| English Composition | Spring 2009 | Palomar College |
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On-Campus Classes
1. Required Work
How much reading
is required for the course?
How much writing
is required for the course?
Will we be doing
group work ?
2. On-line work
How much computer
expertise do I need to take this course?
Will we
upload
our work to the Internet?
3. Topics and format
What's a working
draft?
What topics will
we write on?
What is the
format for essay?
What about
grammatical and spelling errors?
Can we
rewrite essays?
Will we write
a research paper?
4. Grading and evaluation
5. Attendance and participation
Is attendance
required?
Can we use computers and cell phones in class?
How important is
class participation?
6. Penalties
What are the
penalties for late work?
What are the
penalties for plagiarism or falsifying evidence?
7. Miscellaneous
Can we throw away
our materials after the essay is finished?
Do we need to own
a dictionary?
How about
meeting with you outside of class?
You are required to read major portions of five textbooks for the class. In parentheses after each book is the abbreviation that I will use to refer to it, usually the authors' last names or initials:
Richard J. Light. Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0-674-00478-7. This book is available from Amazon.com and other on-line booksellers or from the Palomar College bookstore.
Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. The Pocket Wadsworth Handbook. 4th Edition. Wadsworth-Cengage, 2008. ISBN: 1-4282-2978-7. Make sure you have the fourth edition.
Robert McHenry. How to Know. Booklocker.com, 2004. ISBN: 1-59113-523-0. This book is available from the publisher, Booklocker.com: http://www.booklocker.com/books/1641.html.
C. S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. ISBN: 0060652942. This book is available from Amazon.com and other on-line booksellers or from the Palomar College bookstore
The Discovering
Ideas Handbook, linked to our class home page (DIH).
The first four you will be required to buy and to own until after the semester is over. (You will not be able to substitute another handbook for Kirszner and Mandell, 3rd edition. You need to own your own copy of the book. There is no other way to get through the class. Please do not take this course if you are unwilling to buy the books.) The last book is published on the Internet and you may access it there. This course is definitely reading-intensive. There will be over 500 pages of required reading for the course, not counting your own research. For further information about the books, see the Books page.
The required work consists of the following:
You will be assigned to an editorial group at the first or second class meeting. You will be doing a great deal of work with this group and with other students in the class. You will review one another's essays, discuss the readings with one another, sometimes to respond as a group, and will have other group projects to do. Your editorial group will be your support system and sounding board for ideas that you want to try out on someone before putting them in an essay and posting them on the Internet. After we get going, we will meet on-line more often and much of your face-to-face work will be with your editorial group. Group work is an absolutely essential part of the course; you can't avoid it. You need the help of others to become a better thinker and a better writer, none of us can do it on our own. In this class, it isn't optional; it is required of every student.
You will do much of your work for this class at a computer and send it to me and to your fellow students electronically. Most of you have already used e-mail and the Internet extensively. You will probably be doing some new things this semester. Don’t worry about this. If you have seldom or never worked with computers in the past, it isn’t a problem. You will be working with computers in the future--you won't really have a choice about it--and this will be an easy way to start. You are not required or expected to have any experience or expertise with computers or communications technology in order to participate in the class. You do not need to own a computer. You will be able to do all of your work, if you choose, in the computer labs here on campus. On the other hand, if you do have a computer at home and have access to an on-line service, you will be able to do some of your on-line work from home.
You will be assigned to an editorial group. Groups will exchange e-mail responses to the assigned readings and will react to one another’s responses. These on-line discussions will be a major part of the writing you do early in the course. Later, you will place copies of all your essays and your portfolio on the class homepage. You will respond to essays on-line. In some cases these will be essays written by other members of the class; in some cases they will be essays written by students in other classes.
Unlike some English classes, the work you do in this class will be published. Specifically, your essays will be uploaded to the Internet so that they will be publicly available to anyone who wants to read them. Your final portfolio will remain a permanent part of the class archive. And people do read them. Many Internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, will pick up your essays in keyword searches. I have received mail from instructors at other colleges to let me know that they have used essays from our class page as reading assignments in their classes. One of my former students was interviewed on a local television program when a reporter turned up her essay on an unusual topic in an Internet search. You shouldn't worry about everybody seeing your work as soon as it's done. But you also shouldn't think that what you write for this class is some sort of classroom exercise that is private and secret. It isn't. You are writing to real people, and real people will read what you write.
You will submit at least one working draft of each of your essays before the revised essay is due. A working draft should be a complete essay, but not necessarily a finished one. The minimum length for a working draft will be 1,000 words. That is 500 words shorter than the minimum length of a revised essay, but it is a firm minimum. If you have not really written enough for your fellow students to give you feedback on the working draft, it is a waste of time. Calling the second draft of the essay "revised" should not be taken to mean that a working draft should not be revised.
