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Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
text set (1-5)
1.
Fighting a McDonald’s in Queens for the Right to Sit. And Sit. And Sit.
Fighting a McDonald’s in Queens for the Right to Sit. And Sit. And Sit.
By SARAH MASLIN NIR and JIHA HAMJAN. 14, 2014
(PHOTO: Some seniors spend hours at a McDonald’s in Flushing. Workers say they drive away business. Group members say they should not be rushed.)
(PHOTO: Some seniors spend hours at a McDonald’s in Flushing. Workers say they drive away business. Group members say they should not be rushed.)
Shortly
after New Year’s Day, Man Hyung Lee, 77, was nursing a coffee in his usual seat
in a narrow booth at a McDonald’s in Flushing, Queens, when two police officers
stepped into the fluorescent light of the restaurant.
Mr. Lee
said the officers had been called because he and his friends — a revolving
group who shuffle into the McDonald’s on the corner of Parsons and Northern
Boulevards on walkers, or with canes, in wheelchairs or with infirm steps, as
early as 5 a.m. and often linger until well after dark — had, as they seem to
do every day, long overstayed their welcome.
“They
ordered us out,” Mr. Lee said from his seat in the same McDonald’s booth a week
after the incident, beneath a sign that said customers have 20 minutes to
finish their food. (He had already been there two hours.) “So I left,” he said.
“Then I
walked around the block and came right back again.”
For the
past several months, a number of elderly Korean patrons and this McDonald’s
they frequent have been battling over the benches inside. The restaurant says
the people who colonize the seats on a daily basis are quashing business,
taking up tables for hours while splitting a small packet of French fries
($1.39); the group say they are customers and entitled to take their time. A
lot of time.
“Do you
think you can drink a large coffee within 20 minutes?” David Choi, 77, said.
“No, it’s impossible.”
And
though they have treated the corner restaurant as their own personal meeting
place for more than five years, they say, the situation has escalated in recent
months. The police said there had been four 911 calls since November requesting
the removal of the entrenched older patrons. Officers have stopped in as
frequently as three times a day while on patrol, according to the patrons, who
sidle away only to boomerang right back. Medium cups of coffee ($1.09 each) have
been spilled; harsh words have been exchanged. And still — proud, defiant and
stuck in their ways — they file in each morning, staging a de facto sit-in amid
the McNuggets.
“Large
group — males, females — refusing to get up and leave,” read the police summary
of one 911 call placed on Jan. 3 at 2:30 p.m. “The group passed a lot of
sit-down time. Refusing to let other customers sit.”
Neither
a Burger King nor another McDonald’s, both within a few blocks on Northern
Boulevard, has the same allure.
Workers
at the restaurant say they are exasperated.
“It’s a
McDonald’s,” said Martha Anderson, the general manager, “not a senior center.”
She said she called the police after the group refused to budge and other
customers asked for refunds because there was nowhere to sit.
After
multiple requests for comment, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s said the company
would address the issue, but as of Tuesday evening it had not done so.
The
police in the 109th Precinct, which serves the area, say that calls to resolve to
disputes at businesses are routine, though the disruptions are more often
caused by unruly teenagers than by septuagenarians.
The
Flushing McDonald’s looks like any other. Few among the crowd there on a recent
Saturday said they even liked the food. “We prefer our own Korean food,” said
Hoick Choi, 76, a pastor at New Power Presbyterian Church, who comes about once
a week. Many come after filling up on a free lunch at a nearby senior center.
Some
say it is convenience that draws them from the solitude of their nearby homes
to spend the day sitting there in the Big Mac-scented air. Many are widowed, or
like Jee Woong Lim, 81, who arrived in America two years ago from Seoul, say
they are in need of company. They are almost without exception nattily dressed,
in suits or dress slacks, brightly colored ties or sweaters, fedoras and
well-shined shoes.
