policies ENGL 344 Young Adult Literature
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Need to be in touch with me?
LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com NOTE: All classes, student meetings, and open student hours (office hours) this semester will be held virtually via Zoom. Need to make an during a time that is not an open student hour? appointment? Let me know you want to meet by adding yourself to my google.doc appointment calendar here: https://goo.gl/3CqLf and I will send you a zoom link for the time you sign up for. |
Spring 2021 Open Hours for students (office hours):
T&R 11:00-12:30 W 11:00-12:00 F 3:00-4:00 and by appointment. Click here to attend ANY of the Open Hour for Students Zoom sessions listen above. HOW TO ATTEND ZOOM CLASS Click here to attend ENGL 301 Writing & the Teaching of Writing Click here to attend ENGL 344 Young Adult Literature Click here to attend ENGL 489 Advanced Portfolio workshop. |
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course lives in two worlds. As a course in the English department (that fulfills an upper division English elective) it is a course that explores Young Adult, the genre, as literary. Not everyone in the wide world would see it that way. But this course is also a required course for students in the Secondary Education (double) major and, thus, it is also obliged to help future teacher to think about how to teach YA in the ELA classroom. Thus, our work this semester will also live in these two worlds: literary analysis and literacy instruction (two things I love very much).
A quick overview of our class tells me that most students taking this course intend to teach. I believe the goal of a course like this is to help folks that will work with young and still-growing readers figure out for themselves why—why one text rather than another, why one approach to teaching it over another, why bother thinking this much about reading and young people at all, what makes YA "literary," what makes it "young," and what makes it "adult."
While the answers to those questions might seem obvious, I think that it is one thing to have nice ideas about how we help young people read, but the reality of the work of that, the labor of it, is very, very hard.
And there is a great deal at stake. Students who fall behind as readers have a far higher chance of dropping out of school, and this is particularly true for some of our most vulnerable students. Here’s something else I believe: literacy is life-changing. I mean that seriously and deeply not like, oh, reading, saved me from my sad adolescence. I mean like it means serious, material changes in a person’s actual lived in life. And, of course, if you are a serious student of literature, and I'm going to conduct class believing that to be the case, you believe this too. And this is perhaps no more true about any genre than it is true for YA.
So, this semester, as a whole group and in small groups and as individuals, we will read together and write together. And most of all, we will theorize about and then develop ideas about YA and how that can inform good teaching practice. Because all this only works if we have ways of bringing texts into classrooms in ways that help students to read deeply, create meaning, and articulate what they themselves believe about their worlds.
COURSE OUTCOMES
Titles are live links to amazon site; total cost of books purchased new 97.00.
You can use any edition or format for the texts; please note you will need to quote from the texts at some points.
The Poet X Elizabeth Acevedo
Publisher: HarperTeen; 1st Edition edition (March 6, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0062662805
ISBN-13: 978-0062662804
Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Publisher: Dover Publications (September 12, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0486828069
ISBN-13: 978-0486828060
Dread Nation Justina Ireland
Publisher: Balzer + Bray; Reprint edition (June 4, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0062570617
ISBN-13: 978-0062570611
Pepper’s Rules for Secret Sleuthing Briana McDonald
ISBN-10: 1534453431
ISBN-13: 978-1534453431
Like a Love Story Abdi Nazemian
ISBN-13: 978-0062839367
Long Way Down Jason Reynolds
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1481438263
ISBN-13: 978-1481438261
Patron Saints of Nothing Randy Ribay
ISBN-10: 0525554920
ISBN-13: 978-0525554929
Gossip Girl #1: A NovelCecily Von Zeigesar
Publisher: Poppy; 1 edition (April 1, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0316910333
ISBN-13: 978-0316910330
And
COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
For the online components of our class, we will use this, my teaching website, google.docs, and email. You may also need to sign up for dropbox in order to submit the Pecha Kucha and Final Project for the class.