Keep in mind that a working draft is supposed to be a work in progress. You are not necessarily supposed to be fully satisfied with it. That's why it's called a working draft. Indeed, you have met all of the requirements of the course if you submit a very “bad” working draft, in the sense that you end up using very little of it in your revised essay. The working draft is a step in the process of developing a finished essay. You have not failed in any way if your working draft is deeply flawed as an essay. You have failed completely if you don’t submit a working draft by the time it is due. It is an essential step in the process of developing an essay. Skipping that step is not an option. The working draft is required work. So remember: It doesn’t have to be "good," but it does have to be here, in the reader's hands or on the screen, when due. You don't have the option of "skipping" the working draft and simply procrastinating until the revised essay is due.
One of the major reasons for assigning working drafts is that they get you started on the essay in time to do a decent job. But if this strategy is to work, you need to take the working draft seriously. The working draft you submit should be a serious effort to say something important. If it is something you throw together the night before it is due, it will be of limited value. But limited value or not, it's still required.
The theme of the course is "Discovering Ideas." It is intended to emphasize that the major task of writing is discovering ideas and conveying them to others. The theme is intended to be broad and allow you to choose from a wide variety of topics and approaches for your essays. But it will also allow us to pursue a common understanding in our discussions and reading. While developing your ideas you will also be learning about the ideas and assumptions your fellow students bring to the topic. In doing so, you will be learning about the audience for your writing, because these are the same people you will be writing essays to. Each of the four essays will have a very general subject area. You will write on a very specific topic within that general subject. The subject areas for the fours essays will be Learning, Thinking, Morality, and Technology.
In this class, you will submit your working drafts and essays in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). HTML is the set of conventions that allows different browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, to consistently present text and graphic images over the Internet. The document you are reading now was prepared in HTML, as was everything else you see on the Internet. These days, it is very simple to prepare an HTML document. In general, you will just type the essay in your word processing program as you normally would and then save it as HTML or a Web page. This will be no problem unless you have a very old word processing program. You can easily produce HTML documents in Microsoft Word using the computers in the library Academic Technology Lab. If you have a problem here, we will discuss it individually.
There are a couple of differences between the format for HTML documents and for word-processed documents that you hand in on paper. The following are the most important:
The reason for these differences lies in the difference between reading something on a screen and reading on paper.
One more requirement for the format of all your essays is not covered in your book. I will ask you, for all working drafts and essays, to put your thesis statement at the very end of the essay, after the last paragraph, and after the list of works cited if you have one. So the last thing at the end of your essay, separated from the previous material by at least one blank line, should be the heading "Thesis Statement:" followed by the thesis statement for that essay. You will read about the rationale for this requirement in DIH 1.4 The Thesis Statement.
Some of you may think of an English composition class as primarily a "grammar" course. This, as you have probably already figured out, is a mistake. Grammar is a small part of writing, and one that you have already learned most of what you need to know about. (If you hadn't, you wouldn't be in this course.) However, we all make some technical mistakes in writing that get in the way of clearly transmitting the information we want to transmit to our readers. One of your goals this semester is to get better at freeing your writing from these distractions and to learn the conventions of standard English where you are unfamiliar with them. The way you will address this goal is by correcting the technical mistakes you do make. You will be required to correct all of the grammatical and mechanical errors that I find and mark in your essays. I may sometimes ask you to submit corrections of some errors to me as well as making it in your essay. Our textbook and on-line resources are excellent, and if you use them as instructed you should find that most corrections will come easily, and the whole process will get easier as the semester goes on. But it will get easier faster if you do your corrections and revisions before the next essay is due. So I will usually require a revision a short time after your revised essay is submitted. I will be happy to answer your questions and to meet with you at any point in the process to go over problems or discuss questions you may have.
You may rewrite your essays if they were handed in on time. Before beginning to rewrite an essay, you must submit a proposed thesis statement for the rewrite and discuss it with me. And if you intend to rewrite an essay you must set a date for submitting the rewrite within one week of receiving the revised essay back from me. I will be very flexible in accepting the dates you set for rewrites. But I have found in the past that it is very easy to intend to do a rewrite, but often very difficult to actually produce one. It takes time. Some people have an unfortunate tendency to overestimate the amount of work they can do in the future. I have had students try to rewrite three essays in the last two weeks of the semester. Not one of them has done a very good job of it. It just doesn't work to postpone all of your work to the end. You won't get it done that way. You need to schedule the work so that you have a chance to really get it done. You may submit only one rewrite at a time. Late essays cannot be rewritten.