Yet
there seem to be no shortage of facilities that cater to the elderly in the
neighborhood. Civic centers dot the blocks, featuring parlors for baduk, an
Asian board game, and classes in subjects from calisthenics to English. Mr.
Lee, who comes to the McDonald’s from Bayside, passes several senior centers en
route. One is a Korean Community Service center in Flushing, which recently
changed a room in the basement into a cafe with 25-cent coffee after its
president, Kwang S. Kim, got word of the McDonald’s standoff.
No one
has come.
“I think
I have to go to McDonald’s and ask why they’re there,” Mr. Kim said.
Outside
the McDonald’s on Saturday, Sang Yong Park, 76, and his friend, Il Ho Park, 76,
tried to explain what drew them there. They come every single day to gossip,
chat about politics back home and in their adopted land, hauling themselves up
from the banquettes with their canes to step outside for short cigarillo
breaks. And they could not say why they keep coming back — after a short walk
around the block to blow off steam — every time the officers remove them. They
said they had each been ousted three times so far.
The two
men, however, knew what they would do next time. Sang Yong Park said he would
not budge, but his friend said he would dutifully obey any police order, just
as he always has. “I will just listen to them,” he said. “But I will come back
inside after they leave.”
###
###
2.
The Food May Be Fast, but These Customers Won’t Be Rushed
The Food May Be Fast, but These Customers Won’t Be Rushed
By SARAH MASLIN NIRJAN.
27, 2014
With
its low coffee prices, plentiful tables and available bathrooms,
McDonald's restaurants all over the country, and even all over the world, have
been adopted by a cost-conscious set as a coffeehouse for the people, a sort of
everyman’s Starbucks.
Behind
the Golden Arches, older people seeking company, schoolchildren putting off
homework time and homeless people escaping the cold have transformed the
banquettes into headquarters for the kind of laid-back socializing once carried
out on a park bench or brownstone stoop.
But patrons have also brought the mores of cafe culture, where often a single purchase is permission to camp out with a laptop. Increasingly, they seem to linger over McCafe Lattes, sometimes spending a lot of time but little money in outlets of this chain, which rose to prominence on a very different business model: food that is always fast. And so restaurant managers and franchise owners are often frustrated by these, their most loyal customers. Such regulars hurt business, some say, and leave little room for other customers. Tensions can sometimes erupt.
But patrons have also brought the mores of cafe culture, where often a single purchase is permission to camp out with a laptop. Increasingly, they seem to linger over McCafe Lattes, sometimes spending a lot of time but little money in outlets of this chain, which rose to prominence on a very different business model: food that is always fast. And so restaurant managers and franchise owners are often frustrated by these, their most loyal customers. Such regulars hurt business, some say, and leave little room for other customers. Tensions can sometimes erupt.
(Donna Watkins reading
at a McDonald’s on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn on Monday. Michael Appleton
for The New York Times)
In the past month, those tensions came to a boil in New York City. When management at a McDonald’s in Flushing, Queens, called the police on a group of older Koreans, prompting outrage at the company’s perceived rudeness, calls for a worldwide boycott and a truce mediated by a local politician, it became a famous case of a struggle that happens daily at McDonald’s outlets in the city and beyond.
Is the
customer always right — even the ensconced penny-pincher? The answer seems to
be yes among the ones who do the endless sitting.
If Mike
Black’s friends are looking for him, they know to check the McDonald’s on Utica
Avenue in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, he said. That is where Mr. Black, who is in
his 50s, spends hours reading his junk mail.
“I
don’t eat fast food,” he said, arguing that his one coffee entitled him to all
the leisure time he needed. “I just come here to hang out and deal with my
mail.”
A few
miles away at another McDonald’s, a fedora-wearing crew holds court daily.
“Old-timers, we have been here for years; we’re kids who grew up in the
neighborhood,” said Jerry Walters, 70, who was sitting with two friends. On the
tables there was nary a coffee, but there was a Budweiser secreted in a paper
bag. “We’re accustomed to being here.”
