English 101

The groups are:

"Compassion and Prejudice"; "Race and Culture"; "Divorce--Effects on Children"; "Capital Punishment - For or Against"; "Child Abuse and the Family"; "Self-Expression"; "Peer Pressure"; "Public vs Private Schools"; "Family Issues"; "Religious Issues"

If you do not see your group topic or name on this list, you need to let me know as soon as possible.  If you aren't here, I didn't receive a group update #1 from your group, or you have been switched into a different group and need to be added.

"Compassion and Prejudice":
Jennifer Kennedy, Star Walters, Stephen Waldo, and Lyndi VanDerBeek.

We have discussed our strategy for achieving our group assignment. We have planned to meet each Wednesday after this class perdiod for at least an hour. We have promised to all meet every Wednesday and be prepared for intellegent discussion on our project, with ideas and something to offer. We have only met once but have now decided for every Wednesday at 12pm. We have not yet decided on our research duties but we plan to disucuss it the next time we meet.
The issue that we are going to address is the "root of judgement", why we judge. We want to get people to be compassionate to others and learn to understand them as they are. We talked about how our issues related and how we could combine all of our ideas to form a specific issue. We have discussed the final project a little bit. We are think about a persuasive article or a flyer of some sort. But we have not ruled out any of the project ideas yet.

"Race and Culture":
Adriana Paredes, Sanjeev Khunkhun, Audrey DeAnda, Mariah Bowers, and Azra Kustunrica.

The race and culture group members are Adriana Paredes, Sanjeev Khunkhun, Audrey DeAnda, Mariah Bowers, and Azra Kustunrica. As a group, we have met and exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers so that all group members can contact each other. Currently, we are still trying to find specified times for group meetings that are convenient for the majority of group members to attend. Once we have established these times and have everybody present, we will establish our ground rules and delegate responsibilities for each member of the group.

Upon talking with each other, we realized that all of our individual topicsdealed with minorities. We then discussed issues that we felt minorities were facing today. One issue the majority of us agreed upon was the debate regarding affirmative action and whether or not affirmative action was justifiable in today's society. We all agreed that this was a highly controversial topic in society. In addition, we feel that society as a whole is affected by affirmative action and not just minorities. The problem we are having now is that not all of us are sure of our own individual views on the issue and we feel that we must all agree on a viewpoint in order to produce a project.

For our project, we came up with the idea of designing pamphlets that would give an overview of the issue and convince our audience that affirmative action is either necessary and justifiable or is unjust and discriminatory. At our next meeting, we feel we must try to reach an accord on our views and must also delgate responsibilities to each member.

"Divorce--Effects on Children":
Chris Lelles, Brienne Weeden, Ryan Gibney, Courtney Kappes

For our group project we have decide to focus on divorce as our topic and tie in two issues. We want to focus on the effect that divorce has on children and address the argument whether getting a divorce should be more diffcult. All of us wrote about divorce in some aspect for out personal essay. When we were discussing what our gruop project we went through a "Divorce Outline" do narrow divorce into a topic that we would all be interested in researching. None of us really discissed how the gov't or state laws dealt with divorce in our individual papers. Realizing this, we decided that this would be the best group project for us.

We havn't really decided on how we are goning to present this information. We are defently leaning towards a flyer or an informational pamphlet. We are communicating by email and in person. We havn't assigned research guidelines for each individual but I plan on emailing everyone tonight and setting up a time frame this week when we all can meet together and discuss the project in greater detail.

"Capital Punishment - For or Against"
Jeff Koester, Matt, Keoni DeRenne, Jenny Kennedy, Upanya Suresh

It took us a lot of thinking but we narrowed our topic into an issue which interests all of us in the group and those not in our group. We wanted a issue which some how related to all of our topics, not just one single persons topic. We decided on Capital Punishment. We first wrote down political issues which interest us and sort of voted on the best one. We wanted to have a debate in class about the issue, but we wanted to incorporate the public into it as well. We decided on either creating a web page or write an article for the "Wildcat" showing both sides of the issue. We then split our group into two. Those for capital punishment and those against it. Right now, Jenny and Upanya are those for capital punishment and Matt, Jeff, and Keoni are those against it. We have currently exchanged e-mail addresses but at our next meeting we are going to have, we are going to set "groundrules", we must fix a time when we should all get together and update each other on the progress we have made on our research and/or work on the final product.

"Child Abuse and the Family"
Andrew Knych, Chrissy Gonzales, Casey Stevenson, Angela Sanchez

So far we haven't done much to waork as a group. We hope to be communicating more by e-mail though. We have come up with a rough plan, as to how we want to display our information. It will be somewhat like an advertisement, but at the this time we didn't want to give it away (surprise!)?

We made a few categories for research as follows

Internet, Books, Interviews, and other something

We will pick in the group, who whill do what type of research.