REQUIREMENTS
Reading Class Updates. It might seem silly for me to put this in the requirements, but I noticed when I taught this class last time that many students didn't read the Monday updates that I both emailed to the entire class and also posted on the "Class Updates" page of this website. So now I'm including it as a requirement.
Attendance/Posting Deadlines: The first two weeks of our class are synchronous 5:00 to 7:00 PM. After that, class meets every other week from 5:00 to 7:00, synchronously. You can miss one synchronous class without consequence. After that, missing synchronous classes will adversely affect your grade. Missing more than three synchronous classes, or three full weeks of class, could result in a failing grade for the course. On alternate weeks, you will have asynchronous requirements. You can locate specific dates for all of this on the syllabus.
The syllabus for this class indicates all of the work that needs to be completed during asynchronous weeks. If there is material that must be posted to our CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD or to your Reading Journal/Book Club that will be outlined there. If there is an individual assignment due, that too will be explained. Synchronous class work is due at class time. In most instances, you will have time in class to post materials. Your responsibility for synchronous classes is to come to class with the reading completed. All work for asynchronous weeks needs to be posted or sent to me by the Monday date listed on the syllabus prior to our Tuesday meeting. Work is due by Midnight.
Failure to meet the deadlines more than three times will adversely affect your grade. Failure to meet the deadlines more than 6 times will jeopardize your ability to pass the class.
Reading Journal/Book Club. You will participate in an elaborate group-making project during our first meeting. This will be your “book club” group, both in and out of class. In the online setting, you will read and respond to reading journals posted to a google.doc for your book club group and to me. You will discuss these texts as literature. Successfully posting to your Reading Journal/Book Club will count for 25% of your final grade.
Teaching Discussion/Discussion Board. Most weeks, there will be a prompt that you will respond to on our CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD. These prompts provide you with information about a class you could teach--information about size, location, demographics, etc. and asks you to imagine or problem-solve a teaching scenario. More details available on this website (live link and in drop down menu). Successfully posting to this discussion board will count for 25% of your final grade.
FORMAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
What follows is a brief description of the major assignments in this class. More information can be found on this course website.
Flash Reading Memoir: YA Edit This is a very short assignment. You will workshop it online with your reading journal/book club group mates, and you will email me a hard copy to be posted on our class website. I am asking you to simply tell me a story about yourself as a young adult reader--one story. It's only 500 words. More details available on this website (live link and in drop down menu). This will count for 10% of your final grade.
Write Your Own YA This will count for 15% of your final grade. This is a second short assignment during the second half of the semester. You will elect a genre to write in (fiction, nonfiction, graphic novel, poetry) and, as the assignment would indicate, write your own. Due to the constraints of time and energy, you will not be writing a complete. Your final product will include an overview and some sample writing of your piece. ou will workshop it online with your reading journal/book club group mates, and you will email me a hard copy. This will count for 10% of your final grade.
Group Reading Theory Pecha Kucha This is your only group project. You will have time in our synchronous classes to work on one entire asynchronous class period to use to complete it. Pecha Kucha is a presentation format that uses PowerPoint software to create a roughly 6 minute video combining both visual and oral communication. In your book club groups, you will read and present on an article on some aspect of reading theory. Your job will be to explain and contextualize the literary theory and to connect that theory to our discussion of YA as a genre. this will count for 15% of your final grade.
Final Project. Over the course of the semester, you will have produced a number of bits of writing that you might turn into your final project: Write Your Own YA (can also be the Little Women Update), you've posted a number of teaching ideas in the Class Discussion Board. You've practiced some literary analysis and read some scholarship for your Reading Journal/Book club. You will choose which of these assignments you'd like to expand and revise to serve as your final project. More details available on this website (live link and in drop down menu) on the Final Project. The Final Project is worth 15% of your final grade.