McDonald’s
is not alone in navigating this tricky territory. Last year, a group of deaf patrons sued Starbucks after
a store on Astor Place in Lower Manhattan forbade their meet-up group to
convene there, complaining they did not buy enough coffee. Spending the day
nursing a latte is behavior reinforced by franchises like Starbucks and others
that seem to actively cultivate it, offering free Wi-Fi that encourages
customers to park themselves and their laptops for hours.
There
is a social benefit to such spots, some experts said.
“As
long as there have been cities, these are the kind of places people have met
in,” said Don Mitchell, a professor of urban geography at Syracuse University
and the author of “The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for
Public Space.”
“Whether
they have been private property, public property or something in between,” he
said, “taking up space is a way to claim a right to be, a right to be visible,
to say, ‘We’re part of the city too.’ ”
At some
of New York City’s 235 McDonald’s outlets, customers say they have adopted the
fast-food franchise as a cafe for a less affluent crowd.
“We’re
pleased many of our customers view us as a comfortable place to spend time,”
Lisa McComb, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an email, citing free Wi-Fi
and areas for children to play as part of the appeal.
But the
leisurely cafe culture and the business plan behind fast food are in
opposition. Although signs hang in many McDonald’s stores instructing customers
to spend half an hour or less at the tables, Ms. McComb said there was no
national policy about discouraging longtime sitting. “The individual
franchisees do what they feel is best for their community businesses,” she
said. “In the case of Flushing, that franchisee welcomed those guests for
years, and it was only when other customers felt they were no longer welcome
that he attempted to adjust the visit time with the customers.”
McDonald’s
has even marketed explicitly to the older crowd, most memorably in a
television commercial broadcast
in 2010, in which a couple of elderly gentlemen who have a standing breakfast
date swoon like teenagers when a lovely gray-haired woman starts showing up.
One
afternoon last week, Vincent Diehel, 39, sat at his usual table in a McDonald’s
near St. Marks Place in Manhattan, scribbling spontaneous bop prosody and then
rapping violent lyrics aloud. He was back even though police officers had asked
him to vacate after hours of sitting the weekend before, he said.
“I
wouldn’t leave; I refused to move,” said Mr. Diehel, who said he had fallen on
hard times and saw McDonald’s as a refuge where he could gather his thoughts.
He felt being kicked out was unfair. “I wasn’t ordering no food, no soda, no
coffee, no beverages nor any of that,” he said. “That’s probably the reason
why.”
Police
involvement, however, is the exception. For the most part, longtime sitters
said they were left alone.
A McDonald’s
in Flatbush, Brooklyn, benignly hosts a group of older West Indian women and
their shopping carts every afternoon, said Okera Correia, 30, a stagehand and
frequent customer. “After a while they become invisible, other than the zone
around them that nobody wants to sit in,” he said. “They become fixtures
there.”
Sango
Pak, who was back at the Flushing McDonald’s a week after the uproar there,
said convening at McDonald’s staved off sadness. “You feel lonely and bored
when you are home,” he said. “Here you talk with these friends.”
In a
McDonald’s near Astor Place, a sign explained that customers were entitled to
just 20 minutes of sitting time.
But
Raymos Martinez, an artist, sat tucked into a dog-eared paperback of historical
fiction, and said the anonymity of the place held some appeal. “McDonald’s,
it’s more like a bus stop. Nobody notices you.”
Or
maybe they do. On the other side of the restaurant, in her uniform cap with the
Golden Arches, Samantha Reyes, 39, swept discarded burger wrappers off the
floor. She refuses to kick out those who seem to find refuge in her McDonald’s.
“For
myself, I could be in the same situation,” she said. “Tomorrow, it could be
me.”
A version of this
article appears in print on January 28, 2014, on page A1 of the New York
edition with the headline: The Food May Be Fast, but These Customers Won’t
Be Rushed.
