Congratulations on making it through the first week of the Fall semester!
As a professor it is important that we find a balance between providing encouragement and productive criticism. Criticism can point out what you are doing well but more importantly it must point out the areas for improvement. While we both recognize that this is the first full online semester for you, we believe it is important that we clarify from the beginning your responsibilities for this course.
– Attending class – During class time you must be focused on our work and logged in on zoom. You should not schedule any other activities during this time unless you have no choice. For example sometimes we have obligations to be in court or attend other required activities like medical appointments, whose schedule you cannot control- yes you will be excused from class- but please limit these if you can. To work properly you need to be in a location where you can work on your computer – attending class only on a phone will cause you to fall behind with the work load.
-Assignments – These are not optional. Even if a graded deadline is a week away, when we ask to see progress work by the next class, you must show an effort and and attempt to complete this work. As of this week, while the Special Zoning District case studies were relatively complete, the individual zoning studies were not at an acceptable level. If we were to assign grades to the individual work, at this point we would give (2) C grades, (5) C- grades and the rest would be F – as no work was shown.
-Team Work- Each team must meet outside of class time. This is up to you to schedule. In addition to working on team related portions of the assignment – you will find it helpful to be online with your team, as you work on the individual portions of your assignments.
We do not expect that you will solve every assignment the first time you attempt it – but we must see productive work. Learning is much more effective when we can see your work and provide assistance. As we will repeat many time, “You learn more from your mistakes, than from the things you get right the first time.”
Each team needs to be meeting outside of class – between every class- including the Tuesday-Thursday gap. Use zoom, FaceTime, whatsup, – we do not mind which platform, but you need to meet virtually and work. We are hoping Slack will provide a platform to schedule these meetings.
This is an early polite warning – but it is a warning, and early work will have an affect on your final grade at the end of the semester. The work load for this course will increase as the semester progresses and you must get up to speed quickly.
If you have any specific questions – please feel free to reach out to us directly.
We look forward to a productive semester of learning.
Prof. Jill & King…..
