English 360

Joshua Geist - Summer 2017

Syllabus

Course Information

Meeting Times

Dates
June 19, 2017 – July 27, 2017
Days/Time
MTWR 8:00 AM – 1:10 PM
Room
TCCB B220
CRN
30348

Contact Information

Email
joshuag@cos.edu
Phone
559.892.1689
Course Website
http://jngeist.com/

Summer Warning

English 360 is a 6 unit course, with an additional lab hour per week. During a normal semester, that works out to 7 hours per week in class, for 18 weeks. This is a summer course, and as such, we’ll be doing the same amount of work in 6 weeks—essentially, we’re going to be going triple speed.

That means this course will be extremely intense. We’re going to be reading a whole book before the end of June. We’re going to be starting, writing, revising, polishing, and turning in a new essay about every week. A good rule of thumb for this sort of thing is for every hour you’re in the classroom, you should be expecting to be doing two hours of homework and studying. We’re in class about 18 hours a week. That means that overall, you should be expecting to spend 54 hours per week on this class for the next six weeks. (That’s more than a full-time job.)

In short, if you’re thinking that you’ll be traveling, working, spending time with your kids, or enjoying your summer for the next six weeks, you should stop thinking that right now. Once this bus starts moving, it’s only going to get faster—and it turns out the road’s iced over, the brakes are shot, and the driver’s kind of insane.1

Catalog Description

This course is a basic course in learning effective reading and writing strategies. The students will learn sentence structure, the writing process, acquisition, reading comprehension, and critical thinking. Supplemental learning assistance is available for students to strengthen skills and to reinforce mastery of concepts. Students enrolled in English 360 may access the supplemental learning assistance by enrolling in English 400, an open entry/open exit non-credit course.

Course Overview

Most people coming into English 360 think that it’s going to be a class about “grammar.” In fact, that’s what many students think writing is, starting out in college: writing sentences. It’s not. Writing good sentences is important, sure, and we’ll practice some stuff about sentences. But really, writing in college is about ideas—about communicating complicated, confusing, challenging ideas to people we may never meet. Sometimes, how well we communicate those ideas can have a huge impact on our lives. They can determine whether we get the jobs we apply for, whether the judge finds in our favor, whether our boss understands a risky decision we made, and a million other things.

Thinking about writing this way is hard, and you’ll quickly realize that as a writer, you face much more complicated, difficult questions than where to put the commas. I see the same struggles over and over:

  • How do I get started?
  • How do I put all these ideas in my head into words?
  • How do I keep myself from rambling?
  • What do I do when I feel like there’s nothing more to say?
  • What if I don’t like the topic?

In English 360, we’ll learn some tools for dealing with each of those questions—and where to put the commas.

Course Materials

  • Livingston, Sonja. Ghostbread.
  • Hacker, Diana. A Pocket Style Manual. 7th ed. with 2016 MLA update. (Recommended.)
  • A notebook for in-class writing and journaling.
  • Money set aside to make copies for in-class workshops.

Your Grade

Part I - Passing the Class

We think about grades as being between teacher and student—how I feel about the work you did. But in a class like English 360, there’s a more important question: whether you are ready for English 251. The College expects students who pass English 360 to be able to do certain things. So, in English 360, it’s not about how I feel about your work. Your grade is a question of whether you’re ready to move on, according to the College.

Fortunately, the College tells us exactly what you’ll be expected to do at the end of the class. For each class, the College has certain “Course Outcomes,” or COs, that tell us what you need to learn by the end of the summer. Here’s what those COs are. By the end of the summer, you need to be able to do the following.

  1. Students will summarize and respond to information from assigned sources clearly distinguishing between other voices and their own.

  2. Students will write essays organized around a central focus using detailed, developed paragraphs to communicate their understanding.

  3. Student writing will avoid grammar and usage errors that obscure meaning, demonstrate basic MLA format, and attribute their sources.

Throughout the summer, we’ll talk about what each of these things mean, and how to show them in your writing. I will evaluate your writing according to these standards at the end of the summer in your Final Portfolio. You must pass the Final Portfolio in order to pass English 360.

