Race; Portfolio; Lab

This morning, please take 1st period to work on your writing. Please print out and leave copies of the work you completed this week with the sub.

Use any of the 10 prompts below to create something. You may (of course) use your own ideas, or combine any of these prompts as you'd like.

• Write a traveler's tale about a secret place that no human has visited...until now (this could be a planet, a country, an island, a city, a house, or anything imaginable). 
• Write a short story or poem in which you deliberately use a metaphor to say something about the human condition.
• Pick your favorite "classic" novel, short story, or poem. Steal a line from this literary work and/or use this allusion to enhance your own story (or choose to revise something you've already written and use allusion to enhance the piece).
• From the article "Believe in Life: William Du Bois", write your own epitaph/funeral speech. What message would you leave the world? 
• Argue whether or not you believe that "human beings will [possibly] live and progress to a greater, broader, and fuller life." Write a story about one such person--or write a science fiction story in which humanity has arrived at this state--what comes next?
• Use the idea from Du Bois that the "only possible death is to lose one's belief in the prospects for human progress" to write a poem, short story, scene where a character succumbs to this sort of "death". 
• After reviewing these 'statistics': black crime facts - Paul Watson, Breitbart: Devastating Facts, Huffington Post: Black Graduation Rates: can you reject the idea that "black people are inferior to white people" and that race is purely a social problem? Can social inequality (failure of education = crime) be "cured" by political and social activism?
• In the article on Frantz Fanon, do you agree or disagree with the notion that "for the black man, there is only one destiny...and it is to be like the white man (or the dominant colonizers of a society)? or to "achieve a 'white existence'?
• Use the line from Fanon's book: "the black man's soul is a white man's artifact" in a poem or short story.
• Research "negritude" and write about what strikes you about it.

Use the time in our lab today to write a draft or revise a draft. Separate yourself from your friends for a little bit of time and keep your writing time sacred. Try to write--not spin your artistic wheels or bother others. Feel free to play around with these ideas/prompts--even if you fail to create something significant. Play. Write. Create.

During period 2 (around 8:45), please take a break from your writing to spend some time reading/discussing your chosen novel. Get into small book groups based on the book you chose and talk to your peers about what you might have read. If you all haven't started reading the book, start today. After your discussion, check out these resources to help you as you read the novel(s):

• Native Son by Richard Wright
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown

If you finish your discussion go back to your writing, or continue to read. As you read feel free to annotate the text with questions (problem areas), observations, or interesting lines/passages. 

• What to do with these annotations:

1. Research questions--find out the answers; or ask during class; use these questions to predict or consider "why" the author writes the passage this way.
2. Observations--share your observations with the other group members; examine what the author does in the book...how is the author's style unique or effective? 
3. Use observations to write your own poems, plays, scenes, essays, etc.
4. Steal an interesting line and use it in your own writing of a short story, poem, play, etc.

HOMEWORK: Please continue reading your chosen novel, write, and bring your materials to next class.