Thesis Statements for Essay Three

Hello students!  I apologize for forgetting to post a prompt for you to post a comment to!  Anyway, please comment to this post with you argumentative claim (i.e., your thesis) for your Essay Three, which we worked on in class all last week. I look forward to reading them all!

Group Project!

I invite you all to now voice your opinions about the group project in this public forum. I have read all of your comments as addressed just to me, but if there are any comments or insights you have about the project as a whole that you want to share with the class, please do so here.

Welcome to our third week of classes!

In class on Friday, I asked you to consider the "genre" and the "intended audience" of the book Inviting Disaster.  Many of you were astute to comment that this book was certainly not written for engineering professionals.  If this is the case, what elements of the book (style, content, or other) lead you to this conclusion?  Another interesting question is this: why would people be interested in a book like Inviting Disaster?  Finally, based on what you've read, does the author do a good job, via his writing style, of engaging you as a reader, of making you want to reader further?  What is it about his writing that does or does not make you want to continue reading?  I look forward to reading your comments on any or all of the ideas I've raised here.

Welcome to our Learning Community!

Hello first-year New Mexico Tech students!  Welcome to the blog of our Mechanical Engineering Learning Community.  We know you are excited to begin your first year at New Mexico Tech, and we are excited to have you as our students.

The classes that constitute your Learning Community are EDUC 101, ENGL 111, and MENG 110.  These classes will work in synchrony with each other this Fall semester and you will be a member of a cohort of students that will share these classes in common.  Also, some of your assignments from each of these courses will do double (or triple!) duty in these classes.  Each class has its own objectives as to what you will learn during the Fall semester, however, as components of the Learning Community, there are certain goals that all of the classes (and the instructors) share.  We hope to help you to acclimate to your new life as an NMT student and equip you with the writing, critical thinking, and college-life-awareness skills that will contribute to your success at NMT!  

Each of the Learning-Community-component classes (EDUC, ENGL, and MENG) will meet at a separate, designated time (as indicated by your schedule of classes).  These classes, and the student members, will function as a community, though -- that's the goal of our learning community!  The members of the Mechanical Engineering Learning Community (that's you, the students, and us, the instructors) will share this blog space, so feel free to visit this site in the weeks leading up the beginning of the semester.

Once our LC begins, we will use this blog space for required weekly "summary" postings, to which every student member of the LC will contribute.  What this means is that every weekend, you will need to write roughly six to ten sentences that summarize what you did in each of the LC classes the previous week (that's six to ten sentences total; you know, a small paragraph) and you will post that paragraph to our blog, as a comment!  Don't worry -- we'll discuss all of this during the first week of classes.

Enjoy your summer, and we look forward to meeting you in roughly a month!

-- Dr. Julianne Newmark

ENGL 111-MENG LC instructor