This is the page for: Reading & Writing 2

(Course-related content will appear here in reverse chronological order: the newest things at the top of the page, and older posts toward the bottom.)

Grades Entered

Folks,

I have indeed finished grading (and given them to the Department Office Assistant, to be uploaded your grades to the UCUPS system). Feel free to go and check your grades.

If the grade you have received is a surprise, then consider the following questions:

  1. Did you submit every piece of assigned homework? How well did you do on your homework. (In most cases, a V+ ranking is a high ranking, a V is an average ranking, a V- is a very poor ranking, and a V++ is an outstanding ranking. In a scale out of 3, V-=1; V=2, V+=3, and V++=3.5 (a bonus mark of 0.5).
  2. Did you attend consistently? Were you often late?
  3. Did you participate in course discussions? Were you active in our classes, to the extent possible for the course?
  4. If there were quizzes offered in the course, did you score well on the quizzes?
  5. Were you well-prepared for any instances in which you were expected to lead or participate in a discussion for the whole class? (ie. leading a discussion, or a panel discussion)
  6. Did you fulfill all the online portions of the course, such as participating in course forum discussions online, or completing blog postings?
  7. Did you submit the Feedback for the Presentation Contest that was assigned for your class?

If your answer is no to any of the questions, you may have discovered the reason why your grade is not what you expected. (Especially if it is lower than you expected.) As a note, #6 and #7 above were particularly a problem for some people.

In any case, if you think your grade is an error, then before emailing me to demand a change, I ask that you review the following two pages:

These will help you decide whether, and how, to contact me with your concerns. I assure you, if you contact me in a reasonable and polite way, I will be happy to explain how you got your grade. If an error was made I will fix it. If not, however, I do not respond well to demands, or to begging. If your whole future depends on this grade, then  I expect you to have behaved that way during semester — preparing for quizzes, submitting all homework on time and as well-done as you could, never missing class without a good excuse, and so on.

Have a wonderful holiday, and feel free to check out the courses I am supposed to be teaching next semester here.

Exam Room

Hi folks,

I just got word from the office that we will be having the midterm exam for Reading & Writing 2 in our regular classroom. (Which I’m told is IH338. If that’s wrong, let’s meet there anyway.) We will meet during our regular classtime, ie. from 12:00-2:00pm on Wednesday, 14 December.

Remember what I said in our last class: if you cannot write a proper 5-paragraph essay, I will be obliged to hold you back — ie. to give you an F grade.

A “proper 5-paragraph essay” for the purposes of this exam includes:

In addition to the 5-praragraph essay structure, you will be responsible for skills related to responding to another text (ie. both of the writing templates we explored, and your ability to paraphrasing another’s writing), and other skills like outlining, drawing a Venn diagram, using proper structure and punctuation for quotations from other texts, and so on.

That sounds like a lot, but you’ve been working on it all semester. Meanwhile, I’m working hard to get some responses to your blog postings. If you wrote fewer than ten essays, you still have time until the 19th of December to get them done. Remember, you need to write ten five-paragraph essays on the blog in order to pass the course as well. I’ll continue writing feedback today, and hopefully finish.

However, if you wrote fewer than 8 essays by today (as of 12 December), you will get feedback on only one of your essays.

Our Department on Facebook, and Movie Night

If you’re a student in the English Language and Culture Department at CUK, or a student in one of the courses offered by the department, then please join our Facebook page.

Events, announcements, and more will be posted on our Facebook page in the future, so joining up is a good idea… even if you’re just taking one course in our department, and majoring in some other area, this page will let you know about important events, some of which are related to courses. So make sure you join up!

Also, this is a reminder that Monday night is MOVIE NIGHT at CUK. Professor Hurt has arranged for some wonderful prizes, and you can find out more about those, and the films showing, on the event page over at Facebook. Go have a look, and sign up.

Presentation Contest: Schedule and Feedback Sheets

Folks,

You are expected to attend one complete session as part of your Department Events grade for any course you take with me.

(If you are taking my Public Speaking course, you are required to attend two (2) full sessions.)

For each speaker, I expect you to fill out one of the following forms, depending on the classes you’re taking:

IF YOU ARE IN MY PUBLIC SPEAKING COURSE:

IF YOU ARE NOT IN MY PUBLIC SPEAKING COURSE:

Make sure you use the correct sheets.

Make sure you prepare enough copies to have one sheet for each speaker — you should fill in the sheets at the end of each speech.

