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Jeremy T.
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English
A/ Math A Learning Community
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Course Introduction
English A is a workshop class in college essay writing and reading. This class will help sharpen your conceptual, analytical, and interpretive skills. You will learn processes and strategies that will help improve your ability to critically read and write English. As you become more proficient readers and writers, you will also learn rhetorical skills such as the ability to develop and support a main idea, claim, or set of assertions for an audience using both your own experiences and the words and ideas of other writers. We will also practice developing your ideas with evidence, and revising and editing to strengthen your writing and clarify your style.
We will read many types of writing and learn how to discuss and use the issues and ideas we find in these writings for different ends. As you do so, you will develop an understanding that writing is for reading and reading leads to writing as we explore and begin to discover different applications for academic thinking. Click here to see more information on my projected student learning outcomes for this class.
Course Description
This course is designed for
students who desire a review of the conventions of written communication.
It offers a review of grammar and usage in conjunction with the writing
assignments.
Required Texts and Materials
Top Heavy by Edward N. Wolff, The Century Foundation, 2002.
Essays provided by me and research material that you will gather will
constitute our primary texts
Email account and internet access
A college dictionary
A pocket folder for submitting essays.
A binder to keep all class writing and handouts.
Copies of your essays and reading responses as needed for small group and
whole class workshops.
Printouts and copies of book excerpts and articles, online and newspaper, as
required.
Course Policies
Preparedness and Participation
By preparedness, I mean being in class with all required materials and
work. Every absence will lower your preparedness grade by half a grade
level. Thus, you may miss two classes and get an A in attendance,
albeit a lower A grade than a student who has attended every class.
After six absences, you will be dropped from the class. Thus, excessive
absences will result in failure of the course. Two instances of
tardiness equal an absence. If you are more than twenty-five minutes late,
you will be counted as absent. Answering a cell phone in class will be
equivalent to a tardy, then an absence. TURN THEM OFF!
A portion of the preparedness grade will be based upon your participation in
whole class discussions and groups. This grade is given holistically
and is based upon my observations of you over the course of the
semester. Collaboration and small group work along with discussions
will be a primary activity in our class. It is imperative that each person
participates.
Class work
Class work will include a variety of exploratory writings done in class in
response to texts we have read, each other’s writing, and various prompts,
which I will assign. Often times the writing we do in class will be the
foundation for longer writing assignments you will complete outside of
class. Save all of the writing we do in and out of class for the whole
semester.
Group work
Group work will consist of small group discussions that lead to whole class
discussions in which your participation or lack thereof will be noted.
You are expected to participate to the best of your abilities. A successful
participant in this class will generate questions, identify problems, infer,
elaborate on texts using personal experience, and will make predictions about
the overall class meaning.
Journals and Quizzes
There will be a weekly reading and learning journal. Journals should be
two, full, handwritten pages written in a large blue book. I will
collect your journals in the ninth week and at the end of the course.
Topics for the journals will be given in the week prior to their being due
and will be posted on this class website under Current
Schedule. Your journals will be checked and signed off weekly.
Conferences
I will schedule conferences with you at least once during the semester. Your attendance is mandatory. Because research shows that individual conferences often produce the greatest amount of learning, I encourage you to make even more time to meet with me during my office hours.
Essays and Final Portfolio
The writing assignments will ask you to provide effective analysis and argumentation based on material covered in class. Assignments will also require you to strategically present evidence and recognize both sound logic/reasoning and identify fallacious reasoning. When you turn an essay in, it will need to have all the appropriate supporting documents including all rough drafts (drafts in this sense means versions of the essay with significant changes in each version), self/partner’s /group’s revision and editing responses, paragraph outlining, rhetorical strategies, and all supporting, in-class writing. Click here to see the grading rubric for final essays. There will be six (6) formal essays 750 words or three to four (3-4) pages in length. Two of these will be in class essays. All drafts will need to be typed, double spaced, and formatted with 1 inch margins and a 12-point font (Times New Roman). Essays not turned in with this format will not be read; I will hand them back to you without responding. I will return your essays within three weeks after you hand them in. Although you may not revise your final essays, you will turn in a final portfolio consisting of three revised and polished essays from the five written over the semester (either essays one or two, three or four, and five), complete with at least three drafts, included first graded draft, revision draft, and final draft.
Course Grading
Your final grade will be based on
the following:
Preparedness and participation
(15%) 15 points
Journal and
quizzes
(15%) 15 points
Final essays 1-6
(60%) 60 points
Final Portfolio (10%) 10 points
____________________________________________________
Total points possible (100%) 100 points
The grading scale is as follows:
A: 100-90 of total points possible
B: 89-80
C: 79-70
D: 69-60
F: 59 and below
Plagiarism Policy
Cheating is the actual or attempted practice of fraudulent or deceptive acts for the purpose of improving one's grade or obtaining course credit; such acts also include assisting another student to do so. Typically, such acts occur in relation to examinations. However, it is the intent of this definition that the term 'cheating' not be limited to examination situations only, but that it include any and all actions by a student that are intended to gain an unearned academic advantage by fraudulent or deceptive means. Plagiarism is a specific form of cheating which consists of the misuse of the published and/or unpublished works of others by misrepresenting the material (i.e., their intellectual property) so used as one's own work. If I suspect you of plagiarism, I will give you an oral and written examination on the material to be evaluated by the English Department chair and myself. Penalties for cheating and plagiarism range from a D or F on a particular assignment, through an F for the course, to expulsion from the college.
