We continue this week with issues
related to environmentally induced illness.
Here's
the assignment:
The reading assignment
for this week is to read Chapters three, four and the Conclusion of Environmentally
Induced Illness: Ethics, Risk Assessment and
Human Rights.
The first
writing assignment
is to pick two (or three, if you like) ideas or facts or claims from this
week's reading. Then, as you did last week, for each of those three ideas,
a. quote
a passage that expresses that idea or fact or claim;
b. explain in your own words
what you understand the author to be saying in that passage you’ve
quoted; and
c. write a couple of sentences
saying what you think about that idea and the passage you’ve quoted.
So that means
you’ll be
posting two (or three) separate messages to the classroom, each of which
will have those three separately labeled
elements, a, b, and c.
The second
writing assignment is this:
after you’ve finished reading EII write a very short
version of a paper you can title a) Cliff Notes for EII;
or b) Environmentally Induced Illness for Dummies; or c) EII:
The Executive Summary; or d) some title like that which you
make up. You can adopt whatever tone and style you would like with
this paper
– serious, humorous, dramatic, persuading, as if talking down
to someone, as if addressing a legislator, a CEO of Dow Chemical,
a friend, group of third graders,
etc etc – but it is important that your descriptions be accurate.
The idea
of this assignment is that it be something you could later hand or
email to friends
or family
people or co-workers when you want to give them a short but accurate description
of what this book is about. So that means your paper will not be so much
about what you personally think of the book -- i.e., it will not be an
opinion piece or
an editorial, though it can certainly include some of that -- but will
instead be mostly a description of some of the main stuff in the
book.
The idea is that your paper be
clear and accurate, and that it also be readable by people to whom you
would give it.
Your paper could
be as short as one page, and definitely no longer than two pages.
The paper will
be evaluated more for content than for writing style, so it is important
that it be accurate and clear.
The third
writing assignment is this
1. Sometime
this week or very early next week, write a one- or two-paragraph response
to any two of the research projects;
your comments can include questions, comments
on what you liked, or on what you would have liked to hear more about, etc.
(Some of you may have already done this.)
2. Respond briefly to at least one other (a third)
research project and all its accompanying student comment(s).
3. Please post these comments into the Research Projects folder.
In addition to
these formally assigned postings, of course, there can also be the more
informal postings about any other ideas or questions or arguments that
strike you.
These messages
will all (except for the comments on research projects) be posted into
the Classroom Discussion folder.
It is not necessary
that you complete the entire reading assignment before posting your first
message. Discussions should probably be ongoing during the time you
are reading the book. In any case, you should start posting discussion messages,
whether as part of this formal assignment
or
just as
informal reactions
to
what you are reading, by Friday or Saturday.