Assignments Week Four

I have activated and updated the links to the fourth week's assignments.

Because of the snow and the fact I am working from home and without my copy of the anthology, the page numbers for the reading may or may not reflect those for the sixth edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, the edition we are using this semester.  I think they do, but I'm working up your assignments from sections which used both the fifth and sixth editions.  If you find the page numbers do not correspond to those of Emerson's essay, "Self-Reliance," in your text, just use the etext link or find the right numbers by looking in the table of contents.  I also want you to note that Emerson can be difficult for students (and for professional readers like me).  Because of this difficulty, I encourage you to listen to the mp3 of the essay as you read and to read the wikipedia links to get background before tackling the essay.

Finally, there are two new activities this week in the assignments--commenting on the blog posts of your committee and writing a learning reflection.  Neither is difficult, and with these two final activities, you will have been introduced to all the kinds of weekly writing you'll do weekly this semester.

First, you will begin the process of reading and discussing the blog posts made by your committee members *last* week.  You'll be reading your committee's blog posts and commenting on and discussing them most weeks for the rest of the semester.  This is one means I use for you to get to know your committee members, and--more important--for you to learn how to write about literature and the questions it raises for a real audience.  You will also be learning from the different perspective each member of your committee brings to the reading.

By "real audience," I mean an audience which isn't just a professor and who is seeking to learn and be entertained as they learn.  Professors, by definition, usually know more than their students, at least, they do in their specialty fields. [You might be surprised how often this isn't true for areas outside of a professor's specialty.] Real audiences are usually seeking to better understand the reading (or life or world) they share in common with the authors they read.  For many students, being an author, one who is writing for a real audience and seeking to better understand an idea or literature through the acts of writing and discussions is a new experience.  While I could tell you everything I know about what you are reading, most of you would be bored by such lecture.  I think it is much, much more important for you learn how to discuss, write, and read about literature and ideas on your own.  In fact, learning how to discuss and learn from discussing and writing about literature is one of the major learning outcomes for the course.

The approach of "professor says/you learn and regurgitate" is why many of my students hate literature and "English," and it is why most people don't read lit on their own or enjoy thinking about the ideas and questions it raises.  They think that there is a right way to read it and this is how the professor reads it.  While there are better ways and ways which correspond better to what the author intended, professors are only better trained in getting at them.  You are learning these methods and discovering how you learn and understand.  In your blog posts and the discussion of them each week, you'll learn these ways of approaching lit, sort of as a book club would.

Secondly, you'll be doing your first learning reflection post this week.  If you don't know what a learning reflection is and the role it plays in learning, I've linked to a very short explanation in the assignments.  In terms of your grade, 50% is tied to class participation, that is, doing all the assignments each week, doing a quality job on them, and getting them done on time and in full.  However, the other 50% comes from a class portfolio you'll put together.  This portfolio will be made up from selections from the work you do each week in the weekly assignments, but it will also include a cover essay or letter.  In this letter, you'll explain to me what you have learned in the course and where and how you learned it.  You'll also discussion your class performance, how it might have been improved, and argue for the grade you feel you have earned with your work.  These learning reflections allow you time to figure out and articulate for yourself what you are learning as you do the work each week.   Doing a good job on the learning reflections will help your class participation grade; more important, taking the time to write well developed learning reflections will make the job of writing your final portfolio's cover essay much, much easier, as you will have done much of the work in the weekly reflections.

As always, write with questions.

Steve