A "rewrite," of course, can be anything from small changes in a few paragraphs to a completely different essay. You have a great deal of freedom. I want you to do the best work you can in the time available. The rewrite policy is intended to allow you to do that.
In some English 100 classes you are required to write a separate research paper, longer than the others. In this class, we will write fewer papers, all of the same minimum length. However, research skills and using evidence well is a major emphasis of the class. Given the subjects we will be writing about, you will have difficulty writing good essays if you don't do background research. So you will be required to use at least three outside published sources in each of your four essays. That means that you will have to use at least three sources that were not assigned as reading for the class for every essay. You may, of course, use sources that we did read for class as well. And three is a minimum; you will often use many more sources than that. Don't think of it as an upper limit on your research. Work published on the Internet, of course, counts as a published source.
You will receive an evaluative grade of your work in the course at the end of the semester, as you do in all of your credit courses at Palomar College. If it were up to me, I would not give A-F grades but would have your work assessed publicly by outside parties. But it is not up to me, so I will give you a grade at the end of the semester as is currently required by Palomar College.
In deciding how to handle grading, as in deciding most other things about the course, I have been guided by the Purposes of the Course. The purpose of this course is primarily to develop your skills and abilities, not your transcript. What you learn, especially what you learn about how to learn in the future, will stay with you much longer and influence your life much more powerfully than will your grade in the course. It is also true that you have a right to a reasonable assessment of your work in the end. With these two points in mind, we will handle grades as follows.
First, because what you learn in the course will depend on what you do in the course, in order to qualify for a passing grade ("C" or higher) you must complete all of the required work in the course, described in Required Written Work. The course consists of what you do; if you are to be a full participant in the course, you need to do all the work.
Second, in evaluating the quality of the work of those who complete it all, I will chiefly be guided by the quality of your final portfolio. But I will also consider how well and actively you have participated both in activities involving the whole class and in your specific editorial group. Your semester grade will be calculated roughly in the following way:
I will give narrative evaluations of each essay you submit. We will discuss each essay, either by e-mail or in person. You will evaluate each of your essays yourself, using the Essay Self-evaluation, and I will evaluate your essay according to the same criteria. We will examine your writing and your responses from your audience, and I will give you detailed comments and advice. I will not, however, give you a letter grade. The reason is that to give you a letter grade tells you nothing at all about how to improve your work, but it does treat the work as finished, over. As you will see in Rewrites, your essays are not finished until you decide they are. You may revise your work as much and as often as you like. If you are still working on a piece, a letter grade is not a very useful bit of information; it tells you nothing at all about how to revise it further. Once you have decided that a piece is finished and that you will include it in your final portfolio, I will be happy to give it a grade. But after I have done so, you can no longer revise it and must include it in your portfolio. In other words, before I give you a letter grade, a final assessment, on a piece of work, you must decide that it is in its final form. So if you want to know the letter grade on some part of your portfolio, you must complete it, post it on the homepage, and request a grade. I do not recommend that you do this before the end of the semester unless you are quite sure that your work is as good as you can make it. I will be happy to discuss the quality of your work with you at any point; you will not need to get a letter grade in order to find out how you are doing in the class. But if you want to be graded before the end of the semester, I will grade your work as soon as you commit yourself to it.
Third, what are the criteria I will use in assigning grades to your writing? I will ask this question: Does the writer succeed in moving his or her readers to accept a serious and important thesis? To see the criteria for a successful essay spelled out in more detail, see the Essay Self-evaluation.
Attendance is mandatory. But in this class, attendance will consist of more than just showing up for class on the assigned days and times. That is part of it. But you also need to do your on-line work within the range of times given in the assignment. That means that you will have to do your on-line work on days when we do not have class meetings. We will meet on-line approximately every other week once we get started, and your on-line work and attendance at your group meetings outside of class count as part of class attendance. If you need to come into the library computer lab to do your on-line work, that means you will need to come to campus on days class does not meet. You need to make a firm commitment to be here for every class session and to get to a computer to do your on-line work when required.
We will meet sometimes in the designated classroom and sometimes in the library computer center and sometimes by arrangement on-line or in your groups. This will be specified in the Syllabus. When the schedule changes, the changes will be included in the on-line Syllabus, so make sure and check it weekly. When we do not meet all together in one room, your group meetings or on-line meetings are required and considered part of your attendance obligation.
