English 1006T
18 September 2003

Questions about English 1006T

Here are the questions I received by email, and some responses to them. I've fixed spelling and other errors to make sure we can focus on what the questions are asking. My responses are in italics after the question. If you've got a question you didn't think of before, or which is raised by reading this, or which isn't sufficiently explained here, send it to me and I'll add it.

You'll notice that some of the questions are ones that I think are already answered in the course materials. I am aware that many people, maybe most, have a hard time reading extended documents and knowing, afterward, everything they said. That's an important part of what I think people need to get better at, in English and in university generally, and what I'm doing by responding to these written questions in writing is trying to help people do that. In some cases I'm simply sending you back to the document. Reading things twice or more is not a bad thing at all -- especially when you're reading with a different goal (for instance, to answer a specific question).

Also, if you'd like to see the questions the class two years ago asked about a document very similar to this one, you can check that here:  http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/10060102/faq.htm

Writing

How many essays will we have to do during both terms? Will we have to read books and write reviews on them?  This course doesn't require formal "essays." I think it's worth looking at what I have to say about "analyzing literature" on the Web site (I've just added a bit to it, addressing this and wider issues).

I was also curious about why we don't concentrate on so many things other professors cover such as grammar and mechanics in reading our work, term papers and essay formats, analyzing literature, etc.? If none of this is really important to our learning, why do so many classes focus on these things? I don't think these thing aren't really important, but I do think the best way to learn them isn't by focusing on them specifically.  Again, I've addressed some of this in the "analyzing literature" document.

In the prompt you say that we will never be writing for you.  From what I understand from reading the course outline etc, we will eventually be posting our writing online for others to respond to, correct?  Am I right to assume that you will be responding to our writing like the rest of the class, or will your role be simply the 'silent' observer? I'm never silent, much as I try to be sometimes.  I'll be offering to respond in the traditional "English teacher" way to anybody's writing when they want me to, but usually what I'll be doing is what I'm doing here: responding directly, as a conversational partner, rather than as an English teacher, assessing your writing for coherence, clarity, mechanics, etc.

I’m curious as to whether or not we’ll be asked to produce any fiction during our time in this course. That was always my favorite aspect of high school English classes. I know we'll be reading novels and poetry, so I think creating our own poems or stories could be beneficial. I've never been comfortable assigning fiction or poetry (my view is that people who write it, write it, and those who don't, don't, and assigning it in class doesn't change them), and there probably aren't many occasions in this course when it'll be an appropriate -- but there might well be.  Watch for them.

Reading

When you say that we will be participating in choosing what we read, I am assuming that you will be involved with this decision like the Chomsky articles we chose from.  If this is the case, I find this to be and extremely interesting way of learning.  While I wished that some people had written in more detail on their yellow sheet about the article they had read, I really enjoyed seeing different perspectives and learning about what other people read and learned about topics that I was reading and learning about.  People get more comfortable with the process of writing about what they've read as well as talking about it, and my experience is that this gets more and more useful as time goes on.

Will it all be responses about what we think about the author and what we think about what other people think or will there be more critical analysis later on? I'm not sure what you mean by "critical analysis," but if you mean what I mean, yes.  There'll be a great deal of it .
First off I have a question about novels that we'll be reading. You mention that we get to choose our own and so if we do is it from a list that you give us or just randomly and book that we choose; if so how will discussion develop if we're all reading different books?  The process of choosing books is part of what the course is about, and mostly what will happen is that it will be collaborative: we'll negotiate what books will be read by groups and by the whole class. 

Are we mostly all going to be reading and analysing the same texts? Or will it be a lot of different texts being read and analysed at the same time by different people? First the second, then the first.  We move (as we are with the first set of texts) from texts that individuals have read, toward finding ones we all want to pay attention to.