EVALUATION
I will be using a combination of spec grading (see the discussion of keeping track of "A"s & "U"s below) and contract grading for each of the major assignments and reading journal/book club. How that will work for each assignment is explained in the details for each assignment available on this our class website. You will still receive written feedback on formal writing assignments. I will make available samples of these comments before the first major writing assignment is due so you have a sense of what this feedback looks like and how it is connected to your final letter grade.
Comments on Teaching Discussion discussion posts and/or reading journal/book club related writing/posts shouldn’t be treated like evaluation but rather like an ongoing conversation between you and me: think of it as a talk between us, only in written form. If I'm not writing anything, I'm bored. Your only cause for alarm should be if I email you something like the following: "you aren't taking this work seriously" or "you didn't really read" or "you need to analyze this text as a piece of literature not just react to it as a reader." Included in the assignment page for these projects are specific details about what you need to do in a journal for it to be acceptable and how many acceptable journals will result in a strong grade in this class for that assignment. An explanation of what spec grading looks like can be found on the dedicated pages for these two assignments as well as right here:
KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR "A"s & "U"s
Here is how I keep track of your reading journal/book club work & teaching discussion posts: Each week, after I've read through the blog posts and google.doc discussion, I will assign you either an "A" or a "U" ("A" for acceptable and "U" for unacceptable). If you earn a "U" on anything, I will make sure you know and know why and you are welcome to revise that "U" into an A no matter how many times it takes to get it there as long as you've posted it initially by the Monday night deadline.
I don't keep track of the date of the "A" or "U" received, and I don't keep track of what you turn in as a revision of a "U." I just enter marks into my book each week. At the end of the semester, I total up how many "A"s you end up with and that tells me what grade you've earned. So if you post by the deadline for all of the assignments and always get "A" for acceptable, great. If you post by the deadline and get all "U"s but then revise them to "A"s, that will be reflected in my book and you are golden too. If you have some "A"s and then, say, one post you keep getting a "U" on week after week, but you still have enough "A"s to earn you an "A" grade in the end, all those "U"s just don't matter.
But here is the thing: Once I've given you the "A" or the "U", my role is done until next week. I can't tell you which posts you get "A"s on and which you got "U"s on after the fact. All I'll be able to do is tell you where you are at in the "A" column. It's up to you to keep track of a "U" in need of revision.
Comments on Formal Assignments are meant to guide your revision process and/or prepare you for the next assignment.
Labor Based Assessment: Essentially, the way I evaluate students is based on their considerable labor in the course. There are several components for each assignment that you must complete in order to earn full credit--or a B grade. The B grade is earned by labor and not by quality of effort, though a B+ or B- is possible that could reflect lack of or extra effort. The requirements for an A and C grade are also spelled out (that's what makes it a grading contract). They are specific to each assignment. Read the specific assignment page for the requirements for each assignment either on this website .
Different requirements require different kinds and amounts of effort; therefore, different assignments have different weight in terms of evaluation. Here is a rough breakdown of how things are weighted this semester:
Teaching Discussion 25%
Reading Journal/
Book Club 25%
Flash Reading
Memoir: YA Edit 10%
Write Your Own YA 10%
Group Reading
Theory Pecha Kucha 15%
Final Project 15%
Ultimately, your success in this class depends on the following:
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. How you could plagiarize in a class like this, I don’t know, but don’t try. I will fail you because the last person in the world who should be standing up and teaching is a cheater.
Students with disabilities. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented disability should get me written documentation of the specific disability and suggested accommodations before the end of the second week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time. I try to employ universal design in my classes; if you see a way to make the class more accessible, tell me. I want to know.
The Writing Studio. Located in the Academic Achievement Center (though that doesn't matter at all this semester), on the bottom floor of the Library, the Writing Studio is available to any and all students at whatever level of expertise you might be at.
Other Resources on Campus. Even though this is an online course, we are a brick and mortar institution. There are a wide variety of services available on our campus that you might want to know about but also might just be too inundated with information to remember you have access to, so I'm including links to a variety of places on campus that I think you might want to know about. First and foremost is probably the counseling center and the wellness center. Other places you can go if you want to connect with folks: the Center for Multicultural Affairs, the Pride Center, the campus food bank, and Commuter Services. Making a connection to this campus is the number one way you'll get from day one to graduation.
