Dr Tom Kerns
North Seattle Community College

 

Assignment for week nine

 

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.