Participation and Weekly Free Writes (30% of final grade)

A large portion of your grade in this class is based on you doing the reading, showing up for class each week, completing your free writes, and participating in discussion. As a seminar, the success of this class depends on your participation. This class will be what we make of it, together.

Participation (10%)

You are expected to come to class having completed the reading listed for each day and prepared to write about and discuss it. Ours is a small class, so you should expect to speak at least once during each class session (though hopefully, everyone will speak more than that). If speaking in class is difficult for you, please talk with me about it. We can discuss strategies to help you meet this goal. These may include:

  1. Raising ideas from our assigned materials for class discussion and/or from your weekly written responses to them, including directing our attention to specific moments you found evocative, inspiring, unexpected, or otherwise salient;
  2. Asking questions about materials or ideas or passages you found puzzling or difficult (I cannot overstate how valuable good questions are to a thriving class, and how desperately I wish more students were courageous in asking them);
  3. Bringing pertinent materials discovered outside of class to our attention during discussion;
  4. Expressing appreciation for something a classmate has said in class in specific terms and describing how it has deepened, extended, changed, or otherwise affected your thinking;
  5. Visiting office hours to extend course conversations around subjects or questions you find particularly interesting and/or to ask for additional feedback on your writing.

Weekly Free Writes (20%)

In addition to doing the reading for each week’s class and participating actively in class discussion, you will also submit a brief response to the week’s assigned reading in the form of a free write. These free writes will be written in response to a prompt I provide at the beginning of each class (sometimes you will have a choice between prompts). You will write them by hand during the first ~15 minutes of each class and submit them that day. You will be able to access the day’s reading while you write them, and they will be graded on completion. Throughout the semester, there will be 12 opportunities to turn in a free write; you must complete 10 of them to receive full credit in this area. Any additional free writes you complete beyond 10 are extra credit.

You will need to bring a notebook – or some kind of paper – with you each week to class to use in completing your free writes.

Except in the case of extenuating circumstances (i.e., an emergency, extended illness, etc), it is not possible to make up missed free writes.