###
###
3..
The Urban Home Away From Home
Lessons From McDonald’s Clash With Older Koreans
JAN. 28, 2014
(Picture
windows, lively traffic and easy access for the elderly: the McDonald’s at
Northern and Parsons Boulevards in Queens. Damon Winter/The New York
Times)
Critic’s Notebook
But
why that McDonald’s?
The
kerfuffle started when word spread that the police were repeatedly evicting
elderly Korean patrons from a McDonald’s in Queens. The Koreans have been
milking their stays over $1.09 coffees, violating the restaurant’s 20-minute
dining limit. The news made headlines as far away as Seoul. Last week, Ron Kim,
a New York State assemblyman, brokered a détente: The restaurant promised not
to call the police if the Koreans made room during crowded peak hours.
Still,
the question remains. The McDonald’s at issue occupies the corner of Parsons
and Northern Boulevards, in Flushing. A Burger King is two blocks away. There
are scores of fast-food outlets, bakeries and cafes near Main Street, a
half-mile away.
So, in
the vein of the urban sociologist William
H. Whyte, who helped design better cities by watching how people use
spaces, I spent some time in Flushing. What I found reinforced basic lessons
about architecture, street life and aging neighborhoods at a time when New
York’s population of residents 60 and older is rising.
(A basement space at this community
center in Flushing, Queens, is not attractive to many older Koreans. Damon Winter/The New York Times)
For
starters, there were common sense lessons about money and cars. Older
city dwellers on tight budgets who don’t own automobiles or no
longer drive want inexpensive meeting places within walking distance of their
homes. The elderly Koreans at McDonald’s, with one exception, all told me that
they live within two blocks of the restaurant.
They
don’t use the local senior center, they said, because it’s in a church a mile
and a half away. (Never mind that it’s in a church basement.) “There’s a van that
will take us there,” Kun Pae Yim, 86, one of the McDonald’s regulars, told me.
“We’re grateful for the offer. But we are not schoolchildren or government
workers. We want to see our friends when we choose.”
So
independence is a factor. It’s a big part of why anyone lives in the city.
At the
same time, people don’t want to be alone. So they find a sense of belonging in
what they think of as their neighborhood, which tends to shrink as they age.
The Flushing branch library, free and welcoming, the busiest in New York, is
always packed with young and old people, but it’s almost a mile away. A park
closer by has benches where some of the regulars meet when the weather is good,
but outdoors is not an option in winter or high summer, when McDonald’s has
air-conditioning.
Step
into the McDonald’s on Main Street, whose layout is one of those glum shoe
boxes with the counter in the back, and on a recent Saturday, you could find a
clutch of elderly Chinese women nursing a single coffee, cheerfully occupying a
nook near the entrance. It’s an area that accommodates eight or so, set apart
by a low divider: the equivalent of courtside seating in terms of watching the
comings and goings, but slightly separate from the main dining room, with a
view onto the street through the front window. Bathrooms are on the second
floor, a major deterrent for older people. I watched an elderly man descend the
stairs like Mallory from Everest, clinging to the handrail for dear life.
Across
downtown Flushing, managers at eateries with restrooms have had the most
problems with lingering elderly patrons. Not long ago, on Union Street, a
branch of Tous les Jours, a South Korean chain of French-style bakeries,
opened, replacing another bakery, but with fewer seats and without a toilet for
customers.
(A McDonald’s on Main Street is
patronized mainly by customers of Chinese origin. Damon
Winter/The New York Times)
In any
case, most of those places are too far and foreign for the McDonald’s gang.
Even the Burger King, only two blocks away, is remote if you walk with a cane.
A few of the regulars at McDonald’s told me that they had frequented a
different Korean bakery, a block away, but that it was replaced a couple of
years ago by a Chinese-American-owned clothing store, the harbinger of changing
times.
