ENG 1101 Week 11 agenda

I’ve opted to give us a late start to the week after all the election on Tuesday and all of the feelings crackling through the air leading up to it and following it. If you want to share any thoughts about it, or if you’ve written a freewrite about the election, last week, etc. and you want to share it, please do–you can reply to this post and leave a comment with your thoughts, reactions, memes, etc.

Last week, I posted your midsemester grades in the ENG 1101 gradebook. I wanted to explain midsemester grades if you weren’t already told about them in general, and explain how I use them in this course. The college wants students to have a clear sense of how they’re doing at the midpoint of the semester, so all students should get a grade in each course, either P (passing), BL (borderline), or U (unsatisfactory).

In this course,

• P means that if you keep up your work the way you have been already, you’ll pass the course.
• BL means that you have done some of the work to pass, but there is some significant portion of the work that you haven’t completed–for example, if you submitted good work for Project #1 but have not posted or commented much on our course site. The final portfolio of all of the projects and your final reflection account for 60% of your grade, and participation and coursework (including all of the discussions and posts on our site) account for the other 40%. You can see how if you haven’t done the work to get credit for much of 40% of your grade, it leaves you at that borderline between passing and not passing.
• U means that you haven’t submitted Project #1 and you don’t have much or any work on our course site. For all the grade details explained above for BL, if you don’t submit more work, you won’t be able to get enough points in that 60% for portfolio or 40% for participation and coursework.
• You can see the information about the course grade in our syllabus.

What I want to emphasize here is that no matter what grade you got for your midsemester grade, it’s not too late to catch up! I am more than happy to work with anyone who needs help figuring out a path to success in this course. If you know that this isn’t the right semester for you to complete this course, let’s talk about that, too.

Class Info

• Date: 11/4-11/10
• Meeting Info: In addition to the asynchronous portion of our class, we have the following synchronous opportunities, using the Zoom link distributed earlier this semester (ask if you need me to resend!):
  • Optional writing lab session: Thursday, 11/5, 10:20am-11:20am.
  • Office Hours: Monday 11/9 10:20-11:20 and Tuesday 11/10 1:30-2:30.

To-Do Before Class

We’re continuing to do work for Project #2, which is a research project about spaces for reflection. I hope that my explanation of the term I’ve been using, “spaces for reflection” is clearer from the Week 10 agenda. Please ask if you want more explanation. The Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9, and Week 10 agendas can help you catch up. The extended due date for Project #2 is Wednesday, 11/18, so that we can include work on library research and time to work on introductions and conclusions. If you need more help or more time, please be in touch with me in office hours or via email.

Topic

Project #2: reflective annotated bibliography on spaces for reflection

Objectives

• To explore further the questions about reflection and the space around us
• To continue discussing how we research a topic
• To find sources for our research, including using library resources
• To draft bibliographic entries and annotations

To-Do This Week

Actions

• Check your midsemester grade for ENG 1101. This is also one way to check your Project #1 grade (the other is in the private comment I shared on your Project #1 post).
• Last week I added a poll to the sidebar on our course site, asking how you were feeling (while awaiting the results of the election). You can share your opinions via the poll. If you like answering polls, I can add more.
• Continue to discover important sources of information for architecture students to gain familiarity with. This can range across different genres, including scholarly journals, magazines, blogs, video channels, Twitter accounts, and much, much more.
• Consider what are spaces or places for reflection
• Further develop and refine a question or group of questions about spaces for reflection
• Use the library databases and the internet to find sources that help you develop those questions and explore answers
• If you’ve lost track of what you need to submit for asynchronous coursework, please reach out to me–I can help. We can have a 1-on-1 Zoom meeting to get you on track.
• Please consider coming to office hours or writing with me in our writing lab if you want to check in with me about anything. We use the same Zoom link for all of these opportunities.

Reading

• Read the Project #2 assignment instructions. Re-read them a few times. You can take notes so you can ask questions, and to help you process what you have to do.
• Read the new post, “Introduction to Library Research” and review the resources it links out to, including the introductory video.
• Read the sources you’re finding as you research
• You’re part of a community of learners. Read what your classmates and I have written in Project #2 posts and in our most recent discussions.

Writing

• Keep freewriting! 10 minutes. 10 minutes again. Write about what’s on your mind, or focus on the topic of spaces for reflection, or urban diary writing. Or something in your coursework, in the news, in your life, in your alternate reality. Or about the election. Or not about the election. Write.
• Continue the work we started previously to draft annotated bibliography entries. If you have done three, find a fourth or more to do. If you haven’t done any, now is a good time to start: Write a post in which you draft a bibliographic entry and annotation for a source according to the instructions in the Project #2 assignment instructions. Use the category ENG 1101 Project #2 Posts and add relevant tags–these should be the keywords or tags I asked you to include in your annotated bibliography. Try to write individual posts for each of your sources (yes, one post per source so you don’t have to write them all at once). You’ll need 4 sources and annotations total for Project #2, but you might try drafting more than 4 to be able to choose your 4 best.
• To help you learn about the library’s resources, I’ve shared with you information from one of City Tech’s librarians. For this week’s discussion, share your experiences using the resources Prof. Monica Berger shared with us, following the prompt in that information plus discussion post.
• Continue to add as many sources (for example, the name of the magazine or a useful Twitter handle, not the individual article or tweet thread) to our shared list in this discussion from last week.
• You can keep sharing your ideas about what aspects of spaces for reflection you’re interested in by adding more to our continuing discussion
• Comment on at least one classmate’s comment, asking follow-up questions or making observations about what they found, in one of our discussions.