4/6: Restarting and Continuing

Challenging times mean we must rise just to survive. Today, we are seeing our fellow New Yorkers take on the problem of the coronavirus, changing our lives to save lives. We are seeing City Tech and CUNY reimagine courses and curricula to facilitate safety without sacrificing learning.

In the same spirit, we are going to further change this course.

This week, we are rounding off what we have been doing for the first half of the semester. Starting when you turn your papers in on Wednesday, we are going to start on something quite different from what I had originally planned for this course and laid out in the syllabus.

You will still be working to improve your writing, but what you are doing will be different in reflection of your changed lives and our changed academic situation. Here is low the course will now be structured:

1. One thing that won’t change from what we are doing this week is that I will post something for every class on the old schedule and will expect you to respond to it. I will generally post five or six days in advance, expecting the conversation in the comments to go on until the end of the day shown in the title (respond to this post, for example, through March 30). Your reading any linked article and participation in the comments will count as the class participation just as if we were still in the classroom. I will post other things, too, and ask you to respond to them—but they will be optional, for improving your grades but not necessary. The dated posts require comments from each of you. You should spend at least an hour and fifteen minutes on all of this combined for each class period.
2. You will begin keeping a journal, with entries made three or four times a week. These could include copy-and-paste entries of text conversations with others in the class, links to articles you have read (and quotes from those articles) along with your reactions, transcriptions of conversations you have had at home, comments on media you have observed, and anything else related to your lives in this time of coronavirus. And you should include other media, including photographs, videos, sound recordings, and whatever else you might care to add (if you are an artist, include drawings). You will be telling your personal story of this strange, unnerving and unpredictable time. We know where it is beginning, but we have no idea where it will end up. Your writing will be personal, unedited and episodic. There will be nothing polished about it. Just sit down and do it for half an hour or more three times a week or more, telling what has been happening to you and those around you and what you have been thinking.
3. From your journal, in May, you will craft a paper telling about the first six weeks or so of the coronavirus crisis from a personal point of view. Here, you will provide a framework, a cradle, so to speak, for the bulk of your prose. That is, you will craft a beginning that will encourage readers to continue and an ending that will make them feel their time has been well-spent. This paper will include a multimedia aspect, anything from a PowerPoint to a photo album to a video to a podcast. You will need to get another student in the class to copyedit the paper and a third to proofread it, so keep connected with your classmates!
4. Your portfolio will consist of all drafts of everything you have written for this course, starting back at the end of January. You will provide an introduction to the whole, a table of contents, and an introduction to each of the four main projects (including the two you have already completed). Make this as professional as you can, for it is what will be turned in to the English department in place of a final exam.

From this outline, you should be able to take charge of your work for the remainder of the semester, scheduling your time and your work to best effect and in coordination with your other classes, your families and your friends. And even with your classmates, whom you should continue to communicate with, and not simply through OpenLab.

I wish you all best of luck!

Here is the reading for March 30. Please read and respond by the end of that day.