Revisiting the Writing Process As you start this lesson, think about your essay writing skills. Has it been a long time since you've composed an essay? Maybe you have never completely understood how to write an essay or how to write an essay well. Maybe you have a clear understanding of basic essay writing procedure, but you need this course to practice specific kinds of academic writing. Whatever your skill level as you start Advanced Writing, see this first lesson as an opportunity to learn or review the information that acts as the foundation of all the writing you will do in the following lessons. Because the steps of writing an essay are laid out in Mindquest's Writing Process course, you will follow links from each of the sections below to the corresponding sections in Writing Process.  The sections are 1. Prewriting: Invention and Planning, 2. First Draft, and 3. Revision. If you'd like to access the whole Writing Process course, click here. You don't have to do the assignments within the Writing Process course.  Rather, we ask that as you go through each section, you look for and make comments and ask questions about information that is new to you. Also make notes about any  strategies that you've used before. At the end of Part One, you'll send your teacher an e-mail with questions and comments about the essay writing process.   1.  Prewriting Invention We'll begin by looking at some ways to help you get started in the essay writing process.  The invention stage is part of prewriting and helps you  generate material you can use to create and develop an essay. In this course and most other academic settings, you will be given a topic or suggestions for a topic about which to write. The actual essay writing doesn't start there, however. It's important to generate a lot of ideas and information about your topic before you ever begin to write the essay. Good essays are not composed of a few paragraphs that are a few sentences long. Good essays include at least five paragraphs and are made up of paragraphs that fully develop the main ideas using a variety of techniques This stage will help you explore your ideas and thoughts about the topic, so at the end of the Prewriting session, you have a lot of material and can choose the points that will be the most effective. Click here to review some Prewriting strategies. List at least five questions and/or comments you have about the Invention stage of writing an essay.  Make sure you save a copy of your work.  You'll be sending your questions and comments from each section of this lesson to your teachers when you have completed the review.   Planning Regardless of the type of essay you are writing, there are basic considerations to keep in mind when planning your essay. Some of these, like purpose, voice, focus, organization, and audience, are important in any kind of academic writing. Click here to review some important ideas behind planning an essay.  List at least five questions and/or comments you have about the Planning stage of writing an essay.   2.  First Draft Whenever you are writing an essay, it is important to write a rough draft. This gives you a chance to fully explore your ideas, organize your work, and check to make sure you've followed all the requirements of an assignment. Specific requirements for particular kinds of essays will usually be laid out in the assignments you get from your teachers. There are, however, some general steps which you can follow to write a first draft for any essay. Click here to review the steps for writing a first draft. Follow this link to read Anne Lamott's description of writing first drafts: Shitty First Drafts. List at least five questions and/or comments you have about the First Draft stage of writing an essay.   3.  Revision If you are writing for an audience, it is crucial to go through the revision process. Even professional writers revise, sometimes many times, in order to produce writing that says just what they want to say in a way that is most effective in reaching their audiences. Click here to review some important steps in the revision process.  List at least five questions and/or comments you have about the Revision stage of writing an essay.   Assignment: Good basic academic essay writing requires the knowledge presented in Part One. To make sure you are clear about the four steps of basic writing before you go to Part Two, send the questions and comments you've listed about each of the proceeding sections to your teacher with the subject heading Lesson One -- Essay Process Questions and Comments.

Introduction If you look through many career counseling books and career exploration web sites, as we did when we were developing this course, you'll see that career counselors, job coaches, and employment specialists agree that reading about different kinds of work, asking questions, volunteering, job shadowing and trying your hand at different jobs and in different companies can teach you a lot about yourself and what you value most about work.  They would agree that to be able to choose work that will be satisfying, you start by knowing yourself, what you can do, and what you need to learn to get the job you want. The path toward what will makes you happy in a career doesn't happen overnight or even over the course of a year. It is an ongoing process in which you may already be actively engaged, of trying to figure out the kind of work that will be rewarding to you and equipping yourself with the tools you need to enter that job market.  What you will be learning In this course, you'll  learn about yourself and your skills, attitudes, values, and interests and how to  match these with career possibilities  how to focus your job search if you feel distracted by too many career possibilities   how to evaluate career choices to see whether they will make you happy considering who you are  what training you  need to perform certain careers  how to explore your educational options What you will be doing gathering and analyzing career information creating online and hard copy folders to organize and file the information you gather designing a career plan that lays out your career and educational goals and how you can attain them completing the Minnesota Career Exploration Graduation Standard How the course is laid out First, this course has been designed to provide you with learning experiences that may different from some of the other Mindquest courses you may have taken.   The information in the course lessons is brief.  Most of the information you gather will come from the many excellent career-planning sites that are available on the Internet.   You'll  be collecting and analyzing  information in a variety of ways, but all of your work will be filed in folders within the Career section of your portfolio. Second, Career Exploration is divided into 14 lessons: Lesson One:   Looking at Ourselves Lesson Two:   Gathering Personal Career Information Lesson Three:   Investigating a Career Lesson Four:   Educational Options for Your Career Choice Lesson Five:   Gathering Material on Training Programs Lesson Six:   Your Vision of Work Lesson Seven:  Identifying Your Skills Lesson Eight:   Matching Skills to Careers Lesson Nine:   The Employer's Perspective Lesson Ten:   Do You Have the Skills the Employer Needs? Lesson Eleven:   Imagining Your Ideal Job -- Goals and Values Lesson Twelve:  Looking Back Lesson Thirteen:  Looking Forward -- Creating a Career Plan Lesson Fourteen:  Finishing Up Bookmark important web sites You will also want to create a bookmark for this course and for the main Career Planning web sites you will use through this course.  These are the sites you'll be using the most often during this unit and are excellent sources of information on Career and Employment Planning. Send your teacher an e-mail with the subject line Career: Getting Started to let him know you have finished reading the overview.  When you hear back from your teacher, you can go ahead to your next lesson.

