Remember that we are meeting at the library to begin class tomorrow — see you at 6:00 pm in front of the 4th floor (Namm building) entrance!
Remember that we are meeting at the library to begin class tomorrow — see you at 6:00 pm in front of the 4th floor (Namm building) entrance!
City Tech’s 35th Annual Literary Arts Festival is being held between 5:30 – 7:30 pm on Thursday, March 24 in the Voorhees Theater (186 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201). As the Festival’s OpenLab page denotes, the event will include readings from students, faculty, and writer Mary Gaitskill (best known to most of us as the author of “The Other Place”).
I will offer extra credit (a letter grade bump on your lowest response paper…a D becomes a C, a C becomes a B and so forth) to anyone who attends and writes a coherent, thoughtful response paper that addresses the following points:
Extra credit response papers should be emailed to me by 3PM on Sunday, March 27.
Lateness has become an issue this semester, so I’m updating our grading policy to address the problem. Effective March 9, anyone who arrives more than 5 minutes late to class on the day an assignment is due will incur a ten point penalty on the work they turn in. Further, if reporting back to class on time following our mid-class break proves to be an issue, we will no longer take this break. Please let me know if you have any questions about our updated policy (copied below):
Grading
Ten points (which is the loss of a letter grade) will be deducted if you are more than five minutes late to class on the day an assignment is due. No late work will be accepted. If circumstances prevent you from being in class on the day an assignment is due, please contact or speak with me before the assignment is due so that we can strategize together. Below please find a breakdown of how various components of our coursework will contribute to your final grade:
Thanks to a fantastic question coming to me via email, I wanted to post a quick overview of what goes into creating an explanatory synthesis. As our textbook illustrates on pages 102-103, creating an explanatory synthesis involves three basic steps:
Steps 1 and 2 should look familiar, as we’ve just written summaries and critiques. Therefore, step 3 is the new writing task.
Keep in mind that the goal of explanatory synthesis is to help our readers understand something by presenting facts from various sources in a reasonably objective manner. This means that there isn’t a lot of room for our opinions when writing an explanatory synthesis. Instead, we should work to connect the sources we are sharing with the reader — what does one source teach us about the other?
As you prepare response paper 3, I wanted to send along a reminder about our submission guidelines. I’m seeing a fair number of sloppy errors while I’m grading response paper 2, and I want to be sure that I help you avoid making similar such errors for the homework that is due on March 8.
The guidelines are copied below for your reference, and can also be found on page 2 of our syllabus. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you’re having trouble figuring out how to effect any of the below requirements; failure to adhere to the guidelines will result in a grade penalty from response paper 3 onward.
Submission Guidelines
All work is to be typed and printed out before class unless otherwise noted; please use 12-point type, double spacing, 1-inch margins all around, no extra spacing between paragraphs, and Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font. Please title your work; the title should be in 12-point font and centered, with no quotation marks, bolding, italics or underlining. No cover page is necessary; instead, create a heading in the upper left-hand corner of your first page: using single-spacing, please list your name, ENG1121, E115, the name of the assignment, and the due date. Use of page numbers should begin on the second page. After an initial warning is given in writing, failure to adhere to these guidelines will result in a grade penalty.
For folks who are experiencing difficulty creating a post, please check out this OpenLab resource designed to walk users through the process of writing a post.
To create a post:
7. Use the blue “Publish” tab to finalize and publish your post before 6PM on March 1
This is just a reminder that we will not be meeting on Tuesday, February 9, as classes will follow a Friday schedule.
Should you wish to access the Spring 2016 academic calendar or a class meeting grid, please visit our “Useful Links” page.
See you on the 16th!
Aha! I’m so glad that you’ve found your way to our OpenLab site. I will update this resource after each class; it will contain the most accurate, up-to-date information regarding coursework, assignments, texts that have been distributed, and section-specific announcements.
Take a look around and familiarize yourself with the page — feel free, too, to make suggestions if you see opportunities for our site to be more helpful.