Essay 1

For our Essay assignment for this unit, we’ll be considering a topic near and dear to our heart–ourself!

CONTEXT and TOPIC:

Our first Paragraph focused on one of the non-academic skills, tasks, or hobbies you’ve concentrated on lately. You wrote a paragraph identifying how the “Habits of Minds for Academic Success” could contribute (or are already contributing) to your mastery or completion of that skill or project you identified.

For your first unit, you’ll expand your first paragraph in an 800 word essay arguing that the “Habits of Mind for Academic Success” contribute to your mastery of a specific skill, hobby, or project.

PREPARATION:

1. You must first select one of the following established techniques for evaluating student learning. one of the non-academic skills, tasks, or hobbies you’ve concentrated on lately. This could be anything you’re working on that doesn’t have to do with school–for example, practicing yoga, mastering a video game, writing your autobiography, learning a new cuisine or baking technique, painting the garage, getting Insta-famous…anything you’ve committed to learning, completing, owning.

2. Read the seven

3. Select the three or four “Habits” that you believe best helped (or will hep) you master the skill you selected.

INSTRUCTIONS and GUIDELINES:

Your essay will begin a compelling introductory paragraph that ends with your thesis statement that makes a claim for the contributions of the “Habits of Mind” to your topic. If you wrote a strong topic sentence for your first paragraph assignment, this could be recycled into a thesis statement for this essay. Intro paragraphs and thesis statements are described on

).

You will continue to support your claim with well developed body paragraphs. Each body paragraph will start with its own topic sentence (a sentence that describes what’s in the paragraph and how it supports the thesis) and develop a different element of the argument. Each topic sentence will identify a specific “Habit of Mind” that will be discussed in that paragraph. Body paragraphs that begin with topic sentences and described on

),

Be sure also to review

.

You will NOT be using outside research; you will use only personal and common knowledge (rely only on what you’ve experienced, the experiences of those whom you know, knowledge you’ve acquired through media, and the knowledge you’ve acquired by living the world). You may NOT use any of the language in these instructions (except for the name of the “Habits of Mind”).

If the hobby or activity you’ve chosen has a proper name, please capitalize and punctuate it accordingly. For example, while Animal Crossing is capitalized and italicized as the title of a video game, Crossfit is only capitalized as a copyrighted company name as is Rachel Ray as a celebrity chef (although the Rachel Ray Show is italicized). See

if you’re unsure.

You do not need to provide MLA citation for this first assignment, and you may refer to the habits by name as they are described in our textbook. But because we didn’t invent the habits, you will want to add quotation marks to the names/titles, of the habits (for example, “Be responsible”). You are of course free to paraphrase (use your own words for) descriptions of the habits, but you may NOT directly quote any of the article’s original language except the names/titles of the seven habits.

Remember that you’ve got experience and opinions about this topic–it’s YOUR skill! You’ll want to be as specific as possible when relating/recounting your examples–you’re telling little stories to hep support your thesis! Include the who, what, when, where, why kind of details that will capture the attention of your reader. Without those details, your essay might sound like AI wrote it!

You’ll also edit your work to ensure that your writing is free of language and usage errors.

Lastly, your essay will have and be MLA formatted like the sample on page 574 of

.