Today your first formal essay is due. Please turn it in using the Google Form at the very top of today’s entry on our “Chalkboard” Doc.

We’ll take a few minutes at the start of class to review all the content we’ve covered since the start of the semester. Since August 26, we have been busy…

• editing the work of peers
• summarizing assigned readings and other texts of our choosing 
• composing responses to assigned readings, including each other’s work 
• conducting research using library databases and learning about APA citation
• continuing that research with internet sources
• learning to evaluate both types of sources as reliable and/or relevant
• annotating (alone and with others) independent readings
• posing different kinds of questions and defining our own purposes as readers
• discussing readings, activities, and our own writing in the context of our experiences
• drafting and sharing exploratory writing verbally, in the chat, and on the course blog
• completing both informal and formal staged writing tasks

There is, of course, a lot of semester left. This first Module prepared us to choose a book for Module 3’s book groups. Module 4 is reflecting on our progress on many of the above skills and concepts.

So what is Module 2 about?

To borrow the phrase from Rebecca Renner, a journalist whose work we’ll read today: “How to start a book club that doesn’t suck.”

The essays you’ll write will draw on another wide swatch of experience and sources to imagine the kind of experience you want in Module 3. As a class, we’ll read open internet sources and peer-reviewed social science articles about the social phenomenon of reading with other people. What makes it work? How does it change when it happens at school? And what (yes) expectations do you bring to this experiment from your own history as a reader, writer, and student? These are starter questions; we’ll refine them as a group next Tuesday, October 5.

The turnaround for this essay is going to be quite a bit faster: a draft will be due October 12, and the graded revision will be due October 19.

You can write a traditional essay, or you can use a different form: collaborative writing, a powerpoint presentation, a video of a reasonable length, multimodal writing, a story map or some other kind of digital project. Again, more on that this coming Tuesday.

Today, we’ll start class with a freewrite about reading alone and with others. You’ll expand this, eventually, to a blog post. Here’s the prompt — broad, with lots of questions, designed to keep you writing. Go where it takes you and use all 10 mins:

Prompt: What do you enjoy about reading on your own? What’s hard? Is anything different when you read for school? What drives you to share something you’ve read with another person? What was the last thing you read and shared (verbally or otherwise)? What else comes to mind when you think of reading? Of reading for school? Of reading in groups?