Title IX and Sexual Violence. The Office of Equal Opportunity and the Title IX Coordinator work to ensure that all members of the campus community flourish in a supportive and fair climate. See https://my.bridgew.edu/departments/affirmativeaction/SitePages/Home.aspx to learn more.
SOME ADVICE ABOUT MANAGING THE WORK LOAD OF A 300 LEVEL ONLINE CLASS.
A word about asking questions and getting them answered: As this is an online class, it's useful if we function as a community of practice, and by that I mean that we all work together to make the class work and for everyone to do the best work they can do. To that end, rather than emailing me individual questions on any assignment, I'm asking you to post your question to the Class Discussion Board. Each week, I will post a new Q&A Discussion Board for you to post questions and get answers. I will check that Board every 48 hours and during office hours and respond as best I can to your questions. This will keep me from having to answer the same question 26 times, and, it is always true, that if you have a question it means that most other people have the same one or some version of it.
Also, after last semester, I've thought a lot about what I hope to have happen in synchronous sessions. I've put that information together here.
This is a 300 level English class. It is a lot of work. But I believe I am fair, and I am supportive. If we find that we need to make changes to the class structure we will. Additionally, this class in online. In my opinion, online makes somethings harder. My most recent experience of a hybrid class is that students tend not to look at what is due until the day it is due. This is not good practice. I would suggest treating the work of this class like any other class that meets twice a week: try to do one part of the assignment as if we were meeting on a Tuesday; try to do the other part of the assignment as if we were meeting on a Thursday. Finally, my best suggestion to you to get through the next fifteen weeks is to read ahead. The books aren't hard. You can read these in a couple of hours--some even less than that. But you need to do the reading. I will know if you don't. It will show in your work. So get the books early and start reading. It will make everything easier.
Most of all, please know, it is always my goal to help students do their best work in one of my classes. I very much enjoy working with BSU students, with future teachers, and with Young Adult lit. So it should be good.
This course lives in two worlds. As a course in the English department (that fulfills an upper division English elective) it is a course that explores Young Adult, the genre, as literary. Not everyone in the wide world would see it that way. But this course is also a required course for students in the Secondary Education (double) major and, thus, it is also obliged to help future teacher to think about how to teach YA in the ELA classroom. Thus, our work this semester will also live in these two worlds: literary analysis and literacy instruction (two things I love very much).
A quick overview of our class tells me that most students taking this course intend to teach. I believe the goal of a course like this is to help folks that will work with young and still-growing readers figure out for themselves why—why one text rather than another, why one approach to teaching it over another, why bother thinking this much about reading and young people at all, what makes YA "literary," what makes it "young," and what makes it "adult."
While the answers to those questions might seem obvious, I think that it is one thing to have nice ideas about how we help young people read, but the reality of the work of that, the labor of it, is very, very hard.
And there is a great deal at stake. Students who fall behind as readers have a far higher chance of dropping out of school, and this is particularly true for some of our most vulnerable students. Here’s something else I believe: literacy is life-changing. I mean that seriously and deeply not like, oh, reading, saved me from my sad adolescence. I mean like it means serious, material changes in a person’s actual lived in life. And, of course, if you are a serious student of literature, and I'm going to conduct class believing that to be the case, you believe this too. And this is perhaps no more true about any genre than it is true for YA.
So, this semester, as a whole group and in small groups and as individuals, we will read together and write together. And most of all, we will theorize about and then develop ideas about YA and how that can inform good teaching practice. Because all this only works if we have ways of bringing texts into classrooms in ways that help students to read deeply, create meaning, and articulate what they themselves believe about their worlds.
