Bishop
Mary Austin's formative environment: Bishop in the Owen's Valley east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California.

January 21
Motivating students to describe their environs.

Reports on who you are and the formative environment from where you were raised.

Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain

Verbal Report entry electronically submitted by the end of the week.

Task

Using Mary Austin's examples in her first seventeen to twenty pages, do you think she was influenced by her surroundings?

Give some examples of that:

 

Do you think you were influenced by any environs where you grew up?

Can you describe those surrounding areas that affected your impressions of the wider world?

How do any of these impressions stay with your to influence your emotions, your thinking, or your values?

      1. emotions?
      2. thinking?
      3. values?

      An example of descriptions:

      Dawn

      Rivers

      Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.

      W. E. B. Du Bois

      Henry David Thoreau

      No one expects you to write like Austin, or any of the above authors about where you grew and became aware of the world. But do describe your formative surroundings enough to tell us how you felt about the places your recall.

      Include in your verbal presentation a particularly revealing passage from Mary Austin's first chapter.

      A learning outcome that this task is associated with:

      #3. Active participants should explain an analogy in writing portraying the specific qualities of settlement patterns including, urbanization, agriculture, or use of natural resources.

      This task is to start you to think about how your gradually became aware of "settlement patterns including, urbanization, agriculture," and more importantly the "use of natural resources."

       

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