English 1A

The theme of my 1A course is “books versus movies.” We will be delving into novels that have been made into popular films over the years. In this class, students will research and analyze seven different works: Hunger Games, The Color Purple, Fight Club, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Peter Pan, The Great Gatsby, and Of Mice and Men.

Students will hone their critical thinking skills, reading comprehension, writing skills, and research abilities. In addition to that, students will be taught how to write in accordance to MLA format. Students will write several paper assignments that vary from 1-5 pages in length.

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My B1A course is titled "Pastures, Pipelines, and Prisons: Critically Engaging the Economies of the Central Valley."

The course approaches the major industries of the Central Valley and our local region as they are represented in both fiction and non-fiction texts and other media. The course is divided into three sections, each focusing on a specific part of the local economy: water usage and rights in California, agriculture and migratory labor, and the prison industrial complex. These broader themes intersect with relevant topics such as capitalism, race, class, immigration, labor rights, and other pertinent concepts and issues. This is all to serve the purpose of providing students with the knowledge and tools needed to think critically about those forces undergirding or undermining the region and our own communities.

Students will view the film Water and Power: A California Heist for the first unit on water. In the second unit on agriculture and migratory labor, students will read Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California by Carey McWilliams, America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, and Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes. For the third unit, which focuses on the prison industrial complex, students will read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, and they will also watch the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th. Each of the three units culminates in an essay.  

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My English 1A course focuses on topics such as health, education, parenting, advertising, immigration, and civil rights.   

The first part of the class focuses on the recently-released book entitled Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Family and Personal Relationships, featuring pro-con arguments on topics such as adoption, homeschooling, and immigration, among others. 

The second portion of the class centers on the book Fast Food Nation.  Students analyze various aspects of the author's critique of the entire fast food industry, from worker treatment and injuries, to foodborne pathogens, to treatment of animals. 

At the end of the semester, students will have the chance to choose from a long list of topics to conduct research on, including video game violence, doping in sports, animal rights, censorship, gun control, and many more.

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In the last several years, we have seen a dramatic rise in extremism in the United States and across the world. We will look at the factors that contribute to extremism, including cognitive biases, the authoritarian personality, lack of media literacy, lack of critical thinking skills, belief in conspiracy theories, and prejudices against groups of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. We will also study potential solutions.

The assigned books follow:

J. M. Berger’s Extremism, part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, gives an overview of “What extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence.” It was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 by the Association of College and Research Libraries: “Elegantly written, the book provides a lucid discussion of a contested concept, with illustrating examples from right-wing, left-wing, and religious terrorism. For anyone new to the extremism landscape, it is an excellent introductory text to better understand political extremism.”

Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist “tells the story of how white-supremacist ideas migrated from the far-right fringe to the White House through the intensely personal saga of one man who eventually disavowed everything he was taught to believe, at tremendous personal cost. With great empathy and narrative verve, Eli Saslow asks what Derek Black’s story can tell us about America’s increasingly divided nature.” Saslow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History is a graphic novel based on the author’s family’s experiences during and after the Holocaust. It is a Pulitzer Prize winner and “[a] brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.”

There will also be a class pack emailed to students and uploaded to Canvas Files that contains information on MLA format, requirements for writing assignments, including essays and the research paper, information on punctuation and grammar, and so on.

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The overarching theme of my course is on “Propaganda and Public Opinion.” A notoriously difficult word to define, “propaganda” does not simply refer to blatant lies but to how information is motivated. This course examines the history, techniques, and debates over propaganda, as the term took on a new meaning in the twentieth century. Beginning with classic essays by writers such as Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, and Edward Bernays, we discuss how while some were horrified by propaganda others made a case that it was essential to safeguarding a democratic society. The mutual impact of propaganda on theories of psychology will further be examined through the Adam Curtis's documentary series The Century of the Self. The course concludes with arguably the most trenchant critique of controlling societies through propaganda: George Orwell's 1984. Along the way, students will have the opportunity to analyze and discuss primary materials, including World War I posters, Second World War films by Frank Capra, and Cold War comic books.

Throughout the course, we will continually raise questions about the meaning and ethics of propaganda. How and why has propaganda been defined in different historical contexts? Is its use in society necessarily bad? Could public service campaigns, education, art, and/or advertising also be considered propaganda? What can previous discussions about propaganda tell us about contemporary anxieties over fake news? We will raise these questions not to reach definitive answers but to stimulate ideas for the central purpose of this course: to research and write on a topic of your choice.

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The umbrella topic for my English 1A course is “Gender Issues and Conflicts.”