COURSE OUTCOMES
- Read deeply a wide variety of young adult texts
- Identify various theories of reading and writing that could inform teaching practice for YA lit
- Identify the characteristics of YA as a genre of literature
- Develop reading/writing assignments that encourage strong reading and writing in students.
Titles are live links to amazon site; total cost of books purchased new 97.00.
You can use any edition or format for the texts; please note you will need to quote from the texts at some points.
The Poet X Elizabeth Acevedo
Publisher: HarperTeen; 1st Edition edition (March 6, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0062662805
ISBN-13: 978-0062662804
Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Publisher: Dover Publications (September 12, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0486828069
ISBN-13: 978-0486828060
Dread Nation Justina Ireland
Publisher: Balzer + Bray; Reprint edition (June 4, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0062570617
ISBN-13: 978-0062570611
Pepper’s Rules for Secret Sleuthing Briana McDonald
ISBN-10: 1534453431
ISBN-13: 978-1534453431
Like a Love Story Abdi Nazemian
ISBN-13: 978-0062839367
Long Way Down Jason Reynolds
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1481438263
ISBN-13: 978-1481438261
Patron Saints of Nothing Randy Ribay
ISBN-10: 0525554920
ISBN-13: 978-0525554929
Gossip Girl #1: A NovelCecily Von Zeigesar
Publisher: Poppy; 1 edition (April 1, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0316910333
ISBN-13: 978-0316910330
And
- Selections from popular YA texts that you’ve already read
- Selected readings about YA Lit, Reading Theory, & Literacy Instruction
- Selected YA multi-media, short texts, poetry etc.
COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
For the online components of our class, we will use this, my teaching website, google.docs, and email. You may also need to sign up for dropbox in order to submit the Pecha Kucha and Final Project for the class.
REQUIREMENTS
Reading Class Updates. It might seem silly for me to put this in the requirements, but I noticed when I taught this class last time that many students didn't read the Monday updates that I both emailed to the entire class and also posted on the "Class Updates" page of this website. So now I'm including it as a requirement.
Attendance/Posting Deadlines: The first two weeks of our class are synchronous 5:00 to 7:00 PM. After that, class meets every other week from 5:00 to 7:00, synchronously. You can miss one synchronous class without consequence. After that, missing synchronous classes will adversely affect your grade. Missing more than three synchronous classes, or three full weeks of class, could result in a failing grade for the course. On alternate weeks, you will have asynchronous requirements. You can locate specific dates for all of this on the syllabus.
The syllabus for this class indicates all of the work that needs to be completed during asynchronous weeks. If there is material that must be posted to our CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD or to your Reading Journal/Book Club that will be outlined there. If there is an individual assignment due, that too will be explained. Synchronous class work is due at class time. In most instances, you will have time in class to post materials. Your responsibility for synchronous classes is to come to class with the reading completed. All work for asynchronous weeks needs to be posted or sent to me by the Monday date listed on the syllabus prior to our Tuesday meeting. Work is due by Midnight.
Failure to meet the deadlines more than three times will adversely affect your grade. Failure to meet the deadlines more than 6 times will jeopardize your ability to pass the class.
Reading Journal/Book Club. You will participate in an elaborate group-making project during our first meeting. This will be your “book club” group, both in and out of class. In the online setting, you will read and respond to reading journals posted to a google.doc for your book club group and to me. You will discuss these texts as literature. Successfully posting to your Reading Journal/Book Club will count for 25% of your final grade.
Teaching Discussion/Discussion Board. Most weeks, there will be a prompt that you will respond to on our CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD. These prompts provide you with information about a class you could teach--information about size, location, demographics, etc. and asks you to imagine or problem-solve a teaching scenario. More details available on this website (live link and in drop down menu). Successfully posting to this discussion board will count for 25% of your final grade.
FORMAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
What follows is a brief description of the major assignments in this class. More information can be found on this course website.
Flash Reading Memoir: YA Edit This is a very short assignment. You will workshop it online with your reading journal/book club group mates, and you will email me a hard copy to be posted on our class website. I am asking you to simply tell me a story about yourself as a young adult reader--one story. It's only 500 words. More details available on this website (live link and in drop down menu). This will count for 10% of your final grade.