Make sure also to write some comments.

Also, make sure you do not write your name on the feedback sheets: they will be given anonymously to the speakers, so they can get some more proper feedback. Just staple all your feedback pages together, and attach a different sheet with your name and a list of classes you are taking with me to that pile.

Your feedback sheets are due to be handed in the day after the presentation contest session you attend. They can be handed in at the Department Office (IH341).

Your New Classblog, and Homework

Folks,

Sorry about the delay. I needed to update some database information before I could install, and it took a little while on a pretty busy day.

The new blog where you will write your 5-Paragraph Essays is here. Please click on the REGISTER on that page to sign up, of course using your real name. That is, use the username Lee_Cheolsu or Moon_Sori, not Cutie82 or ICaNd0iT. Remember, I need to be able to know who you are so I can track your work.

As I said in class, my expectation is that you will write 5-paragraph essays on 5 days out of 7 each week, until I tell you that you don’t need to write them anymore. I will check the blog every few days, not daily, and I obviously cannot give feedback on everything you write. The point of this is practice, not pulling off a single good 5-paragraph essay. I want you to be able to write a good one consistently, and then I will tell you that you can stop.

Next: I must apologize, I’ve lost track of the homework I’ve assigned you. It’s mostly related to note-taking — since I lost my notebook, I lost some notes I took, but I have also become somewhat disorganized.  However, to my recollection there are several assignments you have and ought to hand in to me. I recall the following:

I’m pretty sure there was one more assignment as well, but I cannot for the life of me recall what it was. However, if you have done that assignment also, hand it in: you will get credit for it, while those who do not hand it in will get no credit for it.

I will post more information about next week’s Presentation Contest and Mosaic when I get that information.

Homework For This Week

Folks,

For Reading & Writing 2 this week (assigned 31 October), your homework was:

Your Midterm Exam

Folks,

Since some of you are probably wondering what your midterm exam will be (which by the way takes place on Wednesday, 26 October), I’m going to tell you what we’ll do. Not in exact detail, but the basic idea.

I’m going to give you something to read. You will have to do things with the text.

That’s it.

I realize this sounds a bit simplistic, or maybe crazy. But it’s basically what I will be testing you on.

So  far in this class, I’ve asked you to do things with texts a few times. I’ve asked you to answer questions about texts. (Like, in your textbook.) I’ve asked you to write outlines for texts written by other people (and given you a pretty good guide to writing an outline). I’ve asked you to take information from one  text and use it to write another. (Like using information about the classic addictive personality, and Mickey Mantle’s writing, to write an essay on how Mickey Mantle had the classic addictive personality.) I’ve given you a template to use in responding to an argument in someone else’s text that you either agree with, or disagree with.

So review all these things. Pick a random text (say, one in another chapter of the textbook?) and try doing these kinds of things with it. Practice the skills I’ll be testing you on. The test is only two hours long, so we won’t have time to have you do them all… but knowing them all should make the test much easier for you.

Have a nice week, and see you on Monday!

This Week’s Homework (10-12 October)

Folks,

I asked you to do three pieces of homework:

Outlining

The other day, someone asked about how to write an outline. I plan to have two handouts for you — one on writing a proper outline, and the second on how to use the outline as a basis for writing an essay, paragraph by paragraph.

In case you lose them, the handouts are here:

Your Homework

Hi folks,

I promised I’d write up the homework for you here, so here’s a summary.

We got up to #4 on page 19 of the textbook.

Please go ahead and do #5. But instead of writing a personal essay, I want you to write a letter. You will only write a letter — not a letter and an essay. ONLY a letter. You should just write it by hand, on notebook paper. It’s only a first draft.

Okay?

The letter you write will be a letter about a struggle you have faced in your life. The struggle should be the one your partner in class helped you choose. You will write the letter not to me, Gord, but to someone important in your life. You can tell the person how he or she helped you with your struggle, or explain the struggle to them if they were not in your life at that time.

When you write the letter, remember to think about the things we discussed in class for autobiographical writing:

Then complete the exercises on pages 20 & 21. Those exercises should help you to get the formatting and style correct for quotations, as well as to get you thinking about imagery, interesting language, and style.

Finally, type a second draft of your letter for me. Format it as usual, following the guidelines on this site.

You will submit both your first and second drafts of the letter by Thursday, 6 October. We will review the quotation exercises in class on Wednesday, 5 October.

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