07 Jul Us History 1301-1877
Choose one of the questions below and respond (if all of the questions are taken, make sure that your response is still unique). Put the question you’re responding to in the title of the an initial post to reserve your spot. Then, reply to that same post with your initial long post.
When you reply to two of your peers later, make sure at least one of those replies is to a post about a different question from the one you answered.
1. How does Melba learn about and experience the expectations and traditions of segregation and racism (esp. Ch. 1 4)? How does racism and segregation shape the attitudes and behaviors of Melbas older relatives?
2. How and why was Melba selected to be one of the students to integrate Little Rocks Central High School?
3. How do black and white residents of Little Rock (and Arkansas as a whole) respond in different ways to integration?
4. What do Melba and the other eight students experience in their first few days? What does the scene outside of the school on day one tell us about how the white community responded to integration?
5. What did the Little Rock Nine experience at Central High School during the school year? How did Melba and the other eight students manage to survive the school year?
6. What divisions within the white community and within the black community existed throughout the ordeal? How did Melbas perspective change throughout the book?
7. What were the most significant moments in the fight to integrate Central High? Why?
General Instructions:
Each question can have a maximum of 7 initial posts in response to it. So pick a question with less than 7 answers before you start writing. Here’s the tricky part with this one. When you decide which question to pick, please make an initial post with the title of the question and nothing else. That essentially holds your spot while you write and let’s people know how many people are working on a particular question at once.
The initial response should be around 3-4 paragraphs (around 500 words or more). (Take note that this is longer than the topical discussion post … it’s also worth twice as much). Your answer should begin with a concise thesis as a direct answer to the question, it should analyze the main ideas presented in the reading, and it must cite specific supporting details from the reading (meaning that you need to actually talk about examples and details in the response theres only 1 source, the book, so Im not expecting any more detailed citations than a page number or ebook location number).
By the next deadline, you need to have also responded to at least two of your classmates initial posts (at least one of the two replies needs to respond to a different question from the one you posted about). Responses do not usually have a length requirement, but they must advance the conversation by replying with additional details and information. In other words, you need to say something that they havent said yet.
As a guide, I expect that your replies to follow a framework called 3C+Q. You must include a Compliment (this is where you identify something specific in the original post and explain what stood out), a Comment (this is where you specifically engage the post by saying something like, I agree/disagree that because ), a Connection (this is where you really move things forward. You could write something like I also read/thought/heard/saw and noticed this ), and a Question (I wonder how/who/why/what/where ).
Please note that I am NOT asking you to critique the grammar, clarity, spelling, etc. of your classmates posts (its pedantic in regular conversations, and it kills any kind of good faith dialogue).
Each Book Discussion is worth 50 points, 30 for the initial post and 10 each for the two replies (2 @ 50 points = 100 total, 17% of the total).