Part II - Your Letter Grade

From my point of view, my biggest job is to help you pass English 360. Beyond that, I feel very comfortable saying that your letter grade in my class should be determined by how hard you work. If you come to class, turn in your work on time, participate in discussions, and focus on your work throughout the summer, then to my mind there’s no reason you shouldn’t get an A—as long as you pass the Portfolio. So, in our class your letter grade will be determined by a “Grading Contract.” The requirements for each grade in English 360 are listed in the boxes below. Instead of weighted categories, each grade has a list of requirements. In order to earn a given grade, you must meet every requirement for that grade—but don’t worry, the requirements are simple.

To earn an A, you must do ALL of the following:

To earn a B, you must do ALL of the following:

To earn an C, you must do ALL of the following:

If you do any of the following, you will earn an NP (No Pass):

What This Means for You

At the end of the summer, there will be two questions that will determine your grade. First, we’ll ask whether you’ve done the work of the class. If you meet all of the above requirements for a C or better—that is, if you’re eligible to pass the class—then you’ll turn in your Final Portfolio. If your Final Portfolio meets the Outcomes of the course, you’ll pass the class with the grade you’ve earned.

If, at the end of the summer, you are in the “NP” category in any area, you will not pass the class and will not be eligible to submit the Final Portfolio. Even if you are in the “A” category above, though, if your Final Portfolio does not pass, you are not ready for English 251, and therefore will not pass English 360.

What “NP” Means

In English 360, there are no “D” or “F” grades. Either you earn a passing grade, or you earn an “NP,” meaning “No Pass.” An “NP” means that you need to take English 360 again before moving to English 251. It does not affect your GPA, and that says something important about 360: some people need to take it more than once, and that’s okay.

Course Expectations

Attendance and Participation Points

Like I said, this is going to be a really intense summer, and part of what that means is that we all need to be on board, working with and supporting each other throughout the summer. Because of this, I think it’s especially important that we understand what our job as students is.

In English 360, we’re going to learn a lot from each other. We’ll be doing a lot of workshopping, discussion, collaboration, and problem-solving together. Often, your knowledge and experience will help your classmates figure something out, and much of what you learn will come from the ideas of your classmates. We can’t just think in terms of “attendance” for a class like this one; instead, we need to expect that we’re going to be active participants in class throughout the summer. Here’s how I’ll deal with that.

As you’ll see when we look at the schedule, we’re going to be breaking each day up into four major periods. Each of those periods each day will be one Participation Point. If you’re in class for that time, and doing what you’re supposed to throughout the period, you get a Participation Point. If you’re not, you don’t.

How to Lose Participation Points

  • Not be there. If you’re not in class for a period, you aren’t participating—and so you’ve missed your participation point for that period. That’s it—no excuses, no doctors’ notes, no personal excuses from the President. If you’re not here, you’re not participating.

    For the counting-impaired, I’ll make this point as directly as I can: if you miss a whole day of class, that means you’ve lost four participation points. If you miss two days, that’s eight—which is as many as you can miss and still pass the class. So it’s really, really important that you come to class.

  • Be late, leave early, or disappear. I’m not great at being on time for things in general, and a 7:00 class is early for everybody. I know it’s difficult for everybody to be here on time. But if you’re in this class, then you’re making a deal with me, the college, and all your classmates to be in a certain place for a certain time. You, me, and everybody else in this class are agreeing to be here on time, ready to work. Everybody’s late from time to time—I probably will be—but we can’t allow it to become a pattern. For that reason, the following applies.

    • If you miss more than 20 minutes of a period—coming late, leaving early, or disappearing in the middle—you lose a Participation Point.
    • If you miss less than 20 minutes of a period—coming late, leaving early, or disappearing in the middle—you will be marked tardy. You have three “free” tardies throughout the course of the summer. After that, every other tardy will cost you a Participation Point.

  • Don’t participate. (Duh.) If you’re not participating in whatever we’re doing in class, you’ll lose a Participation Point. We’ll do a lot of writing, discussion, workshop, and activities in class. It’s your job to be a part of what we’re doing in class. That means:

    • Bring whatever we need for the period. If we’re having a workshop, and you don’t have a copy of your paper, or if we’re discussing a reading, and you don’t have it with you, then you won’t be able to participate.

    • Do what we’re doing. Take notes when I’m lecturing, write when we’re writing, discuss when we’re discussing. Whatever we’re doing in class, you should be doing it.

