HUM 221: 'Blue Winds Dancing,' Reflective response essay due March 24

Posted below is an assignment sheet for the reflective essay you will write over spring break. The story is available on line at several locations, including this personal website maintained by somebody who doesn't appear to be an expert but just liked the story and wants to see it available on the Iinternet. Sometimes people just like the story and keep coming back to it.

Here are some links to help you write your papers.

There's a good, detailed biography of Whitecloud by Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Several shorter bios, too, including one in Wikipedia that informs us Whitecloud was "one of the Association of American Indian Physicians's foundering members." It's right about his role in the AIP, bit surely "foundering" is a typo!

[UPDATE: In class Monday, we fixed it. I had this post up on the screen, and a student suggested I edit it. Do what? Edit it. Right here? Right now? I'm an old print journalism guy. I learned newspapering on an old-fashioned black Underwood upright manual typewriter. I don't like technology. I don't trust computers. But I try to keep up to date. I believe in Wikipedia and the "wisdom of crowds," and I try to teach to use it wisely, not be scared away from it. So in a spirit of practice-what-you-preach, I clicked on the "edit this page" tab. I made the change: "... one of the Association of American Indian Physicians's foundering founding members." And we got, right there on the screen at the front of the classroom, an immediate demonstration of why Wikipedia works as well as it does.]

Not too much else out there about Whitecloud. WARNING: Stay very far away from the garbage offered by the term paper mills for aspiring plagiarists! You'll have to use your critical thinking skills to spot them, but any use of the term "essay," "essays," "paper" or "papers" in the website's name I interpret as presumptive evidence that they're in the plagiarism business. Some of the sites may be kosher, but the papers I've read -- and I've read enough of them by now to be able to recognize them immediately -- will not be helpful to you in this assignment.

I have written several tip sheets on how to write a reflective response for my classes, too. They are linked here and also to my faculty page on the Springfield-Benedictine website.

You'll find some good advice on my handout for Humanities 223 (roots music), headed "How to Write a Reflective Response on Music (or literature of any other work of art)." That title doesn't mention "Blue Winds Dancing," but it'll do. My three-part outline with Circumstances, Background and Analysis comes from there.

Linked to the reflective response handout is a "Sample Reflective Response Essay" I wrote on a Texas songwriter named Kinky Friedman. It shows you how to use the Circumstances-Background-Analysis format, too ... And it also tells you a little bit about a sadly neglected songwriter.

And linked to the Kinky Friedman sample is an old handout I wrote on literary reader response essays when I was teaching freshman English. It gives more of the theory of reflective response, which comes from an educator named Louise Rosenblatt. She once explained:

The special meaning, and more particularly, the submerged associations that these words and images [in a literary work] have for the individual reader will largely determne what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text.

It is that process of reacting to a text that gives each of us our own unique, individual interpretation. The process also frees us up to appreciate the work of an artist from another culture, because we are focusing on what speaks to us across cultural boundaries instead of pretending to be experts.

A word on plagiarism. My writing assignments are designed to be plagiarism-proof. If you follow the steps I list on the assignment sheet, they'll help you write a paper on which you exercise your independent judgment, come to your own conclusion and support it with evidence drawn from reading the story. If you don't follow the steps, I will stop reading your paper as soon as I realize you are giving me the same-old, same-old. In that event, I will return it to you with no grade and enter a zero (0) in my gradebook which will not be removed until you turn in a completed, original paper. But if I suspect plagiarism, I reserve the right to submit papers to SafeAssign for electronic analysis of their dependence on unqcknowledged sources.