Topics
paragraphing
Required reading
Freire, "The 'Banking' Concept of Education"
Homework due
Self assessment
250 - 400 words
Essay 1 (Freire)
Applying Freire to Your Own Experience as a Student
800 - 1,000 words
In-class assessment
Quiz 1 - paragraphing
Divide the following text into paragraphs:
It is difficult to determine precisely when coffee was introduced to Arabic culture. According to legend, Mohammed was cured of narcolepsy with coffee. There are indications in Arabic medical literature that coffee was used medicinally as early as the tenth century. But in the Islamic world, too, it became a popular beverage relatively late, certainly no earlier than the fifteenth century. Although the dating may be vague, the logic of coffee drinking for Arabic-Islamic civilization is incontestable. As a nonalcoholic, nonintoxicating, indeed even sobering and mentally stimulating drink, it seemed to be tailor-made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics. Arabic culture is dominated by abstraction more than any other culture in human history. Coffee has rightly been called the wine of Islam. Until the seventeenth century, coffee remained a curiosity for Europeans, mentioned in accounts of journeys to the exotic lands of the Orient. They could not imagine consuming a hot, black, bitter-tasting drink – much less with pleasure. It reminded them too much of hot pitch, which was used in medieval times for battle and torture. The situation changed around the middle of the seventeenth century. Suddenly a whole set of hitherto unknown exotic substances became fashionable. Together with chocolate, tea, and tobacco, coffee made its entrance upon the stage of European luxury culture. It appeared in several different places at once, then spread in a quasi-strategic pattern of encirclement: in the south it surfaced in the Levantine trade centers, Venice and Marseilles; in the north, in the transshipping ports of the new international trade, London and Amsterdam. From these bridgeheads it quickly conquered the hinterlands. Around 1650 coffee was virtually unknown in Europe, at most used as medication. By about 1700 it was firmly established as a beverage, not, of course, for the entire population but certainly among the trend-setting strata of society.
Schivelbusch, W. (1993). Tastes of Paradise: A social history of spices, stimulants, and intoxicants. New York: Vintage.[Translation of Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft (1980).]
