Jan 30: Class and Home Work

I want you to start exploring possibilities for your larger paper assignment.

You need to find a topic that fulfills two requirements:

1. The topic is interesting *to you*. Whether you have a personal connection to a topic, or it's just something you're interested in, I don't really care, but you need to find a topic that you don't mind spending the rest of the semester researching and writing about. Additionally, DON'T worry whether *I* find it interesting or not. I'm just grading it--YOU have to write about it.
   
2. A topic that has a controversy in it. This can be as simple as arguing that agility training is much better training for dogs than obedience training, or that the BCS Bowl system is terrible, or that James Bond films portray women in sexist ways, or .... fill in your blank here. But you can't give me a biography of a person or a history of a topic--you need to be able to take a stand on the side of an argument in the topic.

Forbidden topics: Anything to do with reproductive rights, anything to do with gay rights/equality, and anything to do with religion. Neither you nor I can be objective on these issues. But other hot button issues (whatever they might be) are (mostly) fine, although I reserve the right to be able to veto a topic idea.

Classwork will be preliminary research on your topic and discussion with me as I come around the room.

Homework will be posting what you find to YOUR blog. Don't post links by themselves. Post links and then summarize them. Tell me what you found, what interested you, and where/how you might be thinking of taking a stand. Give me a preliminary idea of what your argument might look like. (For a guide for all your blog posts, you should be writing about 200-250 for each one.)