Grading

For this course, we will use a grading contract, which scholar Melissa Watson has defined as “a system of grades that are based primarily on your labors and efforts.” That means that your final course letter grade will be based on your engaged participation, regular attendance, and successful completion of assignments and revisions. Like Watson, whose model of grading contracts I borrow from here, I will “continue to hold high standards for completing assignments fully and effectively,” but hope that contract grading will “invite you to feel more comfortable taking risks, making mistakes, and being transparent about your questions and stances.” You decide your final course grade. (Pluses and minuses are at the instructor’s discretion.) 

Generally, as should be clear from the expectations in this syllabus, you’ll need to attend most classes for close to their full duration, and be prepared and present for the entire time you are here. Being a few minutes late a few times in a semester is understandable, but we may need to talk if lateness becomes a problem. If things come up, including technology issues, please let me know. Get the contact information for people in class who seem friendly. I’ll give you time for this in the first few course meetings. These friendly people can help fill you in about what you might occasionally miss, and you can return the favor. 

As part of this grading contract, you agree to participate in ways that best fit you and that are most appropriate for each day’s goal (by actively listening, taking notes, asking questions, offering comments, etc.). You agree to work cooperatively and collegially in groups, to share your work, to listen supportively to the work of others, and, when called for, give full and thoughtful assessments that help your peers rethink and revise. 

More specifically, the grading contract includes some consideration of the assignments, low stakes and high, that make up your grade for the term. Half of these are formal; half are informal. There are different options for students contracting for different grades. Whatever grade you are contracting for, the main goal is timely completion of the best work possible. I imagine that work to be writing that takes risks, that reflects effort and energy, that imagines an audience beyond just your teacher, and a purpose beyond meeting the minimum requirements of the assignment. 

Below is a list of the specific kinds and amounts of formal and informal writing required to honor your grading contract: 

Informal Work (50%)

  • Freewriting (five minutes at the start of each class, totalling between 3,000 and 5,000 words over the semester)

This assignment, which we’ll share in various ways and respond to as new writing, works directly toward the two overall goals of our class. It is essential. Because the writing is of your own design, you can do anything: journaling, grocery lists, poetry—or you can draw on this collection of work for your prose workshops, for homework and classwork, and to develop ideas in response to the day’s reading. Required for all students.

We’ll use two digital tools to engage the text. The objective this task helps us meet is to learn how to “employ methods of active reading, including annotating, summarizing, questioning and synthesizing” and, while doing that, we’ll “utilize current technologies to assist in the research and presentation of critical and creative writing.” Prose workshops and discussion starter posts will also meet this crucial objective. At least two annotations and one reply to another student are required for each podcast episode, for a total of 30 annotations and 15 replies over the semester. Hypothes.is allows links and even multimedia in annotations. Students may also reply to Discussion Starter Posts with extensive summary-responses in lieu of annotations, if the technology is just not working for you. Required for students contracting for an A or B; strongly encouraged for all students.

  • Prose Workshops

We’ll set up this schedule on our first day. Starting on February 2, several writers will contribute a sentence for us to look at in a set of Google Slides, and a paragraph for us to look at (later in the semester). By making the class our audience, this task becomes one of the primary ways that we will learn to “employ effective rhetorical strategies in order to persuasively present ideas and perspectives.” We’ll also use this to “Employ methods of active reading, including annotating, summarizing, questioning and synthesizing,” since Slides has a Comments feature. Secondarily, this is also an occasion “to apply the rules of English grammar”—though this is more for insights into how to organize sentences than to critique individual errors of grammar, verb tense, syntax etc. Required for students contracting for an A or B; encouraged for all students.

  • Discussion Starter Posts 

I will model these brief summary-response mini-essays with Mixtape. We’ll have two of these most days. It’ll be a little nerve-wracking for you, but this kind of assignment can both get our conversation started and can get you practicing finding out what your peers are interested and engaged in. Like with the prose workshops, it’ll open up some discussions around learning to “employ effective rhetorical strategies in order to persuasively present ideas and perspectives” and it’ll come in handy. After all, I hope you’re writing for your peers as much as you are for me. As blog posts, the reply function will help us develop digital academic literacies. Required for students contracting for an A; encouraged for all students.

