Last class assessments

Final exam questions and answers for novel Monkey Hunting

Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia tells the story of the main character, Chen Pan, a Chinese man who, in 1857 at the age of nineteen, is seduced into accepting a job that promises him riches that he could take back to his home town and family in China.  Instead of riches Chen Pan finds himself in servitude/indentured labor and when he arrives in Cuba he is sold to a sugar plantation where he makes important relationships with black slaves; he falls in love with a beautiful black woman; she dies.   Eventually, he arrives in Havana and makes himself successful; he buys a black slave woman to free her and they fall in love and start generations of a family.

The book covers four generations of Lucretia's and Chen Pan's family and these family members take us back to China to deal with sexuality in the 1900s and to New York to deal with suicide and racism and from New York to Vietnam during the war to deal with death, prostitution and new life.

The students designed the final questions to be answered.  These questions came from their weekly thinking, use relevant quotations, and for them to make connections to society.

Language, Literacy and Culture - an oral history project

The webblog was the first inspiration and the starting of this entire idea for collecting stories and then the idea expanded into collecting the oral histories of women.  The idea came to me when I had to complete a class in technology in graduate school.  As a student in education and a student with a reading credential I wanted to create a site that allowed students with various abilities and one that also allowed teachers with multiple interests to be involved.  I also realized that the internet allowed the project to include students and teachers across borders.  It was also my intention to allow for Frierian pedagogy and allow for the voices of social justice.

This post introduces the webblog (website and blog) which is the umbrella of all projects in this critical thinking classroom.
http://instructors.sbcc.edu/bacchus/sohp/diaspora/
The webblog is dedicated to collecting the oral histories of women.  In a critical reading/writing classroom these stories are used as a bridge to writing the academic/expository essay.  Students learn critical thinking skills; they learn to form critical thinking questions; they become aware of social issues and focus on social justice.  The theme is voicelessness; students become aware of what this means; they become aware of multiple violences; they learn to use dialogue to convey their ideas, to build new ideas, and to contemplate solutions.

The blog is where students upload their stories and on the right is a list of teacher generated examples of what students can produce.
http://sohp.blogspot.com/2009/09/gathering-of-indigenous-womens-voices.html
The student instructions on this webblog are now in four languages (Spanish, French, Portugese, and English) and more will be added.
http://instructors.sbcc.edu/bacchus/sohp/diaspora/essaywriting.html




















The Blog experiment in an English 103 classroom.

103 students

video interviews to come

The Blog experiment in an English 103 classroom.

103 students

The Blog experiment in an English 103 classroom.

103 students being interviewed by classmates

 video interviews to come

The Blog experiment in an English 103 classroom.