I have another question about the books we'll be reading -- if we'll be reading books that other people in English classes are reading (the classics). I would really like the opportunity to read these and I was unsure if we'll be covering them. . . . Are we going to generally be doing the same literature, texts, poems etc. as the other English classes?? If you look at the lists of "books that other people in English classes are reading (the classics)" you'll find that they don't overlap much.  I suspect, in fact, that you won't be able to find a book that's read by more than two or three. And since we'll be negotiating what we choose to read, you'll have a chance to argue that we should read whatever you see as particularly important.  But my view of what "the classics" are is different from every other person who teaches English 1006, and theirs are different from each other.

I was quite surprised by how incredibly different this class will be not only from the regular first-year English classes, but also from the other section of the Aquinas Programme. They have already read Beowulf and the Iliad. I was just wondering how it was possible for us to not come out behind other first year students if we haven't looked at all the great works. . . . Next year will I be behind everyone else because of the fact that I am in this particular program?? No.  You might be "behind," but not because you were in this program. There are no texts that second year English expects you to have read. If you look at the English department's aims for English 1006, you'll see what second year courses expect, and we'll work on those issues probably more, and more explicitly, than most sections.

Will there be any particular themes covered in the texts? Not that I'm aware of, because what texts we use will depend on a process of negotiated choice.  But there might be . . . for instance, right now the theme is something like "belief and the media."

Classroom, evaluation

Is the work in this class going to be primarily individual or in groups? or perhaps a bit of both? I'm not sure exactly what this means, because I believe, with Robert Frost, that people "work together, whether they work together or apart." When you were reading "The Missing News" in order to have a discussion about it in class, were you working individually?  Well, yes, but you were also participating in a group activity: you'd never have read that "on your own."  On the other hand, when you talk about it in a group in order to make a recommendation to the rest of us, you're still an individual, making your own arguments and arriving at your own conclusions.  I guess the short answer is "a bit of both" -- and a lot of the time you won't be able to tell the difference.

General

I was a little bit confused about when you said that this is a course about learning itself. could you explain a little further? Ah, I'll try, but it's pretty long to set out here.  The short version is that most people think of learning as acquiring facts and skills and storing them away for future use, whereas most people who study it think of it as more fundamental than that: when you learn thatMacbeth was written around 1600 and is about what it is to be a man, that's one thing; when you experience the profound desperation of knowing Macbeth has somehow put himself in this terrible position where death is the only reasonable outcome, your way of being in the world might change.  That's what I call learning.

Is there no set time for the classes?? I drive a carpool but the times for classes seem to vary everyday...will this be an issue for the people I drive?? I think we've dealt with this: the formally organized day begins at 10:00 (very occasionally earlier, but there'll be warning and alternatives) and ends at 4:00.

Will we ever be totally relying on the website for an assignment or prompt, or will we always get additional or primary notice of such things in class? No, I think the face-to-face meetings in G6 (or the library, or wherever) will stay central.  There have been times, though, when the Web or email has become the main communication medium on a particular occasion -- for instance, a class cancellation because of a storm or illness, etc.

Occasions

This question doesn't really have anything to do with English in particular but with occasions...if 6 go to the same play lets say, but 2 go one night and 4 the next...does that still count??? Yes.  The same applies to gallery exhibitions.

I just wanted to ask you about a lingering thought of mine in terms of occasions.  I really enjoyed my first two and if the opportunity does arise and I wanted to attend more than five or six and write about them, is this a problem? No problem at all.  For one thing, we're more happy the more things people go to (what's the down side?) There might be times when your attending and writing about one will enable it to count for someone else (that's a good thing, obviously).  But I think it's interesting that the question should come up, because it's evidence of something I believe about education and learning: if you pay people for something (by giving them marks, for instance, or requiring it for a course), it makes them less likely to be interested in it for itself.  If I offered to pay people to eat ice cream cones, I bet I'd get the question, well, how many do I have to eat?  Or -- as in this case -- if I offered to pay you to eat six, someone might ask, well, suppose I wanted to eat more?

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