Therein
lies a further lesson. The neighborhood’s center of gravity has shifted. As the
Chinese population in downtown Flushing has grown, younger, more affluent
Koreans have moved eastward toward Bayside, leaving behind an older generation
of Koreans. Absent a senior center within walking distance, McDonald’s has
become, by default, their home away from home. Its architecture offers big
picture windows with views onto a major intersection. A seating area near the
front door is set apart, half-obscured from the restaurant’s counter staff,
with an extra-long banquette, ideal for large groups, people watching and
privacy: the urban trifecta. McDonald’s is a ready-made NORC.
The
official name is Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities. These include
various midcentury housing projects (like Co-op
City in the Bronx or Penn
South in Manhattan) that have evolved serendipitously over the
decades into homes well suited for the elderly people who have aged in them.
Despite itself, and the many disgruntled patrons who find nothing charming
about people they consider space hogs, McDonald’s is the NORC that has bound
together the elderly Koreans. Most of them didn’t know one another until they
visited the restaurant. They were drawn there by proximity and price, and they
have stayed for the companionship.
“It’s
how we keep track of each other now,” Mr. Yim told me. “Everybody checks in at
McDonald’s at least once a day, so we know they’re O.K.”
People
check in from far away, too. Byung Uk Cho, 84, who moved to the neighborhood
from New Jersey three years ago and stops into the restaurant two or three
times a day, said that a friend called from Seoul after hearing about the
evictions last week. “We became famous around the world,” he said, “but,
ultimately, it wasn’t a conflict between a big corporation and weak seniors. It
was a community issue.”
And
that’s the answer to the original question.
McDonald’s
the corporation serves billions and billions. But the hamburger joint at
Parsons and Northern Boulevards is theirs.
###
###
4..
Old McDonald’s
By STACY TORRESJAN. 21, 2014
THERE’S an old Italian saying, “A tavola non si invecchia,” which means: At the table, you don’t grow old. All of us, of whatever age, need to socialize in public places to feel connected and alive.
THERE’S an old Italian saying, “A tavola non si invecchia,” which means: At the table, you don’t grow old. All of us, of whatever age, need to socialize in public places to feel connected and alive.
That
sense of shared conviviality was notably absent recently when police officers removed loiterers, many of
them elderly Korean-Americans, from a McDonald’s restaurant in Queens. The slew
of comments that followed a report of the dispute were unsympathetic to those
who whiled away their hours there.
One New
York Times reader commented, “It is only in the inner city that McDonald’s and
Starbucks are the gathering places for the unwashed, elderly, incompetent and
infirm. I suppose this is the price for being a city dweller. These people ruin
everything!” Others offered proposals to “solve” the problem by making the
seating uncomfortable or removing it altogether, suing the elderly customers or
playing blaring rap music to drive them away.
Older
patrons may test the limits of public dawdling, but this phenomenon — call it
loitering or community building — is essential for the survival of many people
65 and older. According to the last census, seniors constitute 12 percent of
New York City’s population. Many of them are single, sometimes far from family,
and have lived in their localities for decades, their entire lives even. For
the past four years, I have studied how neighborhood public places help older
Manhattan residents avoid isolation and develop social ties that offer support,
ranging from a sympathetic ear to a small emergency loan.
Like
the teenagers who linger over sticky tabletops at Burger King and McDonald’s,
these older people have reached a time when their lives do not revolve around
work and family. In the absence of those, these public places can anchor
routines and provide a sense of structure and belonging.
A
Manhattan bakery I observed had served as a de facto senior center for decades.
The owner allowed customers to linger; many stopped in more than once a day.
The bakery hummed with conversation: It felt more like a social club than a
business, with a cup of coffee being the modest price of admission.
Yet the
elderly are often now hindered by the loss of neighborhood places that have
closed because of gentrification and rising retail rents. When that West Side
bakery was shuttered, its patrons were forced to regroup in other neighborhood
locales, including a nearby McDonald’s.
