English 1006G: An Introduction
Up front:
Although its official title is "Introduction to Literature," English 1006, as I teach it, is really an introduction to English -- to how the language works, both written and oral, and to how you can get to be a better user of it. I hope that after the next few months you'll not only understand more than you already do about how the language works, but also be a better writer, a better reader, a better listener, and a better researcher: a more effective learner, in lots of ways. "Literature" is only one of the kinds of language we'll be attending to.
At St. Thomas the first year English course is shaped by the English department's statement of goals for first year courses. It's worth considering this document with some care, because it suggests some things we might be doing, and not doing, that will probably surprise you. "English," in other words, may not be quite what you think. We'll spend a fair bit of time in the first few sessions talking about that document, and what it means for how I organize the course.
What it's all about:
The most important thing I can say about this course here at the beginning is to explain that it is a course about learning itself. Besides helping you change some of your ideas, and practices, and abilities to deal with written texts of various kinds, I'm also hoping to help you become an even better learner than you are already, and to think differently about what learning is than you probably do now.
Most of the things you do in connection with the course will be aimed at getting some particular task done -- finding an article, story, or book; explaining an idea or an experience or a reading to others in the class; persuading other people to do something you want to do or read something you think they should read; getting a wiki page or blog or forum posting onto the computer network. More important, those things will also be occasions for learning about the process itself. They'll be designed to help you learn things like how to find articles, books and ideas in the library, how to read more critically and responsively, how to explain things more clearly (in writing and orally), how to use tools for communicating (like computer networks) effectively.
One important way this course is peculiar is that one of its fundamental ideas is that learning can happen even if you don't succeed at the main task itself. When you come back from the library empty-handed, or when your reader says "I don't get it," or when your wiki page disappears without trace, that can be just as valuable a learning experience as it would have been if you'd succeeded. In fact, we usually learn more from failures than successes. (One of my favourite writers, Louis Menand, says, "You can't learn when you're afraid of being wrong." Another way to say this might be that failing is not the same thing as being a failure.)
In other words, even if you "fail" to achieve the particular job you were trying to accomplish, you're almost certainly learning something -- and the more open you are to taking a risk that might lead to that kind of failure, the more likely you are to learn. In most educational situations, failures are "averaged in" with successes, which means every failure comes with a penalty, and you can never entirely escape it (once you have an "F," you can never have an "A" average, and so can never get an A). I don't think that makes sense. If we learn by failing, why would our failures follow us around forever? Isn't that a way to make us so worried about failing that we don't take any chances?
Accordingly, I try to create an environment in which it's okay to take risks. I try to attend to what people learn, and know they learn, rather than to whether they fail or succeed at tasks. Centrally important is whether people get actively involved in the process. And being involved means taking initiative, asking questions, starting things: taking risks. Not waiting passively for orders to carry out, and then carrying them out to the letter.
The rest of this introduction to the course is set up as answers to questions you might have. If you have others that aren't asked here (and thus not answered), let me know. If I think they're of interest to lots of other people, I'll add them to this document. Here are the questions I'm anticipating.
What does St. Thomas mean when it calls this "a first year English course"?
What will I actually be doing in class, and between classes, from day to day?
If you're reading this online, you can click on them to take you to the relevant section of the document.
What a first year English course is:
At St. Thomas University, the English department agreed many years ago on a set of goals that any section of English 1006 should strive to achieve. They are listed in the statement of goals I mentioned, which you can read by clicking on that link. The goals include attention to things like this: how students read and deal with texts (poems, stories, plays, nonfiction); how they write and read; how they use libraries, computer resources, and the Internet; and how they learn. How any individual section of English 1006 does that -- what people read, what kinds of writing assignments there are, whether there are group assignments, class discussions, or lectures -- is decided by each professor. For some teachers, English 1006 is a course in which you read and discuss poems and plays drawn from an anthology, a collection assembled for that purpose; for others it isn't. You will probably find that this version of English 1006 isn't much like what you expect, on the basis of previous English classes you may have had. My English courses tend to emphasize independent reading and writing and exploration, and a much wider than usual range of reading material and writing tasks.
Some questions you might have now, or might have later, about this course as compared to other English courses, I deal with in separate documents, which I've posted on my Web site. If you're concerned about how I treat grammar and mechanics, or term paper and essay formats, or analyzing literature, or covering the range of English literature, click on that phrase to find what I've got to say about that (or ask me for a copy of the document). These are all things that are approached rather differently in this class than in most, and though you may not see them as issues or problems now, you might later.
We'll be using the word "texts" frequently, and in a variety of ways. When I talk about "texts," I do not mean assigned textbooks you buy in the bookstore. Rather, I'm referring to written material of many different kinds -- newspaper or magazine articles, research reports from scholarly journals, novels, poems, stories, plays, chapters from books, and so on. Much of the written material we use will be written by members of the class. One important kind of writing is found in the "prompts" I'll hand out at the beginning of almost all class meetings, outlining what we're going to be doing. These documents are important. I do this in writing for at least three reasons:
One is that much of what I'm saying may seem pretty complicated and unfamiliar. So, I want everybody to have a chance to read it at her own speed. While there's only one speed to listen at -- the one the speaker chooses, regardless of what suits the listener best -- a piece of writing like this one can be read at whatever speed you like, quickly or slowly -- and it can be reread many times over.
This leads to the second reason: I want to make sure you have a chance to read it over -- and to file it away and keep it to read again later (that's also a reason they are all available on line, on the course Web site). Often a document means a lot more after you've experienced some of what it's talking about.
