How to Survive a Plague Blog Post

How to Survive a Plague deals with one facet of the AIDS crisis--the activist community's ability to affect governments and pharmaceutical companies in the creation of drugs to treat the disease. The film documents the protest movements to create this change. For your blog post, I would like for you to think about protests. What makes an effective protest? Why do groups of people use protests? Was there any other way the AIDS activists could have gotten what they wanted and needed?

Your Education

Thinking about what you know about education from our readings, compare your own educational experiences so far. What portrayal best represents your own education and why? Include photos of your past schools if possible to illustrate what kind of schools they were. Did class matter in the school you went to? What were you taught? How did it affect your career choices later in life? Please write about your own experience in the context of what we have been learning so far this semester.

Media Image analysis

To to this blog, you should first read the chapter on analyzing texts. There are specific ways to look at images that you may not be used to.

You should find an still media image to analyze. You will be looking at how gender stereotypes are propagated in media, but the image does not have to be an extreme example. In your regular daily media consumption, find something you are exposed to on a regular basis. This could be an ad that pops up in a Google search, a magazine ad, or anything you find in your life.



Once you find your ad, you should write your post doing a gender-based analysis of what the image is portraying. You can focus on men or women, but the film will give you a lens to think about how the ad is constructed. In the above ad, for instance, Under Armour is using this image of a female athlete who is wearing pink shorts. The background is a body of water, perhaps in a city. The text proclaims "I Will," which is the tag line for this campaign. "What's Beautiful" is not a question but a statement. This is what is beautiful: "Becoming stronger than your strongest excuse." What does all of these layers of image and text mean? You should take your image apart and explain how it works to form meaning.

The Mask You Live In--Film Blog

In The Mask You Live In, we hear from a variety of experts on how American masculinity affects boys, men, girls, and women. For your blog post, I would like for you to think about your own childhood experience of learning what was acceptable for boys and for girls. Give an example of a time where you learned which toys you were supposed to play with. The toy aisle is color coded--pink for girls, blue and red for boys. Was there a particular toy that you wanted to play with but couldn't? Or was someone else told which toy was appropriate?

Your favorite book

For your blog, choose a book that you read that had an effect on you in recent years. While children’s books are favorites for many of us, let’s stay in a more recent part of your life. You should not use a book you were assigned to read in school unless an assigned book really changed your thinking or was meaningful to your life. Graphic novels, popular fiction, as well as classics are all applicable to this assignment.

In your wiki post, include the following:

The book title and author

An image of the book cover

A description of the book in a few sentences

A short narrative (no more than 200 words) about your experience with this book

You will be commenting on one another's blogs, so think about how you can write something that someone could comment on. Make it interesting!

 

Interview

Blog assignment #1:

Interviews

You will be interviewing a classmate for your first blog post. A good interview reveals something about the interviewee that we would not normally know. Make your questions in a way that will get your interviewee talking about something important to her.

The blog post will be well written in paragraph form, so you will be taking your answers and making them into a complete picture with your writing skills.

The blog post will also include photographs that your interviewee provides you. These photos should be a central part of your question and answers.

You will have time during the next week to work on perfecting your blog post before it is officially due. Please use your time wisely and proofread your work. Make it as professional and presentable as possible.

Welcome to the English 101 class blog!

I will be posting questions here for you to write posts on your own blog.
First, you should create your own blog. To do this you can use Blogger or Wordpress. Go to blogspot.com or wordpress.com to set up an account.  You can make it as visually interesting as you want to! Each post should include an image because blogging should be visually appealing to the reader. You can tell a different story with words and images then you can with just words.

Please reply to this post with your link to your new blog! I will make a list on the righthand side of the screen, so you can see each other's blogs.