    • Leave your phones and gadgets off and away. You’ll soon learn I’m a big giant technology-loving geek, but phones, tablets, iPods, and the like only distract us in this class. If you’re expecting an emergency call, let me know. Otherwise, gadgets off.

    • Leave the computers away (unless I tell you). We’ll work a lot with the computers in class, but we’ll do it as a class. Your computer shouldn’t be up unless I’ve asked everyone to bring them up.

    There are a lot of ways that I’ll check on this. I might keep track of whether everyone participates in discussion, or ask you to turn in your notes for a period. If I notice your phone out, I’ll make a note of it. (I do notice.) I’ll be checking on your participation every period, in one way or another, but I won’t always tell you in advance (or even after) how I’m doing it. You need to make sure that you’re always on task, because what we’re doing at any moment might be what I’m using to check. That said, if we’re doing something on Blackboard during a period, you can be darn sure that I’ll use it for checking participation.

What happens if you lose a PP

When you miss class, you miss the stuff that’s going on in class. That part is pretty obvious. But the fact that you weren’t there doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for what we did and learned. (You can’t rear-end somebody and say, “Sorry, I missed the day about braking in Driver’s Ed,” right?)

So: if an assignment is due on a given day, it’s due on that day, whether you’re there or not. You can always turn in an assignment early, and if you know you’re going to be absent, you can email me your work to avoid late assignments. Note: assignments are due at the beginning of class.

You’re also responsible for catching yourself up on what you missed. You don’t email me and say “Did I miss anything,” because you know you did. It’s your job to figure out what it was. It’s best to work out a deal with your classmates to share your notes in these kinds of situations.

Assignments and Responsibility

This class is about reading and writing, so you should expect to do a lot of reading and writing. We will read, and we will write. We’ll also do a lot of stuff to make reading and writing easier, less stressful, and more fun.

Because our class is contract based, I will not grade your individual writing assignments. For each assignment, you’ll just get credit for completing it on time. But, because sometimes stuff comes up, you’re also allowed some exceptions. Consult the table above to see how many of each you can have in order to earn a given grade.

Assignments are due at the beginning of class (so, 7:00 AM). If you haven’t turned in an assignment when class starts, it’s late. You have a week to turn in a Late Assignment, so if an assignment is due on Monday, you can turn it in any time up to the beginning of class the following Monday and earn credit as a late assignment. You can have two late assignments and still earn an A. Note: this does not apply to Final Portfolio. That must be turned in on time.

If you haven’t turned in an assignment by a week after the due date, I will not accept it, and that assignment will be considered missed.

Assignment Types

Here are some kinds of assignments you can expect. You’ll get more information on each of these as we start work on them.

  • Writing Projects. Over the course of the summer, we’ll be working on several formal writing assignments. We’ll be working our way up to a 3-4 page paper for the Final Portfolio. Our Writing Projects are the core of our class, and most of our in-class work will be supporting those Writing Projects in one way or another.

  • Journaling. Everything is more difficult when it’s unfamiliar. It’s not just that practice makes perfect, but that practice makes familiar. Every day, we’ll do some writing in a personal journal. While I won’t collect or read those journals, I will check them periodically to ensure that you’re writing in them.

  • Workshops. Our workshops will have in-class and out-of-class components. In the classroom, we’ll read, respond to, and discuss each others’ writing. Outside of class, we’ll evaluate and make decisions about our readers’ feedback, and use that feedback to help us revise our writing.

    Workshops are one of the few activities that are counted separately in our Contract, because they’re one of the ways in which we’re most dependent on one another. We’ll talk more about what that means later on in the semester, but for now, I’ll note that if you miss an in-class workshop, you should plan to make it up.

  • Paragraph Spotlights (¶S). As we’ll soon discuss, one of the big assumptions about writing that we’ll be exploring is the idea that every piece of writing is just a bunch of smaller pieces stuck together, and that one of the best ways of developing something we’re working on is by looking at its pieces. The Paragraph Spotlight is one way we’ll do this. With each Writing Project, we’ll choose a particular paragraph that will be a part of that Writing Project to look at more closely, to revise and improve together, and to help us understand more about how paragraphs work.

