Homework for Lab #2 (Wednesday, 4月7日）

Reminder: Complete first draft of quantitative vs. qualitative essay. Due 21:00 Tuesday 4月7日, 1000-1200 words. I will read it in Google Docs, so all you need to do to alert me that you're finished is change the title from:

Essay 1 (Student): "Your Title Here"

to

Essay 1d (Student): "An Actual Title Here"

I hope the laboratory session was useful today. I did not have time to look at your developing essays on Wednesday night after class, but I will look at them on Thursday night, and at various points over the holiday.

Each of your papers is different and presents different challenges for writing, but I realized their were two confusions today that most students had.

The first was a confusion created by the Graff & Birkenstein textbook. They show you they say / I say moves that could be used in sentences. Call them small moves. Today I was showing you they say / I say moves that could be used in paragraphs or in entire essays. Call them big moves. Really they are quite the same, but maybe I should have said so specifically.

The second was a confusion created by my outline template. I made it look like the I say had equal weight in your essay, or that you had to make an I say argument in each paragraph. This is not the case. As you can see from my specific instructions yesterday, each of your papers has a few different theys, and there are many options for where to insert your I, and how much.
You can see from my comments in the laboratory session that I like to give lots of advice, but no rules. I am like the doctor who says "take two of these pills and tell me if you feel better." So don't be concerned you are breaking a rule. Like for instance I advised one student to move the Moneyball comparison to the end of the paper. I break my own rules! But I am not leaving you in an ocean of confusion, because I will help you all along. (I can get my American students to trust me like this, but then they all become lawyers and ask me how can I grade fairly if every student is really writing a different essay with different rules and different process. A somewhat interesting question, but I usually respond by asking which is more important, a deviation in your grade that might be something like plus or minus 2%, or you being better at writing?)

Which reminds me, we must finish our discussion of "writing class experiences"! We'll do it in the first Blink session. Have a safe and happy holiday and see you soon.

Bonus: Dynamic "team payroll" vs. "team performance" visualization for Major League Baseball season 2009.

Bonus: Another visualization... this one is Charles Darwin's process of editing the six editions of Origin of Species. Wow!

Bonus: Baseball neo-traditionalist Bill Simmons apologizes and joins the statistical revolution. I say neo-traditionalist because he's only 40 years old and he's known for using edgy humor rather than for 'old man' nostalgia. But this is still an important development. Here is the key quotation: "It's too easy to be informed these days. Takes a lot less time than you might think." Simmons had argued in previous years that he thought the new statistics removed the fun and the aesthetic beauty from baseball; he compared them to "calculus homework." Now he feels (like Bill James and others) that they enhance fun and beauty.