Day 5: Epic Fail

Discuss Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Walk in having read the prologue, which explains the origins of Skloot's interest in Lacks, and chapters 1-3. This is a perfect book to use in freshman comp classes: it's current (2010), it's braided, so we get to see Skloot the researcher, Henrietta Lacks and her family, and the history of HeLa and what those cells have done for science. We get race, class, history, rural poverty, urban poverty, public health, biology, immunology, bioethics, journalism, nonfiction writing, the works. A book teeming with rich, exciting discussion topics.

Or not.

The task was to discuss the text in groups and as a class, then use that to jump into stasis theory and academic discourse communities. This was pretty much repeated on Day 6 (which I'll refer to as Week 4 now) and was much better. What happened on this day, though?

To be continued...