  • Paragraph Spotlight Presentations. As we work on and develop those Paragraph Spotlights, I’ll also invite you to share your paragraph with the class. If you’re having difficulty with something, for example, you might share your paragraph with the class, explain your problem, and we might work through it together. On the other hand, if you’re really proud of how something has turned out, you might share it with the class and talk about why you made the choices that you did.2

  • Writing Center Visits. The Writing Center is an amazing resource for any writer, no matter how experienced or talented. What the Writing Center offers is the opportunity to sit down with an experienced reader and talk about how your paper works. Writing Center tutors can help you at any stage of the writing process, whether you’re looking to brainstorm, or to polish up your final draft.

    For English 360, research has consistently shown that students who go to the Writing Center are significantly more to pass than students who do not. Students who make use of the Writing Center also tend to get higher grades than students who do not. If you want to succeed in English 360, the Writing Center is one of the best things you can do.

    With that in mind, I’ll ask you to visit the Writing Center twice this summer.

    The Writing Center is located in Lodgepole 209, and has services available in Hanford and Tulare as well. For more info, visit http://cos.edu/library/writingcenter

Comments Policy

A big part of the goal of English 360 is to help you learn to write and revise on your own. Both for that reason, and because of the pace of our class, I won’t comment on every draft of your Writing Projects. Rather, I’ll comment on the Polished Draft3 of each Writing Project you turn in.

Notes and Policies

Notes About Writing

The assumption of this class—and of all your writing classes at CoS—is that we’re working toward being prepared for college writing, and toward the expectations your teachers will have of you in the future. Here are some habits that will help prepare you for the expectations of those classes. some things to bear in mind this semester.

  • Keep everything. Make sure to keep every assignment, and every draft, until the end of the semester. This is for your benefit: if, at the end of the semester, I think you missed a particular assignment, you want to be able to prove me wrong, if I am. It’s also useful for your Final Portfolio to have access to previous drafts of your Writing Projects, so make sure to save each draft as a new document, rather than saving over the previous one.

  • Use MLA format. We’ll be learning about MLA style later this semester, but for now, it’s a good policy in all of your classes to follow MLA’s guidelines for formatting your papers. In short, what that means is that all the writing you do in this class should follow these basic guidelines:

    • 12-point Times New Roman font
    • double-spaced throughout, with no extra lines between paragraphs
    • one-inch margins on all sides
    • your name, the date, the class, and my name in the top-left corner.

    Note: we’ll be using the 8th Edition rules for MLA Style (commonly called MLA 8). This is new this year, and may be different from what you’ve learned before. Don’t panic! We’ll learn together.

  • Length matters. A lot of people think, “Well, if I can say it in a paragraph, why should I write two pages?” For the most part, I think that’s exactly right. Good writing doesn’t include a lot of “filler.” But part of what this class is about is learning to write about ideas that are complex enough that you can’t explain them in a paragraph. If you can say it in a paragraph, then probably that idea is too simple to write about in a paper that’s meant to be three pages. Length requirements are a challenge. But what I’m challenging you to do, with a length requirement, is not to “fill up” three pages. I’m challenging you to explore an idea in enough depth that you can’t do it in less than three pages.

    Practically, though, that means that if I say “three pages” for a writing assignment, I mean three pages completely filled with writing, probably spilling onto a fourth. If you want to be sure that you’re meeting the length requirement, make sure that you’ve got a couple of lines on the next page. 2¾ is not the same as three.

  • Use Microsoft Word-compatible software. This doesn’t mean Microsoft Word necessarily, but if you email an assignment to a teacher, they need to be able to open it. Apple’s Pages can save and open Word .doc files, as can many other programs. Google Docs can too. Microsoft Works cannot. If you have Microsoft Works, I strongly recommend downloading the free, open-source LibreOffice suite at http://www.libreoffice.org.

Canvas

This semester, we’ll be using Canvas as our course management system. Mostly, what this will mean is that we’ll use it to turn in our assignments, and sometimes to access readings or links that don’t fit on the Course Website.

Canvas is a new system for College of the Sequoias, and if you’re used to Blackboard, it will take some getting used to. I feel confident that we’ll run into some problems with Canvas this semester. I’m sure that I’ll cause some myself, and I’m sure that Canvas will offer up a few of its own. We’ll figure it all out together.

Canvas can be accessed through our single sign-on system at mygiant.cos.edu.