INTRODUCTION What this Course is About Have you ever looked at a friend's or family member's photograph album, seeing pictures of this person as a little child, a teenager, a young parent, and realized with a sudden shock that the photos reveal parts of that person's life that, taken together, tell a story -- a story of growing up, of changes in appearance and life style. A story also that includes details about the person's surroundings and the events he or she was living through. We look at photos recording the passage of time and see changes in people's clothing, the cars they drove, the houses they lived in, and we often see even more emotional happenings, like going off to war or auctioning possessions at a bankruptcy sale. We learn many things about life and times from looking at the personal history set forth in a series of photographs. When filmmakers put photographs, drawings, and text together to tell the story of someone's life or of a major event, we call their finished product a documentary. Think for a minute of documentaries you've seen. Here are some examples to jog your memory: television documentaries of famous people like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jane Goodall, John F. Kennedy; documentaries of events like the Civil War, baseball, slavery in the United States; movies like Hoop Dreams and Roger and Me. All of these have one major element in common -- they explore and describe change. Since a leading characteristic of all life is its state of continuous change, it is not altogether surprising that this phenomenon is a major theme in documentaries. What is important for us as lifelong learners is that the more we recognize and explore change in our own lives and in the lives of those around us the better we'll be at understanding ourselves, our relationships, and the society in which we live. In this course, you'll have some exciting opportunities to learn more about techniques that photographers, filmmakers, artists, and writers use to study a subject in depth, present their findings, and, thereby, to tell their story of human experience and change. Two main questions we ask in this course are: · How can we examine the dimensions of change by looking at a person's life over time? · How can we collect and present the evidence or information that describes and documents change? The course uses documentary film as the means to answer those questions. We'll be focusing on one particular documentary  The Farmer's Wife a PBS special made in 1999. Why Should We Study Change? Think of all the ways you use the word change: change of heart, change of plans, short-changed, change for the better, change for the worse, change of clothes, change of life, change in schedule, change the channel, change your attitude, change the light bulb, change of mind, time for a change, short changed, what a change, change of temperature, and the list goes on and on.  Changes occur when one thing replaces another, when one thing undergoes a transformation or when one thing switches with another. Change, then, is when something becomes different. Change is a main force in our lives as big and small changes make up our daily existence. Think of all the changes you have undergone in the last hour, even if you have only been sitting still. Your thoughts have changed, your heart rate, temperature and the time has changed. Maybe you changed clothes, or maybe you just shifted your position. Maybe you've undergone a major change.  Maybe you received a phone call about the car you wanted to buy or a job for which you applied. Suddenly the changes in attitudes, thoughts, and how you understood your world to be have been altered. Being unaware of the significance of change in our lives is to be oblivious to who we were, who we are, and who we are to become. To be unaware of the changes that others go through is to ignore a major element  of the human condition.   To observe and understand change helps us to understand ourselves and those around us. Why an Interdisciplinary Course? In the context of school and learning, a discipline refers to a subject area, like social studies or science or language arts.  Interdisciplinary study, therefore, simply means looking at a topic from the perspective of more than one subject. Schools, including colleges and universities, often offer their students courses built around several disciplines. A humanities course is a good example of this, where a topic such as freedom of expression may be approached through the study of art, music, literature, history, and science. Because the topic of change encompasses such a broad range of inquiry, we do well to explore it from more than one perspective, or angle, in order to better understand the impact it has on our lives. Imagine for a minute that our task in a certain course is to learn more about how the role of parent has changed over the last forty years. If we approached this topic from a single or limited perspective, we might interview someone who raised her children in the 1950's and someone who is raising her children now.  We would probably collect some interesting information and gain some insights into how the role of parent has changed. However, to find out if these experiences were and are typical portrayals of parenting practices of the two time periods and to go beyond the surface of single experiences, we could conduct interviews with other people, consult history, sociology, and psychology books.  We could study the pressures on parents and children over the years.  We could explore the role of media, art, and music in children's lives now and in the past. When you move from single discipline study to multidiscipline study, the scope of research and discovery becomes much broader and infinitely richer. Simply stated, change is just too complex to study and understand from a single perspective. How to Create Your Own Interdisciplinary Study in Change After you've become more familiar with the documentary form, you'll have the opportunity to create your own interdisciplinary picture of change.  You'll be free to choose your own subject, to investigate changes that person experienced, and to decide on the form you want to use to present your study.  