Additionally, this is a first opportunity to start to become involved in meaningful academic co-curricular activities like Undergraduate Research. You can put this presentation on a resume. I will show you how to do this in class. It is my hope that this experience will launch many of you into a very successful, academically rich life at BSU. I always look forward to these days.
DETAILS: As I mentioned in the overview, you have 12 minutes to present. You should use exactly 12 minutes, not more and not less. During those 12 minutes you need to make sure you address the following:
1. A brief, and not boring summary of the plot of your novel. Too much summary is boring.
2. A brief overview of the important themes of the novel. In other words, what is the thesis, essentially, of the novel? What is the author trying to get you to think about and understand by writing this particular story? This is the most important thing that people should learn from your presentation. It is also the best opportunity to be creative.
3. Figure out a way to include all the research I asked you to do this semester. It is related to what you need to do in number two. Here again, how you present this information to your audience, how you connect it to the theme/thesis/big idea of the novel can be as creative as you want to make it.
That is what you need to include in terms of content during your 12 minutes. As for presentation, how you develop this content into 12 minutes is up to you. Here are some ideas gleaned from previous years:
- Make the movie trailer for the novel. This involved writing a script and putting together a short movie/powerpoint slide show that looked sort of like what a movie trailer for the movie version of your book would look like. The movie trailer was not the full 12 minutes—the students did a power-point for the summary. They explained how the movie trailer represented the theme of the movie. They also included ideas for casting the movie—what characters would be played by what stars and why.
- Talk show discussion like Oprah between main characters about significant ideas in the novel. I liked this one better than I thought I would. They had some characters from the novel and then other characters that allowed the book characters to talk about ideas, fears, anger that the group felt like they would have expressed about what happened in the book. It turned out to be a really effective way to combine research and theme.
- Pop-up Videos. This was the most clever way I ever saw students bring research into their presentation. Students would be presenting on the different parts of the presentation—theme, plot. And two of the group members would suddenly run in front of the speaker and hold up a cue card with relevant research that pertained to whatever the actual speaker was talking about. They’d hold the cue-card up in front of the face of the speaker, read the card, and then disappear behind the group again. After we all stopped laughing, it was really clever—and really highlighted what they learned.
- Mock Trial. One year, a group of students put different characters on trial for crimes committed in the novel. They had a prosecutor and a defense present opposing argument based on what happens in the book and the research they did about the topics/themes covered there. In the end, they had people in the audience use their phones to text guilty or not guilty. It went to some website and before the presentation was over they had a verdict. Then they talked a little bit about how they thought the verdict played out (they were in agreement with the not guilty verdict rendered by the audience/jury). Super techy and clever.
These are just some of the things I’ve seen over the years. I’ve also seen a lot of basic powerpoint presentations. And those work too, and a lot of them just, well, they just suck. It's not always the case that groups that do powerpoints phone it in, but it is true that the group that phone it are always the ones that "just do a powerpoint." You are a clever bunch and sort of a bunch of clowns--I mean that in the best way. So I look forward to what you might come up with. As with the first presentations in class, there will be voting by your classmates and suitable prizes for the best presenters.
Here are the categories:
- Best Group Overall
- Most Creative
- Best use of Research
OTHER THINGS:
- On the day of the MYS, please dress decently. Don’t wear anything that it would embarrass you to wear to your grandmother’s funeral. Wear something that might be considered “business casual.” So no hoodies or sweats. I guess nice jeans, but I’d prefer decent pants and a decent shirt and decent shoes.
- Introduce yourselves to the audience, tell them the title of the book and who the author is, and clue people in as to why you are doing this presentation. So set things up.
- Remember to thank, by name, your book club facilitators for their help with this project and the entire semester.
- There is lots of food all day at the event, so make sure you take advantage of that. Eat for free all day on the school's dime.
- You'll have an extra credit assignment that will make up for either missed classes or missed reading journals, or, if none of these is a problem for you, will increase your final grade by half a letter grade.