Write Your Own YA This will count for 15% of your final grade. This is a second short assignment during the second half of the semester. You will elect a genre to write in (fiction, nonfiction, graphic novel, poetry) and, as the assignment would indicate, write your own. Due to the constraints of time and energy, you will not be writing a complete. Your final product will include an overview and some sample writing of your piece. ou will workshop it online with your reading journal/book club group mates, and you will email me a hard copy. This will count for 10% of your final grade.
Group Reading Theory Pecha Kucha This is your only group project. You will have time in our synchronous classes to work on one entire asynchronous class period to use to complete it. Pecha Kucha is a presentation format that uses PowerPoint software to create a roughly 6 minute video combining both visual and oral communication. In your book club groups, you will read and present on an article on some aspect of reading theory. Your job will be to explain and contextualize the literary theory and to connect that theory to our discussion of YA as a genre. this will count for 15% of your final grade.
Final Project. Over the course of the semester, you will have produced a number of bits of writing that you might turn into your final project: Write Your Own YA (can also be the Little Women Update), you've posted a number of teaching ideas in the Class Discussion Board. You've practiced some literary analysis and read some scholarship for your Reading Journal/Book club. You will choose which of these assignments you'd like to expand and revise to serve as your final project. More details available on this website (live link and in drop down menu) on the Final Project. The Final Project is worth 15% of your final grade.
EVALUATION
I will be using a combination of spec grading (see the discussion of keeping track of "A"s & "U"s below) and contract grading for each of the major assignments and reading journal/book club. How that will work for each assignment is explained in the details for each assignment available on this our class website. You will still receive written feedback on formal writing assignments. I will make available samples of these comments before the first major writing assignment is due so you have a sense of what this feedback looks like and how it is connected to your final letter grade.
Comments on Teaching Discussion discussion posts and/or reading journal/book club related writing/posts shouldn’t be treated like evaluation but rather like an ongoing conversation between you and me: think of it as a talk between us, only in written form. If I'm not writing anything, I'm bored. Your only cause for alarm should be if I email you something like the following: "you aren't taking this work seriously" or "you didn't really read" or "you need to analyze this text as a piece of literature not just react to it as a reader." Included in the assignment page for these projects are specific details about what you need to do in a journal for it to be acceptable and how many acceptable journals will result in a strong grade in this class for that assignment. An explanation of what spec grading looks like can be found on the dedicated pages for these two assignments as well as right here:
KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR "A"s & "U"s
Here is how I keep track of your reading journal/book club work & teaching discussion posts: Each week, after I've read through the blog posts and google.doc discussion, I will assign you either an "A" or a "U" ("A" for acceptable and "U" for unacceptable). If you earn a "U" on anything, I will make sure you know and know why and you are welcome to revise that "U" into an A no matter how many times it takes to get it there as long as you've posted it initially by the Monday night deadline.
I don't keep track of the date of the "A" or "U" received, and I don't keep track of what you turn in as a revision of a "U." I just enter marks into my book each week. At the end of the semester, I total up how many "A"s you end up with and that tells me what grade you've earned. So if you post by the deadline for all of the assignments and always get "A" for acceptable, great. If you post by the deadline and get all "U"s but then revise them to "A"s, that will be reflected in my book and you are golden too. If you have some "A"s and then, say, one post you keep getting a "U" on week after week, but you still have enough "A"s to earn you an "A" grade in the end, all those "U"s just don't matter.
But here is the thing: Once I've given you the "A" or the "U", my role is done until next week. I can't tell you which posts you get "A"s on and which you got "U"s on after the fact. All I'll be able to do is tell you where you are at in the "A" column. It's up to you to keep track of a "U" in need of revision.
Comments on Formal Assignments are meant to guide your revision process and/or prepare you for the next assignment.