For
retirees on fixed incomes who may have difficulty walking more than a few
blocks, McDonald’s restaurants remain among the most democratic, freely
accessible spaces. Much of the appeal lies in the fact that, as an elderly
patron said to me, “you can sit all day and nobody bothers you.” At the branch
I observed, the tolerance for older New Yorkers also extended to the homeless,
people who appeared mentally unstable and teenagers who congregated after
school — even when they occasionally flung ice cubes at one another.
An
afternoon at McDonald’s opens up a world of people-watching opportunities. One
elderly regular I observed sat an entire day and greeted a changing cast of
passers-by, acquaintances and friends — a welcome alternative to sitting alone
in her apartment with worsening dementia.
Ray
Oldenburg, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of West Florida,
calls these gathering spots “third places,” in contrast to the institutions of
work and family that organize “first” and “second” places. He sees bookstores,
cafes and fast food joints as necessary yet endangered meeting points that
foster community, often among diverse people. The Yale sociologist Elijah
Anderson likens public settings such as Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia
to a “cosmopolitan canopy,” where people act with civility and converse with
others to whom they might never otherwise speak.
The
care-taking performed by such places extends to all kinds of groups. A
professor of sociology at Princeton, Mitchell Duneier, has found a Chicago
cafeteria that supports older working-class African-American men in this way. I
have interviewed people who tell me they don’t like senior centers because
“they’re depressing”; in these cafes, they can form emotional attachments with
a wider mix of people.
Centers
offer vital services, but McDonald’s offers an alternative that doesn’t
segregate people from intergenerational contact. “I hate old people,” one
89-year-old man told me.
We
should praise companies that allow loitering and devise public-private
partnerships that benefit both older adults and business owners: I can imagine
tax breaks for franchises that serve a high proportion of older adults and
discounts to encourage patronage at off-peak hours. And we could replicate the “Café
Plus” model of the Chicago nonprofit group Mather LifeWays in 30
American cities. These attractive coffee shops not only offer older customers
who dislike traditional senior centers a 75-cent bottomless cup of coffee, but
also welcome customers of all ages.
The Queens dispute has been settled, for now, by a
compromise that allows the elderly Korean-American customers to linger,
provided they vacate during the lunchtime rush. Battles over public space are
as old as the city itself, but we have an opportunity to reimagine overlooked
resources like McDonald’s as new generations of older people find themselves
needing places to hang out.
About the author: Stacy Torres is a doctoral candidate in sociology at New
York University.
###
###
5..
Hitches in Compromise at a McDonald’s
By NATE SCHWEBERJAN.
21, 2014
An
agreement limiting the number of hours a group of older Korean patrons can
linger at a McDonald’s in Flushing, Queens, is two days old. On Tuesday, some
patrons disregarded the limits. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Maybe
it was the snow. Or a lack of communication.
For
whatever reason, the compromise between a McDonald’s and a group of older
Korean patrons — limiting the hours that the group can linger at the restaurant
— seemed to have some loose ends on Tuesday, two days after the agreement was
reached.
The compromise, brokered
by Assemblyman Ron Kim, called for patrons to limit their loitering to less
than an hour from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the McDonald’s at the corner of Northern
and Parsons Boulevards.
“They
agreed to a compromise, to have more compassion to the business,” Mr. Kim said.
But
at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, the two elderly Korean patrons who sat in the restaurant
continued to do so. One stayed until 12:15 p.m., the other until 4 p.m.; both
left of their own volition.
Though a security guard in a neon green jacket
swept the restaurant several times before 3 p.m., he asked no one to leave.
About 10 older Korean customers came and went as they pleased all day, none
staying less than an hour, and most sitting for several.
“They
don’t care — they don’t want to stay home watching TV and going to sleep, they
want to drink coffee at McDonald’s and that’s it,” said Il Jong Paek, 46, who
is friends with the two customers who violated the time limits. He sat with
them for more than three hours on Tuesday afternoon.
