BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

The City University of New York

AGENDA | PARTICIPANTS | LINKS | FRIDAYS

Agenda for this morning

A.       Why write?

1.      Go to the Blackboard, then discussion board and then the forum called "Freewrite."  Freewrite for 5 minutes on the question "Why write?"  (Five minutes).

2.      Read a few of the responses and respond to one other person. (Ten minutes) 

B.       Read “The Papers Are Full.”  

1.      Go to Blackboard, then "communications," then "group pages."  Find your assigned group, then "discussion board," then the forum titled "The Papers are Full."   Generate one real question about the poem and submit it. 

2.      Answer the questions of the other two people in your group forum.

3.      Go back to the main discussion board (not the group discussion board).  Look for the forum "Reflection - The Papers are Full."  Reflect on the following:

·        Did asking and answering the questions help you to understand the reading?  If so, how; if not, why not?

·        How did technology contribute to this process of understanding?

·        How could you adapt this assignment to a reading assignment in your own discipline?

C.       Learn to use the comment function (Danny Sexton) on written assignments.

The Papers Are Full

of the damnedest things,

this morning for instance

a little girl who crawled

into a five gallon milk can

was trapped, had to curl up

and wait, be greased and slid out

just like a birth, head first

from womb of a can.  So of course

that set me thinking

how our four-year-old stuck her thumb

in a hole meant for the brush

sticking through a paste-pot lid

and we too had to go running,

bloody rebirth of a thumb in this case.

And later the letter from the paste-

pot company president said they

would change the design.  But I know

they did not.  Paste-pots, milk cans,

firecracker battlefields – much woe

from beer and cars.  And now I know those

who have lost children from a hair

dryer dropped in a bathtub

or from lawndarts or toy guns (the battle

begun but not ended with one).  How lovers

who never loved and lost kids – call them that,

our angelic beloveds like lambs –

relate to the world I can no longer imagine. 

For us there is danger on all sides,

much to scream, wail at, go running with

bleeding past those fortunate paired lovers

frozen in place as they were at Pompeii.

                                                          David Ray

AGENDA | PARTICIPANTS | LINKS | FRIDAYS