So far we have narrowed our topic down to child abuse, and we will make each person research more specifics. How it affects communication, why it's done, how to prevent it etc.

In order to decide on this issue we had everyone discuss their topic and see how it might fit into the whole. We put it all together, and came up with child abuse and the family.

We will take a time magazine and glue to pages in the middle sort of like an advertisement. They might show a picture of a dinner table where no one talks, it might show a father beating his kids, or a mother that is afraid (maybe all 3) to instill fear. Then there iwll be this caption that says. Does this look like your family. There is help go to www.stoptheabuse.com and we can make a pretty little report that tells all our research. And how it can save your family

"Self-Expression"
Brianne McConnell, Alison Parker, Jamie Bobbit, Barrie Portney, Julie Lazarr

We decided on a an issue.  We even incorporated it into a talent show.  We thought of ideas to help us with our talent show, like watching Higher Learning, which deals with a girl trying to individualize herself through an event.  Each of us know our issues and we each have an idea of what we are going to do for our talent show.  We met at Coffee Plantation and in class. We have not assigned the research duties yet, but binse we know our issues and our strong points we know what we are going to research.  We can thereofre begin developing our ideas.

The issue we are going to express is individuality and self expression.  We know we wanted to provide information and use the arts to help us with our issue.  SInce all of our topics either dealt with indivuduality or self-expression, we decdied to take those two issues fro our group project.  We talked about doing a Website or newsletter but we didn't know how to combine all our issues into making it happen.

We have decided to plan and advertise a talent show.  The show can demonstrate different aspects of self-expression and individuality.  It will have all of our issues incorporated in the show.  We can have an open-mic poetry reading, musicians and artists display their talent.  Each event in the talent show will portray our subject matter in a more active light.

"Peer Pressure"
Michael Graves, Olga Urcadez, Steve Fischer, Angela Hickel, Debanjon Ghosh

So far we have met once in the library to decide what we are going to do. We have also shared each others' e-mail and phone numbers.  We haven't yet decided on groundrules or work division. The issues we have decided to work onis the peer pressures of drunk driving and other pressures today's teenagers have. We talked about our personal topics.

We haven't quite figured out what we are going to do for our project. Angela and Debanjon weren't at our meeting so we couldn't get a good idea of what to do.

"Public vs Private Schools"
Dolores Galaz and Christine Masenga

Well the issue that we have decided to look at is th difference between public and private schools, specifically the difference in education in the elementary years. The reason we chose to do this is because Dolores went to public school and Christine went to private school.  So our experiences are very different.  Dolores feels that she would have received a better education if she had gone to private school during elementary school.  Christine knows that she received a good education at private schools.  We are not sure if this is exactly what you want us to do for this project. If you have pointers on where we should focus please feel free to share.

We have exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers.  We met the other day at the library and discussed our issue.  We have decided to divide the work in half, 50% and 50%.  We are going to try to do the work together as much as possible.  Niether of us is going to get stuck doing all the research or all of anything.  We are leaning towards doing a flyer of some sort to make people aware of the educational difference and maybe we can somehow tie this in with the voucher program.  So this is what we have done so far. We need to discuss more and elaborate on the issue we have chosen, if it even is a big enough issue for this project.

"Family Issues"
Hosanna Kakarala, Nick Gehlert, Isabel Alcoverde

1. "Family Issues" was our group's main topic of broad interest.  What we did as a group was discuss about our personal exploratory essays and the main idea behind each.  We also exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses to make this possible. We actually met once at the library to do this Update #1.  We kind of discusseda bout something all of us could talk about in our project, even though we didn't reach a conclusion yet.

2. All of our topics seemed to have family problems and conflicts in common, which was tying all our papers.  From this we decided to talk about family problems in our group projects.  The group is not sure at this point.

3. As far as presenting to the class, our group project we are thinking about an article for local or school papers. We wanted to talk about current problems and issues affecting the "family" and maybe rhetorical analysis on different solutions.  This seemed like a reasonable or realistic thing because none of us were really good with computeres or writing persuasive letters to organizations or editors. So, writing an article seemed like a more realistic thing but we hope to come up with something much more interesting.

"Religious Issues"
Sara Rotman-Zaid and Dustin Johnston

As a groupp, we decided how most everything will be done and by whom.  Since we are both highly motivated students, we have no ground rules by which to distribute work.  We keep in touch through e-mail and by telephone. Discussion of meeting times occurs over the phone, and presenting issues or thoughts is done with e-mail.

Our topics both include allusions to women's issues, but we felt it is not as relevant to our issues. From this conclusion, we decided to discuss the evaluation of religion over time.  Both of our issues are distinctly related to major religious movements. This issue was agreed upon while communicating via e-mail.

The product will certainly be a web page. This web page will be a source of free information. As the authors, we purport to inform the viewers.  We will present the general trends of religious change. In this manner, we hope to find some correlation between major changes of different religions.