Labor Based Assessment: Essentially, the way I evaluate students is based on their considerable labor in the course. There are several components for each assignment that you must complete in order to earn full credit--or a B grade. The B grade is earned by labor and not by quality of effort, though a B+ or B- is possible that could reflect lack of or extra effort. The requirements for an A and C grade are also spelled out (that's what makes it a grading contract). They are specific to each assignment. Read the specific assignment page for the requirements for each assignment either on this website .
Different requirements require different kinds and amounts of effort; therefore, different assignments have different weight in terms of evaluation. Here is a rough breakdown of how things are weighted this semester:
Teaching Discussion 25%
Reading Journal/
Book Club 25%
Flash Reading
Memoir: YA Edit 10%
Write Your Own YA 10%
Group Reading
Theory Pecha Kucha 15%
Final Project 15%
Ultimately, your success in this class depends on the following:
- Fulfilling all of the requirements listed above,
- The quality of your work,
- Your efforts to try new things and think in new ways.
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. How you could plagiarize in a class like this, I don’t know, but don’t try. I will fail you because the last person in the world who should be standing up and teaching is a cheater.
Students with disabilities. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented disability should get me written documentation of the specific disability and suggested accommodations before the end of the second week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time. I try to employ universal design in my classes; if you see a way to make the class more accessible, tell me. I want to know.
The Writing Studio. Located in the Academic Achievement Center (though that doesn't matter at all this semester), on the bottom floor of the Library, the Writing Studio is available to any and all students at whatever level of expertise you might be at.
Other Resources on Campus. Even though this is an online course, we are a brick and mortar institution. There are a wide variety of services available on our campus that you might want to know about but also might just be too inundated with information to remember you have access to, so I'm including links to a variety of places on campus that I think you might want to know about. First and foremost is probably the counseling center and the wellness center. Other places you can go if you want to connect with folks: the Center for Multicultural Affairs, the Pride Center, the campus food bank, and Commuter Services. Making a connection to this campus is the number one way you'll get from day one to graduation.
Title IX and Sexual Violence. The Office of Equal Opportunity and the Title IX Coordinator work to ensure that all members of the campus community flourish in a supportive and fair climate. See https://my.bridgew.edu/departments/affirmativeaction/SitePages/Home.aspx to learn more.
SOME ADVICE ABOUT MANAGING THE WORK LOAD OF A 300 LEVEL ONLINE CLASS.
A word about asking questions and getting them answered: As this is an online class, it's useful if we function as a community of practice, and by that I mean that we all work together to make the class work and for everyone to do the best work they can do. To that end, rather than emailing me individual questions on any assignment, I'm asking you to post your question to the Class Discussion Board. Each week, I will post a new Q&A Discussion Board for you to post questions and get answers. I will check that Board every 48 hours and during office hours and respond as best I can to your questions. This will keep me from having to answer the same question 26 times, and, it is always true, that if you have a question it means that most other people have the same one or some version of it.
Also, after last semester, I've thought a lot about what I hope to have happen in synchronous sessions. I've put that information together here.
This is a 300 level English class. It is a lot of work. But I believe I am fair, and I am supportive. If we find that we need to make changes to the class structure we will. Additionally, this class in online. In my opinion, online makes somethings harder. My most recent experience of a hybrid class is that students tend not to look at what is due until the day it is due. This is not good practice. I would suggest treating the work of this class like any other class that meets twice a week: try to do one part of the assignment as if we were meeting on a Tuesday; try to do the other part of the assignment as if we were meeting on a Thursday. Finally, my best suggestion to you to get through the next fifteen weeks is to read ahead. The books aren't hard. You can read these in a couple of hours--some even less than that. But you need to do the reading. I will know if you don't. It will show in your work. So get the books early and start reading. It will make everything easier.
Most of all, please know, it is always my goal to help students do their best work in one of my classes. I very much enjoy working with BSU students, with future teachers, and with Young Adult lit. So it should be good.