The
peculiar attraction that the Korean patrons had to that McDonald’s — two other
fast-food restaurants nearby do not share the same allure — drew the attention
of the police, who would be called to occasionally roust them from the
restaurant. When the police’s involvement became known, several Korean
community leaders urged a boycott of
the McDonald’s.
Mr.
Kim said he gave his phone number to McDonald’s managers and will send staff
members over to mediate any future conflicts.
He
said he had signs printed in Korean, Mandarin and English. They will be
delivered to the McDonald’s and hung in a few days, he said. Two employees who
identified themselves as managers said they knew of no changes in seating time
policy.
Anthony
Sharkey, the security guard, said he had been told Tuesday morning by the
owner, Jack Bert, to roust loitering Hispanic patrons who he suspected were day
laborers. But Mr. Bert said nothing about elderly Koreans, Mr. Sharkey said.
“They never bother anybody,” Mr. Sharkey said. “They just stay
here like they own the spot.”dy,” Mr. Sharkey said. “They just stay
here like they own the spot.”
###
###
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Wednesday, SEPT 12th
Friends,
The heart of research is knowing what questions to ask. In other words, the best researchers are those who are naturally curious about the world in which they find themselves. We call this personality trait "intellectual curiosity." Meaning, the most effective researchers are not the people who already have all the answers, but rather the people who can see questions where there might not appear any. I've italicized that for a reason. Take a moment to reread it.
So today, let's practice "The Art of Raising Questions." Here is what I'd like you to do.
1. Read this very short post. After you've read it, come back to our blog and review the next steps.
http://janabouc.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/wasps-nest/
(Write down your responses the below questions.)
2. In order to have a solid/masterful understanding of this post, what words or ideas or terms would you need more information on? What resources would you use to gain this information (a person, a local company, Google?).
3. In what way does this post relate to your life (either specifically or metaphorically)?
4. If you could contact the artist/author, what would you ask her? Why would you ask these questions?
5. What purpose (beyond "basic understanding of what we're reading") might we have for researching questions we raise about this post?
In other words, we want our writing to have a practical value, a real-world use. (We don't want to write for the sole purpose of having it graded; that's not why people write.) So, here is what I really want to you consider (and then tell me):
OK. I look forward to seeing what you come up. I will be walking around, helping, clarifying where possible, smiling, enjoying your company.
The heart of research is knowing what questions to ask. In other words, the best researchers are those who are naturally curious about the world in which they find themselves. We call this personality trait "intellectual curiosity." Meaning, the most effective researchers are not the people who already have all the answers, but rather the people who can see questions where there might not appear any. I've italicized that for a reason. Take a moment to reread it.
So today, let's practice "The Art of Raising Questions." Here is what I'd like you to do.
1. Read this very short post. After you've read it, come back to our blog and review the next steps.
http://janabouc.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/wasps-nest/
(Write down your responses the below questions.)
2. In order to have a solid/masterful understanding of this post, what words or ideas or terms would you need more information on? What resources would you use to gain this information (a person, a local company, Google?).
3. In what way does this post relate to your life (either specifically or metaphorically)?
4. If you could contact the artist/author, what would you ask her? Why would you ask these questions?
5. What purpose (beyond "basic understanding of what we're reading") might we have for researching questions we raise about this post?
In other words, we want our writing to have a practical value, a real-world use. (We don't want to write for the sole purpose of having it graded; that's not why people write.) So, here is what I really want to you consider (and then tell me):
- Under what conditions or context would a person want to read what you eventually write?
- Can you imagine how the knowledge you eventually create (as a result of your research here) might be of personal to you one day? Explain.
- Not every single person on Earth is going to be interested in reading what you eventually write for this assignment. However, many people will. So be awake for how who you're writing to changes as your purpose changes.
OK. I look forward to seeing what you come up. I will be walking around, helping, clarifying where possible, smiling, enjoying your company.
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