This is the class blog for The American “I am”: Autobiography and US Literatures, a first year tutorial at Grinnell College.

Students in this course will blog and comment throughout the semester.

Blog posts are 1-2 paragraphs, written for an audience of our class and posted in public.

Why: Blogs provide the opportunity to practice concise writing for an engaged audience

These are the four required posts:

• 2 responses to class discussion about a specific text. Try to develop ideas or questions that you discovered during your in-class writing. Posts are due by 5pm the day after class and marked with the category “response.” You will be assigned dates.

Why: To practice returning to ideas to explore them further

• 1 blog post relating our discussions in class to material outside of class, at any point before Thanksgiving break. This could be a speaker, an event in the news, another text that you have encountered, a conversation that you had, at any point before Thanksgiving break and marked with the category “connection.”

Why: To practice paying attention to the world around you and connect your thinking about this class to your thinking about the world

• 1 blog post providing researched background information on anything we encounter in the texts or discuss in class. This could be definitions of a word, more information about a person, place or event, at any point before Thanksgiving break and marked with the category “research.”

Why: To practice noticing your own questions and curiousity and pursuing them through exploratory research

Students will comment at least once a week, responding to the author’s ideas and/or connecting them to ideas and texts. Because this class meets on T/Th, a comment week will be Tuesday to Monday. So, comment by Monday on the prior week’s posts.

Why: To practice reading and writing as engaged conversation, and because it is fun to know that other people are reading what you wrote.