Course readings, discussions, and essay assignments will focus on definitions of masculinity and femininity in American culture (and in other cultures as well), both now and in the past, and also on prominent issues that highlight the differing expectations and treatment of each gender.

Students will read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms; each author provides intriguing insights into the motivations and behaviors of men and women.

The research paper will be based on a “gender issue” selected by the student and approved by the instructor.

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My English 1A course focuses on the ethics, psychology, nutrition, philosophy, and politics of food.

Students read essays from a food anthology that explore the definitions, purpose, ethics, and future of food and one full-length  non-fiction work of investigative journalism that delves into the policies and practices of food in farm fields, retail outlets, and restaurants.

Critical reading, thinking, and writing are key components of the course and are demonstrated through class discussions, exercises, quizzes, and writing assignments, including thought papers, an analysis of a food advertisement, a synthesis essay, and a research paper on a food-related topic.

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Advertising and Hollywood have us working jobs we really don't want, just to buy things we don't really need. With this philosophy, Fight Club's Tyler Durden tries to shake the sleeping giant of America awake and into action.

While this advice comes from the novel we'll study in my course, it is the focus of much scholarship and criticism surrounding mass media and popular (consumer) culture.

This English 1A class will look at how multinational corporate giants have gained control of our airwaves and checkbooks to further their own agendas. We'll study the scholarship and fiction surrounding consumerism, ad techniques, and threats to democracy.

We'll spend the first half of the semester looking at Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal to see exactly what is wrong with the American food supply, and we'll read Fight Club and some other literature that examines problems with the typical American over-consumerism and corporate greed.

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The course theme is "Marginalized Groups."

Marginalization is treating someone as less valuable based on factors, such as gender, race, religion, abilities, country of origin, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or age. Readings, discussions, and research center around how marginalization is defined, how it affects individuals and the community at large, and ways to address this oppression. The assigned text is Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy.

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My 1A course materials change from time to time because it is my goal to keep the discussions fresh and focused on recent and relevant ideas and conversations. In my class, topics are often focused on education, community inequalities, and technology. Readings are by a range of multi-ethnic authors, and students will read one full-length book in the course. Students will have an opportunity to choose meaningful topics that are unique to them as they craft their formal essays.

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The focus of this course will be success and the American Dream.

All of us want to be successful - isn't that why we're here? But what is success, who is it for, and how do we get there? Implicit in our society is the notion that all who live or come to our country can attain the American Dream - success manifested through self-determination. But is the American Dream a reality or a fantasy? 

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that we have misconceptions when it comes to our ideas of success: it's not as simple as intelligence or diligence. It's about opportunity and cultural heritage and factors beyond ourselves. In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, authors Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer present a compelling look at poverty in the United States today. In the documentary Inequality for All, Robert Reich and the filmmakers contend that income inequality impairs the American Dream for millions of Americans. 

Ultimately, our reading, analysis, and discussion of these works will lead to a critical synthesis essay: What is success and how does it relate to the idea of the American Dream? Is the American Dream still an attainable goal or even a goal one should desire to attain?  

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The central topic for my English 1A course is the public perception of science.

We will cover some related topics, such as technology and social media, science education, and the current state of American science literacy, but we will focus our attention for much of the course on famous controversies and breakthroughs in science and engineering and what those have meant for Americans.

The research paper assignment will ask students to examine public and official government responses to contentious issues such as genetic modification of foods, cloning, stem-cell research, the exploration of space, climate change, and the teaching of evolution in public schools.

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The umbrella topic for my English 1a class is success. We read the 2016 New York Times Bestseller Grit by psychologist Angela Duckworth, along with some of the most current psychological research in the field of success to find out just what it takes to become successful.  Related topics included in the class readings that can springboard into research topics include the relationship between happiness and success, success in education, alternatives to higher education, the American Dream, mindset, the role of talent vs. effort, etc. This topic tends to resonate with students because, after all, who doesn't want to learn how to become successful?
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The term “controversy” usually sparks discussions of the taboo, but my English B1A course will improve students' expository writing, research skills, and critical thinking by enhancing communications and writing about highly political subjects and research. This class investigates the historical controversy of immigration policies in America through the non-fiction narration of The Devil's Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea. Moreover, it analyzes the struggle of overcoming racist systems by exploring Citizen : An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. Further studies will incorporate approaches to literature by studying the psychological approach of two mass murderers in the non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Finally, we will critically debate about the ethics and validity of Greg Mortenson's and David Oliver Relin's non-fiction novel, Three Cups of Tea. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, utilizing critical reviews, film, historical clips, and group discussion and debate to broaden our understanding of what creates controversy and how we move others with credible arguments.

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