Daily Log Blog: 1/29/18

To start off today's class, we began talking about the idea of creating a tentative to do list for our senior paper. Before we talked about what makes a good to do list, we back tracked we discussed about the second marking period and the due date information for the senior paper. Second marking period grades should be set and no more grade will be going in, so what you have now is what you are ending with. On the hand the senior paper has a due date of February 16th at 11:59 pm on google classroom and turnitin.com. Mr. Rivers then went on to the point of staying proactive and if you ever need help with your senior paper email him or see him during lunch, before, or after school.

The next part of class was based more on the objective of making a to do list. The literature reviews seemed to follow a three act structure, but when we zoom out we discovered that it was in three sequences. The three sequences were the points of introducing a major speakers/topics/events, distilling the current state of conversation, and calling for research. After zooming out we tried to see the literature review as act 1 of the sequences. Then we were faced with the question of, in the three act structure, what are the narrative functions of act 1? (What does act 1 do?) We wrote down our thought then we came together as a group and discussed on what we thought the narrative functions of act 1 were. Next we came together as a class and discussed about the question. The points we came with were that it sets up everything else, creates a point of discussion: tension, introduces the setting, characters, point of attack, and it locks in the audience. After this discussion we had to synthesis these points and relate them back to our literature reviews. We then came together as groups to discuss our thoughts and then ended up sharing them with the class. Some points we came up with were that the setting = field of interest, characters = important people of events, and point of attack and tension = the purpose of research method.

 After finishing up what act 1 looked like we discussed what act 2 or the next step of our literature review will be. The next part of the literature review will be to synthesize. Depending on how you want to write the rest of the essay is up to you. How will you sequence your paper? How can you align your paper to maximize the synthesis? How do these research cluster relate to each other? Do you extend your literature review or find new research to go a new way? There are many different options and how you want to write the rest of the essay is up to you. For the next half of class, we worked on making a to do list for the rest of the senior paper. Staying organized and ahead of the game will benefit you very much.

Bringing these points together with the idea organization and synthesis data is huge in the outside world. These are two major skills that are very good to have in the future. Organization and synthesis data is seen in everyday problem solving. Looking at the bigger picture and taking similar or different objects and able to bring them together seen in many jobs and is a desirable skill to have. And without organization these synthesizing skills would be useless. If your thoughts are all over the place there is no way for you to take the two pieces and bring them together. Both of these skills go hand and hand and are a great asset to have for the future and the real world.