And a third reason, perhaps the most important one in an English class, is this: I take every opportunity I can to use writing where people are accustomed to talking -- particularly when written communication has advantages over oral communication. I believe that handling written language easily and skillfully -- writing it, reading it, working with it -- is not only the main thing an English course attends to; it's the main thing higher education is about. In fact, it's the main thing participating effectively in a literate society is about. I want to get everyone accustomed to reading things that make a difference, right now. Reading this document carefully and reflecting on it, for example, will have consequences for you.
You won't need to buy a textbook for this course, though you may need to buy a book or two this year. We'll decide that as we go. You may also be assigned to buy tickets -- for example, to attend a theatre performance; I'll assume that is paid for out of what you'd have otherwise spent on textbooks.
As well as reading a large variety of texts, you'll be writing lots of texts. Usually students write in university in only a couple of ways. They write to take notes in lectures, in anticipation of writing tests and exams. Or they write essays, which, like tests and exams, are to be read by the professor only. In this course, by contrast, you'll never write texts which will be graded. That's not to say, by the way, that they won't be evaluated; the evaluation, though, will be the kind of evaluation you expect when you say something in a conversation. A joke works, or it doesn't, and you can tell by whether people laugh. People are persuaded by something you write, or they're not, and you can tell by what they do. The "audience" for almost all the writing you do will be others in the class -- sometimes everybody in the room, sometimes others in a smaller group, occasionally one person. You'll be in situations where you'll want to design your texts so that they inform colleagues of what you have learned, persuade them to make a certain decision, explain how to do something, or co-ordinate and organize your joint activities. Yes, you'll write "formal academic" texts, but you'll write much more that's informal, or formal in different ways.
How all this will work, in class and out:
In university, the usual way of defining how much work a course takes is to say that students spend 150 minutes a week (three 50 minute meetings, or two 75 minute ones) in class, and usually about twice that in work outside of class. I do it a bit differently: I think one class out of the five which is a full-time load should be about one-fifth of a full work week. A full work week is about 35-40 hours; a fifth of that is seven or eight hours. Those hours will usually include 150 minutes of class time, but not always: my view is that three credit hours per term reflects seven or eight "learning hours" a week, whether spent actually sitting in class or working outside -- in the library, on line, sitting in the cafeteria reading, whatever. If you put that amount of time into this class, you'll do well.
It probably won't be a surprise that a substantial amount of the work of this course will be on line. All the documents organizing the course will be available on the course Web site; much of the communication between those of us involved in the class will be online -- by email, online discussion forums, wikis, blogs, etc. You can read more about this on my page on online work.
During the first few weeks of the term, we'll be looking at how we read and write texts and how they affect us (and how our own texts, and those of others, are shaped by our fundamental values and convictions). We'll spend some time finding and reading some texts. In general, in the first term of English 1006 the texts we work with are prose, and mostly nonfiction (we may engage with "the real world" by attending plays or readings; that will be announced as we go). We'll be sharing texts we read with others and persuading others to read them, and deciding on some to pay special attention to. Particularly, we'll be looking at how our reading of a text -- what we understand of it, how we value it, how we react to it -- changes from one person to another, and from one reading to another, and after we've learned more about it. An important question we'll be keeping in mind is what kinds of roles our own beliefs, assumptions, and values play in our reading. We'll explore how they shape the way we understand texts and how we react to them. Just as important, we'll look at how those texts affect our own beliefs, assumptions, and values -- regularly without our being aware of it at all.
During second term we'll repeat the pattern of the first term; we'll be working with more traditional literary texts -- poems, drama, fiction -- and working toward a new understanding of the way language works in this more "literary" reading.
Having read this far, you probably won't be surprised that marking might work differently than you expect. The short way of saying how it works is that I don't mark your work as we go, or use percentages or averages of those marks toward a final mark. I keep track of how much work you do, and establish a minimum mark between C- and B depending on how much of the assigned work you complete. Doing all of it, or nearly all (it's rare that someone doesn't miss an assignment or class meeting) guarantees a B; usually about 3/4 of it guarantees a pass. I also invite you to keep a regular "learning journal" and use that as a basis for composing a final "learning reflection," which I evaluate rather like an examination; if it gives evidence of learning better than that established by the minimum, that's the mark you'll get; if not, you'll get the minimum determined by how much work you've done. That's how you get a mark higher than the B range. You can read a fuller explanation of this process, and the reasons for it, by clicking on my policy on evaluation.
You'll need to activate your St. Thomas email address. You can easily set it to direct email to your regular off-campus address, but in order to participate in this course you'll need to send and receive email from your STU address (it'll be in the form hijkl@stu.ca). You'll need to be checking your email fairly frequently; you'll also need to go to the course Web site (and the associated Moodle site) pretty regularly, as much of the communication, and work, of the class will be done there.
I'm Russ Hunt. I much prefer to be called Russ. If you're uncomfortable with that, as many people are (I'm quite a lot older than most students, and people sometimes find first names a problem), please avoid "Professor Hunt" or "Doctor Hunt." They make me uncomfortable, partly because university custom means I have to address you by your first name. To avoid discomfort, use "Your Excellency." You can reach me by email at hunt@stu.ca (this is much the best way), or by stopping by Casey Hall 308, or by calling extension 424 (if you're off campus, 452-0424). I'm in my office Tuesday and Thursday mornings and early afternoons (rarely between 11:45 and 1:15). I'm also frequently on campus Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but not predictably. To set up a specific time, email or call.
Finally:
This is all supposed to be fun. And it can be, at least if you think working hard with others, and learning things, can be fun -- me, I think it's the best kind of fun people actually have.