Work for Week of Monday, 7 July-Sunday, 13 July.

Get caught up. Review the reading and the work you have done to date. Complete any assignments you haven't done. Get ready for the last few weeks of class, when you will be bringing together everything you have learned, putting together a portfolio (on which most of your grade for the course will be based), and completing a research assignment. That's it. Oh, and have a good Forth of July.

I expect all the work to date to be in place by Sunday, 13 July, and I will assume you understand the concepts and skills we have covered.

Why the week for review?

I've spent a lot of this week reviewing where everyone is, how researching the process essay genre is going, and where folks are on writing their process paper on how to fix their worst grammar problem. Overall, folks are doing well, but I think you could do with a week of review, a somewhat slower pace, and making sure you know what we have already covered.

It is also the week of the 4th. I don't get "into" many holidays, but one of my specialty areas is Early American Literature. Over the years, I've developed a healthy respect for the just how unique our Declaration of Independence was.

You probably don't know it, but while Jefferson, et al were downstairs getting ready to put life, liberty and honor on the line, upstairs the Pennsylvania legislature was meeting. Folks from both bodies meet each other in the halls. The legislature had been charged with keeping the colony in the good stead with the British empire, so the two bodies had very, very different jobs. It is also important to recognize just how divided the colononies were. Most folks did not favor setting ourselves up as a new nation.

Moreover, when the men who signed the Declaration signed it, they had every reason to believe they were signing their death warrant for treason; more, they had every reason to believe that American would loose a war and they would be killed. France hadn't waded in on our side. The colonies were divided amongst themselves. Just read Patrick Henry's speech. The upshot is it took a great deal of courage to do the right thing, and they signed the Declaration not because they tought we would win but because they knew there was a right and wrong and the Crown was in the wrong. Such courage should be appreciated, celebrated, and remembered, and the 4th is a good time to renew your own commitment to individual liberty, reason, knowledge and to the work it takes to keep a democracy working.

If you don't know these stories or if you don't understand that perserving indivudal liberty and a nation devoted to reason and knowledge is hard, daily work, sign up for my ENG 241 course next Spring.

Do good work this coming week. Get caught up, and enter the rest of the class KNOWING you know the skills and knowledge set already covered.