Of course, there are powerful and unforeseeable reasons why we sometimes can't make it. If you are unable to attend for good reason, please notify me before the scheduled class meeting, if at all possible. We are talking here, of course, about unforeseeable reasons for absence. If you already know, at the beginning of the semester, that your new job or your long-planned vacation will prevent you from attending class, that is a different matter. Do not take this course if you know you are not going to be able to attend class. If you foresee a possible problem--business trips, kids, illness, vacations--talk to me about it as soon as you can. After the semester is under way, please plan around this class the same way you would around other important work. Do not promise to take people to the airport or pick them up therefrom during class time. Do not, unless it is a genuine emergency, go to see doctors or dentists or lawyers during class time.
If you should miss class, for any reason, you must submit an e-mail explanation of your absence, giving the date of the absence and the reason, together with documentation where appropriate to support any claim of an excused absence (doctors' notes or receipts, for example). If your explanation is superficial or unconvincing I may ask you to provide further information. There will be no exceptions to this requirement. If you have more than two unexcused absences you may be dropped from the course. Of course, remember that you cannot drop the course for any reason after the midterm. After that, you must receive an evaluative grade.
We will sometimes use laptop computers and the Internet in the classroom for specific lessons. But we will only do this when everyone has access to them. At all other times, laptop computers must be closed during class. Cell phones or other communication devices must be turned off at all times during class. No telephone conversations, text messaging, or electronic communication of any kind will be allowed in class.
Most class meetings will be devoted to open discussion of the topics we will be writing about. Discussion will be informal and low-pressure. As we get to know each other better, it will get easier and even more interesting. But you will need to participate. Be prepared to do so.
We will be using e-mail and Blackboard to conduct on-line discussions.
You will have several different modes in which you may engage in the ongoing class discussion, face-to-face and on-line. If you are more comfortable in one than another, use it to its full potential. The more fully you participate, the more you will enjoy the class and the more you will learn.
This class has deadlines, and your ability to succeed in the course depends on your ability to do your work when it is due. We will always do something with your essays. As will become clear to you very soon, you will spend a good deal of time responding to the work of other writers in class and revising your own work in reaction to the responses of your fellow writers. If your work isn’t available to respond to, it doesn’t work. If more than one or two people are late with a given assignment, the whole system breaks down. For this reason, the penalties for late work are severe. I don't like to impose them. They are intended as a deterrent. On-line work will be considered late if it is submitted after the time the assignment is due. Notice that working drafts are considered just as important as final essays. A late working draft will affect your grade the same way as a late essay.
Late papers may not be rewritten. And they must be included in your final portfolio as-is. If either the working draft or the final essay is late, you may not rewrite the essay after it is done. Any work handed in on time can be redone and revised as much as you like, and you always have the option of omitting it from your final portfolio. That means that it makes more sense to submit a really lousy paper on time than to keep working on it past the deadline and hence make it late. If you submit it, no matter how bad it is, you can always fix it. But if it’s late, you can never do anything to improve it or to make up the penalty.
Your first unexcused late paper--working draft or revised essay--will lower your final semester grade in the course by a full letter grade, in addition to the result of the inability to revise the paper.
If you submit more than one working draft or essay late, your final semester grade will be lowered by two full letter grades. If you submit more than two late working drafts or essays late before the drop deadline, you will be dropped from the course, or if it is too late to drop, your final semester grade will be lowered by three full letter grades.
E-mail assignments: Five late responses to e-mail assignments will lower your semester grade by a full letter grade. If you have more than seven, I would recommend that you drop the class.
Reflection papers: I will not accept late reflection papers. Reflection papers are written for the purpose of laying the groundwork for class discussions, after the class discussion is over, there is no point to them. So your reflection papers will be either on time or not submitted at all. If you miss five reflection papers it will low your semester grade by a full letter grade.
There are, of course, genuine emergencies. If you are unable to submit work on time because of circumstances beyond your control, get in touch with me immediately--before the work is late if possible, but as soon as you can in any case. I will waive the penalties in appropriate cases. The burden of proof is on you to show that a given case is "appropriate."
These penalties are severe. But they are not as severe as the penalty you will impose upon yourself if you let yourself fall behind. It is very difficult to catch up in this course if you fall behind. You will often have to submit imperfect work, especially working drafts that you aren't happy with, in order not to have late work. That's fine. Indeed, I want you to submit imperfect work, so that we can help you to improve it. You are not required to be a genius or to only submit brilliant essays. You are required to submit a piece of work when it is due, not later. Please take deadlines seriously. More students drop or fail this course because they didn't complete their work when it was due than for any other reason. Don't take chances. Keep up. There will never be a better time to do the work that is due than when it is due. It may seem as if there will be, but it is an illusion. Don't fall behind.