If you do have a problem with Canvas, please email me about it immediately, especially if that problem affects your ability to turn in an assignment. If you can’t turn something in on Canvas, please attach the assignment to your email, so that I’ll be able to give you credit for getting it in on time.

Note: while Canvas is a temperamental butthead from time to time, it will still serve as the official gradebook for our class. If an assignment is due on Canvas, it needs to be turned in on Canvas. If you email it to me because you’re having Canvas problems, that’s great—but you still need to get it turned in on Canvas ASAP.

Email Policy

Your College of the Sequoias Email Address (@giant.cos.edu) will be the official means of communication for this course. Because Canvas and Banner both use your CoS email for communication, I will not send e-mail to non-CoS accounts, nor will I respond to email sent to me from non-CoS accounts. I will respond to email promptly during my office hours, and when I can outside of them.

For information on how to set up your free CoS email account, see CoS’s student email support site. Support is available from the Student Help Desk at 559.730.3780 or student.helpdesk@cos.edu.

Drop Policy

As mentioned above, attendance is a crucial part of any college class, and especially a writing class. There are two drop deadlines in the semester—one early on, and one about halfway through. If, by either drop date, I have determined that you are no longer attending my class, I will have you dropped from the class.

Plagiarism Policies

Cheating is the practice of fraudulent and deceptive acts for the purpose of improving a grade or obtaining course credit. While such acts typically occur in relation to exams, it is the intent of the definition that cheating not be limited to examination situations only but that it include all actions by a student which are intended to gain an unearned academic advantage by fraudulent and deceptive means. Plagiarism is defined as a specific form of cheating that consists of the misuse of others’ published or unpublished language, ideas, or other original material by misrepresenting the material (i.e. another’s intellectual property) through not acknowledging it correctly—that is, passing it off as if it were one’s own work. Neither cheating nor plagiarism will be tolerated in this course.

The issue of cheating/plagiarism goes deeper than “copying” to an issue of academic dishonesty. In your English class, you will be encouraged to discuss your work at great length with others, you will consult models of reading and writing and other student work to help you, you may confer with a tutor or writing center technician, and you will do lots of different activities to guide your learning. But it is NEVER permissible “to give or receive answers” or ideas or even words “in a way that bypasses the need to think on your own” about your reading or writing (Dr. Tim Hankins, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology). Help from any source must be acknowledged, and there are accepted ways to do this. If in doubt, ask your instructor. Violation of the letter or intent of this policy will result in serious harm to your learning, to your grade, to your standing in class, and perhaps to your standing at the college.

Depending upon the severity of the act, cheating or plagiarism will lead to disciplinary and academic sanctions ranging from loss of credit in the class, to placement of a letter in the student’s permanent file, or even to expulsion from the college as defined in the Code of Student Conduct.

Claimed ignorance of plagiarism policies and regulations is no excuse for their breach.

Disability Policy

College of the Sequoias is a campus committed to making education accessible to everyone. One of the things that means is that I will do everything in my power to make sure that the materials we use in class will be accessible to those with disabilities.

If you think you have a disability that affects your learning in any class, please contact the Access and Ability Center (AAC) in room 10 of the Sequoia Building (559.730.3805 or 559.302.9976 Video), and please let me know within the first two weeks of class. The DRC may be able to give you access to assets which will help you succeed in your classes.

You are, of course, not required to disclose any disability to me, or to the school. Doing so allows us to arrange for accommodations such that you can meet the requirements of the class. If you elect not to tell us about the situation, then we won’t be able to arrange accommodations, and you will be expected to meet the requirements of the class regardless. Which is to say, if you don’t tell us about it, we can’t work with you about it.

Everything in this Syllabus (and, let’s face it, in life) is subject to change.

  1. I realize that I’m the madman behind the wheel in this metaphor, but you’re the one who’s about to get on board. >:) ↩

  2. Because I know not everybody’s going to enjoy that sort of thing, you’ll notice that this is not a requirement to pass the class. If you’re wanting a higher grade, though, you’ll want to participate in this part of the class. ↩

  3. We’ll talk more about this once we get going, but instead of talking about “rough” and “final drafts,” we’ll use different language to talk about the steps of our writing process. What we’ll call the Polished Draft will be the last version of each Writing Project you turn in—cleaned up and ready for publication. ↩