Policies and Practices

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Previous Lecture

Anything You Want to Talk About?

(There were lots of questions about things on the syllabus, which I moved to the “How I Plan to Run this Course” section below.)

Diagnostic Writing

What you gave me was very good (thank you).

A couple of writers mentioned wanting to know more about where the theory that birds are really dinosaurs comes from, so here is my quick understanding of it.

• Many similarities in bone structure between coelurosaurs (a group of 2-legged carnivorous dinosaurs) and early birds
• Increasing evidence for feathers on some dinosaurs
• Evidence of similar behaviors such as nest-making

How I Plan to Run this Course

Based on policies and practices laid out in the syllabus.

Questions?

How will grading work?

Very differently from what you’re probably used to, but it’s mostly governed by a few key ideas:

• Mastery grading: your grade isn’t a running total of how well or poorly you do on individual exercises. Instead, it summarizes how well you mastered the course’s learning outcomes by end of the course. Thus grades are broken down by learning outcome, and within each outcome your current grade is the average of the most recent individual grade (i.e., closest to the end of the course) and the highest 2 previous ones (i.e., the best level of mastery achieved previously).
• Redoes: If you feel you want to better demonstrate mastery related to a particular assignment, you can do a related exercise in order to get another grade included for the relevant outcomes. In this course, this will most likely take the form of being able to do an additional round of revisions to essays after you’ve turned in the nominally “final” version.
• Distributed oral exams: There are no traditional exams, their function is distributed over meetings with me about the essays you’ll write; because these are meetings with me, they involve oral discussion (although admittedly about things you have written).

How will you learn about Zoom classes? I will announce them in the preceding class meeting and through Canvas

The term “voice” refers to an author’s tone, often conveyed through the words they choose, how they use language, etc.

The term “thesis” refers to the point you’re arguing for in a piece of writing (or other communication).

“Like Me”

Professors have historically had a tendency to unconsciously assume that their students are like them, e.g., have similar interests to what they had as students, from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, etc.

Can you think of examples where a teacher or professor or classmate thinking this has had bad consequences for someone you know?

• Most professors seem to teach their courses as if all the students are interested in or majoring in that subject. This leads to examples that some students don’t relate to, explanations that lack context for students outside that field, etc.
• With the move to remote learning, many professors assumed that textbooks were still the best way of delivering information without recognizing the increasing importance or convenience of online sources.

Reducing this assumption (e.g., that students have similar demands on their time to what I had, that they need similar amounts of practice to become comfortable with ideas, etc.) is the main motivation behind mastery grading.

Particularly the aspects of it that take things other than mastery of outcomes out of grades. For example, there are no late penalties (other than that you need to finish all the work by the end of the semester), in case the ways you have to spend your time don’t fit well with finishing a particular assignment by a particular day; there’s no extra credit, to avoid favoring students who have free time to do it over ones who don’t.

This also extends to language: I shouldn’t penalize you for not expressing ideas like I would. But how far can it extend in a class that’s about persuasive argument, and so requires clear communication? (I have some ideas, and we’ll revisit this topic in a few weeks, but it’s a good thing to start talking about now if you want.)

• Maybe view this as a chance for writers who start with different language backgrounds to learn ways of using language that are clear to their audience.
• Or maybe take a “talk it out” approach, i.e., use such things as peer editing sessions for both writers and readers to talk about what they mean to say, how they understand it, etc.
• Keep in mind that even language that the author expects to be incomprehensible to readers can be used in ways that help readers relate to the author. For example, I read an account this summer of a course that asked students to write a series of reflections about their development as writers; one Arab-American student opened each essay with a snippet of Arabic poetry (in Arabic), which she generally later gave enough interpretation of to relate to her overall message in that essay, and which in any case helped remind readers of who the author was and what traditions her writing came from.

Next

Writing as conversation.

Please read the introduction to They Say, I Say (entitled “Entering the Conversation”) from the beginning through the subsection “The Template of Templates” (page 1 through almost all of page 12).

Be prepared to talk about the ideas in this section in class on Friday, and to start a conversation about cryptography.

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