  • Classwork (pair and group work) & Homework (usually simple paper assignments) 

Like with freewriting, this aims to meet the two goals in ways that I’ll determine as we go along. Classwork and homework is generally for all students, though occasionally there will be extension work or simplified work for students working under different contracts. Such differentiation will be noted in the assignment (typically on Chalkboard). Required for all students. 

Formal Work 

Essay 1: What is “a cassette world” and are we living in it? 

First Draft: February 9 (in-class)

Revision for Credit: February 21 (to Bb)

Required for all students. In this assignment, you’ll listen to, digitally annotate, verbally discuss, and respond informally in writing to three (3) episodes of the podcast Mixtape: “Dakou,” “Jack and Bing,” and “Cassetternet”. In your essay, you’ll adopt a two-part stance. First, you’ll define from the reading what makes up what host Simon Adler argues is a ‘cassette world.’ Then, drawing on Mixtape, reliable research sources from the open internet and from the Lehman library, and from human beings you might know who lived through the early part of the cassette era, you’ll argue about whether or not Adler is right. In other words, to borrow the language of our course objectives: “Through close reading, annotation, discussion, research, and drafting, you’ll compose a clearly defined claim.” In addition, after a lot of drafting and editing, we’ll prepare this essay for submission on Blackboard. At that point, you’ll also learn how to adhere to the formatting and documenting conventions of the discipline of English. If you have a declared major that uses other conventions, I invite you to share what those formatting and citation conventions are and get used to them.

Essay 2: What is “la brega” and whose lives are shaped by its persistent inequities? 

First Draft: March 21 (in class)

Revision for Credit: March 30 (to Bb)

Required for all students. In this assignment, as in the earlier assignment, you’ll listen to, digitally annotate, verbally discuss, and respond informally in writing to seven (7) episodes of the podcast La Brega. It is available in English or in Spanish. Listen to, respond from, quote using whichever language you prefer. The objectives we’re focusing on here are learning to “utilize literary terminology, critical methods, and various lenses of interpretation.” The best way to learn about critical methods and lenses of interpretation is through reading, comprehending, and working with the concepts found in peer-reviewed academic research. But because these are open-access pieces of audio journalism, there’s going to be some terminology related to this 21st century form of literature. As a result, we’ll increase our use of digital annotation to “locate and critically evaluate print and electronic sources” that help give context to what’s in these digital stories. 

Essay 3: What is the ‘sound’ of 1980 and what makes it both ‘of its time’ and of our own?

Required for all students. In this assignment, as we have all semester, you’ll listen to, digitally annotate, verbally discuss, and respond informally in writing to five (5) audio essays by poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib written and produced for Lost Notes: 1980. Because each of these pieces engages a particular artist’s biography and a particular work of theirs, these two modes of engaging the material will be an important part of our work learning how to “integrate primary and secondary sources” into academic essays. It will be pretty challenging, but just do your best and you’ll learn how to “compose a well-constructed essay that develops a clearly defined claim of interpretation which is supported by close textual reading.”

Portfolio 

This assignment is only required for students who are contracting for an A or a B. 

If you are contracting for an A: Create a website using CUNY Academic Commons. (I’ll show you how). Publish REVISED versions of your first two essays on that site. (The third one is probably too new to get a revised version of, but you’ll do something else with it.) You’ll also publish a sampling of your informal work—3-5 examples of freewrites, outlines, sketches, etc, anything I haven’t graded or responded to—along with brief explanations of how these “artifacts” show your learning over the semester. 

If you are contracting for a B: You won’t create a website or revise your work. But you will compose an oral or written self-assessment drawing on examples from your work this semester, and you’ll present it briefly to our class at the end of the semester. 

If you are contracting for a C: This assignment is encouraged.