Course Policies |
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The five rules of the road 1. Seminar attendance is required--and absolutely essential. Please arrive on time. Don't skip sessions. Missing seminar sessions will adversely affect your grade. 2. Reading, writing, and full participation are equally essential. 3. All written assignments have a due date: they will not be accepted after the beginning of the session on that date. Assignments that are late, or turned in after the session starts, will be given an F and averaged into your other grades. 4. We don't ordinarily give "incompletes" (a grade of "I"). Intellectual crises and the extraordinary pressures of work aren't grounds for incompletes. The only acceptable grounds are the dramatic, documentable ones: serious injury or protracted illness with a doctor's excuse, death in the immediate family, etc. The College also enforces a strict policy on incompletes. 5. Seminar sessions will be intellectually serious--we take the subjects very seriously ourselves--but they won't be reverent. If you feel they should be, you'll be offended: we would encourage you to find another class more to your taste. People offended by irreverence are also likely to have a problem with the freedom with which we conduct discussions. We don't avoid profanity or sidestep indelicate subjects. In general, what we say in class is relevant to the subject matter, but people who want teachers to talk like textbooks won't be happy. If you prefer more self-censorship from your teachers, you owe it to your peace of mind to avoid our class. . . . & just a few words about grades . . . There will be no exams. Your grade will be based on three factors:
. . . & just a few more words about the written assignments . . . How assignments work. They will vary considerably from rough notes, outlines, and charts to short critical papers and research reports--most if not all of them digital. As you complete each course of reading and complete the work coordinated with it, we'll give you instructions for the next assignment. There will be no final research paper or final exam. The best strategy is to put all your energy into the week-by-week reading, writing, project creation, and discussion. That will be easy at first but harder as the semester goes along, because the weekly work in our classes will be in increasingly dire competition with demands from your other classes. Brace yourself for that to happen. The three keys to success in The Future of Reading are a spirit of intellectual adventure, an open mind, and attention to detail. |
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