Classroom Behavior
The classroom is a special environment in which students and faculty come together to promote learning and growth. It is essential to this learning environment that respect for the rights of others seeking to learn, respect for the professionalism of the instructor, and the general goals of academic freedom are maintained. Differences of viewpoint or concerns should be expressed in terms which are supportive of the learning process, creating an environment in which students and faculty may learn to reason with clarity and compassion, to share of themselves without losing their identities, and to develop and understanding of the community in which they live. Student conduct which disrupts the learning process shall not be tolerated and may lead to disciplinary action and/or removal from class.
Entry Level Skills/Course Outcomes
Entry Level Skills/What You Should Already Know
A. understand the form and function of the paragraph and short essay
B. write clear, specific topic sentences
C. support topic sentences with well-developed paragraphs
D. limit a subject and develop a thesis
E. support a thesis with appropriate details
F. organize material appropriately
G. write unified and coherent prose
H. demonstrate a basic competence in grammar, syntax, and punctuation
Expected Outcomes and Course Goals
A. Make the
best use of the facilities and offerings of
B. Make the appropriate connection between reading, critical thinking and writing.
C. Be able to write at the English 1A entrance level.
1. make a claim/thesis
2. support a claim with relevant examples and details
3. develop support with appropriate methods, such as:
a. narrative
b. comparison/contrast
c. illustrations/examples
d. cause/effect
e. argument
4. organize a multi-paragraphed and documented essay (of approximately 1000 words) using primary and secondary sources with appropriate structure
D. Have a thorough understanding of sound grammatical principles
E. Become acquainted with resource tools, such as thesaurus, handbook of writing skills, and dictionary
Instructor's Projected Student Learning Outcomes for English A
All student-learning outcomes are based on five concepts developed by Paolo Freire. More information is available concerning Freire at my website. The five concepts are dialog, community enhancing praxis (dialog with the ability to change the world), developing transformative consciousness, animating first hand and secondary experience, and the teacher/student reversal. The classes are designed to 1) bring students to look at how their education experiences can help them understand the educational community, 2) to open a discussion of how understanding their own community and the type of knowledge it takes to belong can help them in their academic goals, 3) help them think about how an issue that affects their community is portrayed and why it affects the community in the ways that the issue does, 4) instill the ability to engage and generate writing from personal first hand experience and use that first hand experience fro research and analysis, and 5) allow students to become their own “teachers” or, in other words, scholars in the sense of being involved with problem finding, investigation and research, analysis, and proposal making.
Section 1: Dialog (Summarize)
Students will explore their school experiences with an eye to language and
context so as to develop a greater understanding of the overall purposes and
intent of education practices. Students engage each other in dialog to
see the multiplicity of education experiences and the way in which those
experiences have constructed us and our attitudes beliefs about society, the
promise of democracy, and how we understand whether that promise is being met
or not.
Section 2: Community Enhancing Praxis (Evaluate)
Students will investigate their personal communities and at which point and
how their home communities commingle with that of education communities:
students investigate how language, objects of use, use of space, and
hierarchies both become and subvert the structuring principles of their
communities. Students will begin to better define their communities,
understanding the communities to be complicated structures with both positive
and negative attributes.
Section 3: Developing Transformative Consciousness (Analyze)
Students will narrow the scope of their exploration and investigation to a
single, yet wider, cultural issue. They will summarize both sides’
positions and analyze the implicit and explicit arguments. Students
will use their developing sense of educational purpose and community
discourse features to summarize, evaluate, and analyze. The class will
decide the issue and our mutual understanding will be a communal
pursuit.
Section 4: Lived Experience (Animate)
Students will persuade an audience to see a particular perspective,
presenting both sides of the issue in an objective and fair manner.
Section 5: Teacher Student Reversal (The Scholar)
Students will engage in a qualitative study of the education experience, the
community, experiences within that community, types of responses to the
community per fellow students, and interviews, followed by a proposal on how
the department might better serve this particular student community. As such,
students will write about their personal experiences in their English A class
and lab. They will attempt to animate this experience, that is, give a
first hand representation, and then use those experiences to make a claim
about the class and lab overall.
Reading: Students will read their own and other students’ data (student essays from previous section, interviews, surveys, and previous essays from the class text).
Current
Course Plan and Reading
| Week 1 | Introductions | |
| Week 2 | Reading | Articles provided by instructor |
| Week 3 | Essay 1 | Math Autobiography |
| Week 4 | Revising | |
| Week 5 | Reading | Research gathered by student |
| Week 6 | Essay 2 | Mathematicians in History |
| Week 7 | Revising | |
| Week 8 | Reading | Top Heavy by Edward N. Wolff |
| Week 9 | In Class Essay 3 | Representing Multiple Points of View |
| Week 10 | Revising | |
| Week 11 | Reading | Supplemental material gathered by student |
| Week 12 | Essay 4 | Persuading an Audience |
| Week 13 | Revising | |
| Week 14 | Reading | Supplemental material gathered by student |
| Week 15 | Essay 5 | Research and the Scholar/Student |
| Week 16 | Revising | |
| Week 17 | Final Portfolio | Semester Review |
| Week 18 | Final (In class Essay 6) | Development as a Critical Writer |
Updated 1/16/06 by Jeremy Mumford