Class Policies:

Attendance and Class Participation:   (20% of overall grade)

No more than 3 unexcused absences of any kind through the semester.  After 3, your grade will be dropped and entire letter grade, and so on.  If you know that you are going to be absent ahead of time, please contact me and let me know so we can make alternative arrangements for you to make up work and the like.  Also, if you have an official function to go to (court, doctor, family emergency, let me know and get some sort of documentation).  Please be here ON TIME ALL THE TIME.  If I have to be here, so do you, and besides this is your class and your chance to learn—the more responsibility you take upon yourself to be present, the better your grade is going to be, the more you are going to learn, and the more you are going to have fun.  And, of course, please be sober…

It is essential that you contribute to this class—I do not want it to be all me lecturing all of the time.  There will be certain class periods that I will talk a lot, but most of the time I would much rather have you talking and interacting and engaging one another.  I want this class to resemble or be a community of respect, understanding, and inquiry.  You are in college for a reason.

Students with Disabilities:

In accordance with University Policy, if you have a documented disability and require accommodations to obtain equal access to this course, please contact me at the beginning of the semester or when given an assignment for which the accommodation is required.  Students with disabilities must verify their eligibility through the Office of Student Disability Services (SDS) in the Michael Schwartz Student Services Center (672-3391).

Grades:

Incomplete grades will not be given in this class.  Only in extreme circumstances will they even be considered.  Please see me if you have any questions regarding this policy.

Plagiarism:

It will not be tolerated and you will fail this class if you are caught.  Please do not plagiarize.  More than likely I have already read it before in another form, and I will recognize what is your writing and what is not.  There are wonderful programs on the Internet that allow me to basically see if you plagiarized something off the Internet.  If you have any questions, please see me.

We will be working on two shorter papers (4-6 pages long) and one longer, sustained piece of writing that will resemble and mimic the work that will be commonly asked of you in college by your other professors.  The longer  “writing project”  will be roughly 8-10 pages in length.  The first two writing assignments will be primers for the longer work to be done the second half of the semester.  The first two will prepare you, inform you of what is expected in the class, and will get you on your way to writing like university students.  The third will require substantial work in the library and on the internet researching our topic matter.  The point of the third paper is not to just regurgitate the information that you find and read, but to think of a way to integrate those other people’s words and ideas into your paper, and then to move beyond them, keeping them in the rearview mirror.  These other works will provide a foundation for you to try and come up with something that is original, interesting, well argued and supported by what others have to say on the topic.  But ideally, and for my class, you will rely on your own position and your own argument that you will defend with some conviction.  Remember, most of your future professors will expect that you can do this already and if they see that you cannot, your grades will suffer—believe me.

Please read, in your required handbook the section on papers.  I will be mostly following these guidelines in constructing assignments and rhetorical/mechanical strategies.  This is a WRITING CLASS—the thematic of the class will only be the content for the framework already provided by the language we use and the guidelines provided by the department and the university.  We will learn much about the theme, but I intend to make sure that you leave my class with at least the tools necessary to succeed during the rest of your career as a student in college.


Along with these three more major writings, I will also be asking you to write weekly and in class—these will all be connected with and will inform the three large papers we will be working on.  If you keep these points in mind and you are present daily and you work hard, you will succeed.

If you are not happy with the grade that eventually shows up in my grade book, don’t worry about it because, you have the option to revise your paper as many times as you want before the end of the semester.  This means that you can take the paper, rework it, re-think it, re-envision it, and turn it back into me for another grade (only papers that have been substantially changed may be given a new grade).  So basically, I am giving you as many lives as you want.  It will be up to you to take advantage of this option.  My only warning is that you not wait until the end of the semester to use this option because I do not want to read 500 papers at the end of the semester--I do have some life outside of school (not really).  I will talk about this in class for more specifics.


I hope that you find English 10002 fruitful and enjoyable.  I know that General Education requirements can be mundane, boring, and bland, but I will try to do my hardest to avoid all of these.  We will be working hard.  My emphasis is upon personal development within the framework of the University and our society at large.  I want you to not view this class as ‘just a writing class,’ but more of an experience, more of a chance to write what you want to write about, think about things you might not have questioned before, and to allow yourself room to explore.  The end of the semester will come quickly, I promise.  Seize this opportunity to think for yourself, because in the future, the opportunities for you to do so come with many strings attached and under many pressures and constraints.

If there is anything that you want to see changed, anything you are having trouble with, anything that is bothering you at all, please feel free to come and talk with me.  I am on your side and I am here to help.  That is what my position is all about.  Good luck and I look forward to seeing all of you succeed.

“nihile est sine rationale...”
                “nothing is without a reason...”
                                     -Leibniz