These forms might include Producing a video Writing a biographical account Creating a short story Combining drawing a series of pictures with text you compose Compiling a series of oral interviews For example, you may want to create a story or write a biography about a change that someone went through.  You might want to draw a series of pictures that reflect an episode of change in your subject's life. You could compile a series of oral interview to present a period of change in someone's life. Whatever medium you choose, it should reflect your interests and your talents. Once you have completed the lessons in this course, you will have collected methods and techniques that a filmmaker uses, and you can rely on the basic ideas of documentary to help you design your own study.  In other words, you will be prepared to perform your own study of change in an interdisciplinary way. The Farmer's Wife The documentary you'll be viewing is called The Farmer's Wife. This film, about Juanita and Darrel Buschkoetter (pronounced bush-cutter"), a young farm family in Nebraska, offers a wonderful opportunity to study interdisciplinary research and presentation through film. The filmmaker, David Sutherland, spent three years filming The Farmer's Wife. During this period, the Buschkoetters underwent dramatic changes in both their personal and professional lives as their livelihood and marriage entered times of crisis. By studying The Farmer's Wife you will gather information and ideas about how to proceed with your own study of change. Outcomes: When you've completed this course, you will have demonstrated growth in these areas: Understanding how to study a topic from multiple points of view, e.g. through stories and memoir (literature), journalistic accounts of events (social studies), graphic representations (art), songs (music) Using a variety of skills to develop your own documentary of change Recognizing the complexities of change, how many factors connect and fuse to produce new situations, and how the cycle of change continues over and over in our lives How the lessons contribute to these outcomes The following description summarizes how each of the six lessons in this course contribute to those learning outcomes. Lesson One: Documenting Experience We start small by focusing on how a moment in time can be documented.  You'll be looking at examples from your own experience that tell something significant about you. Lesson Two: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Change Going beyond a single dimensional experience to an interdisciplinary study of change means expanding a moment of time into a period of time and delving beneath the surface of a single experience to discover  many layers of meaning Lesson Three: Asking Questions The way to further expand limited knowledge into a fully developed understanding of a topic is to ask good questions and find good answers. Lesson Four- Documentary as Art Filmmakers rely on the main characters and/or events, but they also might add lighting, music, editing and other artistic techniques to intensify and reinforce the themes. As you watch The Farmer's Wife, you will observe how the choice of artistic technique contributes to the power of the presentation. You will explore how point of view and the other choices that a director and editor make influence objectivity in a documentary and debate whether any documentary can be totally objective? Lesson Five: Viewing the Farmer's Wife as a Project As preparation for your own project, you will look at the "anatomy" of The Farmer's Wife as a project. You will explore what goes into creating a project of this scope, and you will learn the common characteristics of all good projects. Lesson Six: Wrapping Up By reviewing the ideas and strategies presented in the course and used in the film, you will conclude your study of The Farmer's Wife and prepare for your own project. Your Project: The first step in creating your own presentation of change will be to fill out the Project Planning Guide. This will include all the components that make up a good project and when completed will serve as a "script" as you pursue your own project in change. Keeping a Notebook Throughout the course you will be recording your observations in a notebook. You will be asked to send some of these observations to your teacher. Other observations you collect can be used in your own project. The sections that you should include about The Farmer's Wife in your notebook are General Questions, Working Definition of Documentary, Artistic Techniques, and Personal Observations. You should also set up a section where you can record ideas and questions about your own project. Send an e-mail to your teacher when you have finished reading the introduction. Make sure you include any questions you have so far. When you get the go ahead, you can start Lesson One. Text and Materials: Documentary-- "The Farmer's Wife" by Donald Sutherland "The Viewers Guide" from the PBS web site Essay -- "The Farmer's Wife" by Jane Hamilton Essay -- "Behind the Film" by Tim Appelo Three essays out of the following: "Men and Women in Crisis: The Journey to Harvest" by Terrance Real "Peter Kramer on The Farmers Wife" by Peter Kramer "Stronger in the Broken Places" by David C. Treadway, PH.D. "On the Farmer's Wife" by Kathleen Norris "On The Farmer's Wife"  by Maggie Scarf "To the Viewer" -- Letters from Darrel and Juanita Buschkoetter Collecting Material for the Final Assessment If you have not done so already,  make sure you create a folder on your desktop where you will save all your assignments from this course. In addition, either create a sub folder within your course folder or create a new folder where you can save examples of your learning growth in this course.  This will save you time because you won't have to go back through all your work when you write up your final paper. Useful links: Instructor's Profiles Detailed Syllabus which can be used as a guide to lessons and assignments. Run a  copy and use it as a checklist of work completed. Student Handbook Let's Get Started: Send an e-mail to your teacher when you have finished reading the introduction. Make sure you include any questions you have so far. When you get the go-ahead, you can start Lesson One.