To plagiarize is to intentionally represent what someone else wrote as your own work. For example, if you were to copy a portion of a published article in your essay without indicating that the material was quoted, you would guilty of plagiarism. If you were to submit a paper written by someone else and put your name on it, you would be guilty of plagiarism.
To falsify evidence is to represent what you have written as the work of someone else. For example, if you were to attribute a statement to an "expert," real or imagined, which you yourself had written, you would be guilty of falsifying evidence.
If you either plagiarize or falsify evidence on a piece of work you hand in for this class, even once, you will receive a grade of "F" for the course.
I am aware that most of you would never intentionally plagiarize someone else’s work. But sometimes the pressure will be great and you won't think you can finish your work in time. You may sometimes be tempted to save time and effort by using someone else's work, or inventing "someone else's" work. Do not do this. Once you've done it, it's too late. The damage cannot be undone. This is not just talk. It is very difficult for me to give someone an "F," and especially so when it is someone who could do much better in the course and has, perhaps, only made a single "mistake." But I will do it every time in cases of plagiarism. After I have discovered a case of plagiarism (and I will discover them; you'd be surprised how easy it is), I will not be open to persuasion under any circumstances. It is over. It cannot be undone.
In this connection, make sure you understand clearly the conventions governing quotation marks and indentation. They are clearly described in your handbook. Please note that parenthetical citations do not indicate that the material preceding them is quoted. Parenthetical citations only indicate the source of your information. That information may be quoted directly or it may be paraphrased. The only way to tell is by the presence or absence of quotation marks (or indentation for an extracted quotation). So if you present a sentence from a magazine article and follow it with a correct citation but do not use quotation marks, you are guilty of plagiarism. If you have any questions about when quotation marks are needed, ask them. Do not gamble on this. Do not guess.
This subject is covered clearly in 32. The conventions governing quotations are covered in 20.
I may sometimes ask you to submit all of the drafts that you have generated in producing an essay or your research notes. Save all of your rough drafts and research notes for all of your essays until after the end of the term. Do not throw them away or lose them. Some of your work will be on your computer, of course. You can save this by backing it up on a floppy disc.
If I ask to see your research materials we will have to make some arrangements for you to get them to me. If this should happen, you need to get copies of the materials to me as quickly as possible. If, at the end of the term, I have requested research materials and you have not produced them, I will assign you a grade of "Incomplete" until you produce the research materials requested. If you do not produce those materials within one year, your grade will automatically become an "F."
Not only because you might need to submit your drafts, notes, or research materials, but also because you may want to refer to them again later in the semester, adopt a clear policy at the beginning of the semester that you will not throw away anything of substance from this class. One technique that many students have adopted is to get a good-sized cardboard box, label it "DI" or "English 100," and toss all of their old drafts and discarded notes in the box. That way, if you need to dig out notes you used for your first essay, you will always know where to look. After the semester is over, you can toss it. If roommates, spouses, parents, children or other interlopers have access to your work area, caution them not to throw away your school work. And for computer work, always back up your work, all your work, to a floppy disc, every time you work on it.
In addition to your textbooks, you will need to own a recent, hardback college dictionary. This would be a dictionary published since 1990. A good college dictionary is simply and essential tool in doing serious reading and writing. If you don't have one, get one. I recommend the American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd edition; Merriam-Webster's Tenth Collegiate Dictionary; or the Random House College Dictionary.
You will meet with me individually several times in the course of the semester to discuss your work. These meetings are a part of your work for the course and are required. They are also often very productive because we can talk about a lot of things one-on-one that are specific to you and your work that it would be hard to discuss in class. I will usually pass around a sheet and ask you to sign up for a convenient time. Please make a note of these appointments and make a point of keeping them. If you can't make a scheduled appointment, please call and let me know or leave a message.
My office is IT-7-L, in the building across from the Snack Shack, on the other side of the temporary buildings. My office hours are posted on my door and on our class Web page. If you would like to talk about anything, please feel free to come into the office. Because my on-campus office hours are often filled up rather quickly once the semester gets under way, you might want to make an appointment by phone or e-mail when possible. Of course, feel free to just drop by the office; I'd be happy to talk with you whenever I'm not busy with someone else. I generally check my e-mail several times throughout the day, and I will always try to respond to your e-mail as quickly as I can.
| On-line Discovering
Ideas Table of Contents On-line Syllabus |
On-Campus
Discovering Ideas Table of Contents |
Discovering Ideas
Palomar College
jtagg@palomar.edu
This page was last edited:
02/15/09