Your grade will be based upon the following:
All work will be graded on or converted to a 0-100 scale, where 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, and 0-59 = F. The highest three numbers in a range are equivalent to a plus grade (e.g. 87-89 = B+); the lowest three are equivalent to a minus (e.g. 90-92 = A-).
Attendance is mandatory. I will evaluate attendance on a case by case basis, but in general you should expect that more than four absences for any reason, including illness and university-sponsored activities, will lower your final grade.
Late work: your term paper grade will be lowered by 4 points (e.g. 93 to 89) for every calendar day that any part of it (e.g. topic, prospectus, first draft, final draft) is late, up to a maximum of 20 points (e.g. 95 to 75). The same penalties (4 points/day) will apply to a late annotated bibliography. Turning in an article summary late will result in a 2-point deduction from your group-led class grade for each day that it is late. Failing to show up for your group-led class will result in an F for the group-led class grade. I will in effect not accept late journal entries--journals turned in late will count towards the next due date (if you have not used up your free weeks) or will be counted as missing.
I rarely grant extensions on assignments, but you're welcome to ask. Because a low grade--say, an F at 50 points--is much less destructive to a grade than a 0 is, it is nearly always worthwhile to make up late work when possible.
Participation in discussion is important in this class. Although there will be no separate grade rubric for participation, active and thoughtful participation in class will raise a borderline grade, while passive or disruptive participation will lower one. (A borderline grade is defined as a grade within .9 of a point of the cutoff between two grades. For example, 90 is the cutoff between B+ and A-; 89.1 - 90.9 is the borderline range between the two grades.)
Plagiarism will affect your grade in one of two ways. If you turn in a paper or other work which is plagiarized in minor or unintentional ways (e.g. you use the language of a source you are writing about without quotes, but in only a brief passage and clearly without any intention to represent someone else's work as your own), the paper will receive a 0, and we will discuss plagiarism until it is clear that you understand what it is and how to avoid it. You may be able to rewrite the paper for a higher grade if there is enough time left in the term. However, if you turn in a paper which, in my judgment, plagiarizes blatantly, either at length or with apparent intent to deceive, you will receive an F in the course, regardless of any other grades you have received, and I will file an Academic Dishonesty Report with the Associate Provost.
In groups of 3-4, you will be responsible for leading class one day of the term. How you conduct the seminar is up to you, but at the very least you must do the following:
By 8 AM the day BEFORE your presentation, your group must turn in printed summaries of the articles or chapters you are summarizing. Each summary should be a single paragraph of no longer than one page. (If for some reason what you do in class requires a longer summary than a single paragraph, the printed summary may differ from the oral summary.) If each student summarizes one article, make it clear whose summary is which. At the end of the presentation, you should turn in to me any notes that you used in the presentation/discussion and your marked-up photocopies of the articles or chapters summarized.
In my grading, I will weigh the overall quality of the class experience about twice as heavily as I weigh your individual written summaries. In most cases, the class experience section of the grade will be the same for each member of the group, but I reserve the right to give different grades to members of the same group if it appears to me that giving the same grade to all would be unjust.
The reading journal is a place to respond to the reading at your own pace and in your own way. Grammar, style, and structure do not count at all in my assessment of your journal; the only thing that matters is whether or not you got somewhere with the text, “somewhere” being defined loosely. Don’t bother with introductions, corrections of grammar or spelling, or conclusions; don’t worry too much about abrupt shifts in topic if that’s the way your thinking leads you. Do engage as substantively as possible with the texts, and try go as far as you can with your ideas. Wind up your brain and see what it wants to spill out. Evaluative comments are perfectly acceptable, but will usually not count as substantive in themselves; try to analyze and interpret rather than merely passing judgment.
Format. It is preferable that journal entries be written on a computer (not least so that you can use this material in your paper if you come up with something useful). Date your entries and single space them, leaving a wide margin on the right side so I have room to respond. Keep your entries together and turn them in in something which isn't too bulky--a 9" x 11" envelope, for example.
Content. You must respond to the texts a certain number of times (see below), but how you respond is up to you, so long as you comment substantively. Here are a few of the possibilities:
There are no doubt many other ways to respond to the texts substantively. Don't paralyze yourself trying to figure out which of the above you're doing--just engage specifically with the text (addressing specific scenes, events, passages, or formal elements) and make a serious attempt to figure out something in writing. As noted above, however, entries should be primarily analytical, however, not mere value judgments.
The key to reading journal entries is that they must be substantive, but they don’t necessarily have to be successful. You do not have to write anything like a finished paper in each journal entry (fortunately for both of us!), or even come up with a workable reading of every passage you write about. Entries that test out an interesting idea about a text only to conclude that the idea doesn’t work can be extremely useful. You should use these journals as a way of solidifying and extending your thinking about the texts as you read them and/or after we have discussed them, NOT as a way of expressing carefully polished, fully worked out ideas. If one of your ideas really takes off, great. If not, that's OK too.
However, entries which skim over the surface of a text without engaging with it in a thoughtful way are not acceptable. It is perfectly all right (indeed it is very useful) to say something like, “this passage completely baffled me” or “I really hated this section of the text,” IF you go on to discuss specifically what it is that you disliked or couldn’t understand, and use that as a springboard for speculating thoughtfully about why the text might have been written the way it is. It is not acceptable to record such responses (or their opposites, “I understand this perfectly” or “I really liked this”) and leave it at that. Entries which are so vague or so insubstantial or so ungrounded in textual specifics that they could have written by someone who had not read the text will not count towards fulfillment of the reading journal requirements (although you're welcome to write anything you like as additional entries).
How the journal will be graded. To give you as much flexibility and freedom as possible, I will grade your journal on a contract system.
To get a B or higher, you must do the following in your journal over the course of the term:
To get an A, you must fulfill the minimum requirements listed above and your journal entries, taken as a whole, must maintain a high standard of originality, intellectual ambition, interpretive subtlety, sophistication, willingness to engage with the texts, keenness of perception, and so on--in general, the overall quality of thought in your journal must be high. Borderline grades (B+, A-) are possible.
If you do not meet the minimum requirements listed above, I will make deductions from your grade. Deductions will be determined on a case by case basis, but in general you should expect me to deduct 10 points for every missing entry on an author or critic and 10 points for every entry fewer than ten. I might take smaller deductions for entries which are only minimally substantive. If it appears that you have not read or not completed one of the two novels, you will receive a failing grade on the reading journal regardless of the quality of your entries on the other novel.
I will not necessarily give you a higher grade for writing more than the minimum number of entries, but I will base my evaluation on the best of the entries you write, so long as they meet the criteria above. For example, if you write only four entries on Lessing but you write ten on Pynchon, I will base my assessment on the best four Pynchon entries but I will take into account all of the Lessing entries.
Uusally, my comments on individual entries will be reactions, not evaluations. My intention is to try to enter into a conversation with you as a fellow student of the texts, not as a professor “correcting” your ideas. Accordingly, I will comment whenever and wherever something you say interests me or provokes me to respond, whether that’s five times for one entry or once in a whole journal. My comments will usually have little or nothing to do with my evaluation of your journal, which I will carry out on a separate grading form.
I will hand out examples of annotations when we get closer to the due date for this assignment.
The topic of your term paper is to be of your own devising. The paper must meet the following criteria, however:
The work for this paper is to be spread out over the course of the term, as follows:
The work for this paper is to be spread out over the course of the term, as follows: