Peter Blakemore
Office: 134 Creative Arts
Office Hrs: M&W 10-11:30
and by appointment
In the Writing Center: T&Th 8:30-9:55
Phone: 476-4314
email: peter-blakemore@redwoods.edu
http:// www.redwoods.edu/instruct/pblakemore
At the center of any really valuable college education must be critical thinking. Thinking critically has little to do with the common ideas about being harsh or insensitively honest or merely picky. In order to think critically you will have to engage in the process of inquiry. To approach topics and issues from the perspective of inquiry requires that you weigh ideas and consider questions you or others might have regarding claims. Most importantly, inquiry means wanting to understand an issue well enough that you can come to conclusions about your own beliefs. This is a process that is generally not taught in school before college in America, so many of you will have had little rigorous practice in the art of inquiry. Though it is a process many of us engage in every day-such as when we decide to consult movie reviewers before shelling out $8 or $9 for a movie-it's also true that most people don't reflect on how carefully and critically they inquire into ideas before coming to belief. College, then, must be one of the primary places where we engage in inquiry consciously. We do this not because it will help us to earn more money after graduation (though it almost certainly will); we do this so that we can prepare ourselves to examine and know the world, nature, our nation, our cultures, our communities, and ourselves as thoroughly as possible. As you might have guessed, this process can be quite difficult-sometimes frustrating, often confusing or even exasperating, and nearly always quite complicated-yet I hope you will realize how important learning this art can be. It can liberate you, enrich your mind, and open your eyes to patterns, systems, and new ways of seeing.
Each of you will have something of your own agenda, as I have mine. As I see it, the most important reason for you to learn inquiry and how to communicate the fruits of your inquiry is that it should help you to be a better informed, more involved, more thoughtful and even more compassionate member of the community. This in turn should benefit you, me, and most everyone else you will come into contact with during the rest of your life. (Yes, I am serious about all of this.) Toward that end of modeling and practicing inquiry, I will ask you to imagine the classroom as a community akin to the wider world beyond the college- actually, the fact that we gather in this same space twice a week to discuss the world already makes this group a community. With your effort, reading, thinking, discussing, arguing, and writing we will all come together to shape a classroom community. That said, welcome!
All of our writing this term will be based on things we read and view and the discussions that flow out of those readings and viewings. The texts we read will be fairly complex, so they will require concentration and careful analytical thinking. On most of the days when reading has been assigned, we'll start class with brief writings to answer the Basic Reading Questions (in the Course Packet on pages ) identify main ideas and authorial intentions (the writer's thesis, either stated or implied) in order to get to the central issues at the heart of our reading. In the same in-class writings you will be asked to come up with questions you have about the reading or about ideas that arise within your mind after reading the essay. You will also be asked to write out a brief response describing and exploring your thoughts or emotions about the essay. If you come to class without having done the reading for that day, you will lose credit for the in-class writing and your participation during the subsequent discussion will likely be of a fairly low order. Obviously, missing more than one of these in-class writings will significantly affect your grade, but more importantly, your failure to take the time to think through the reading in advance of our discussion will hurt the class in general and will affect your ability to write an interesting, meaningful essay. To ensure that doesn't happen, make out a schedule and block out specific times during the week when you will be able to give your reading the undivided attention necessary to truly engage the ideas (see page ? of the CP for a copy of a weeklong schedule). You should expect to be reading at least 50-80 pages or more a week. You should always be prepared to write in class and discuss our readings on the days they are listed in our schedule. You should not expect to pass this class without doing all of the reading. If you are having trouble keeping up, let me know immediately -DON'T WAIT UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE! DON'T WAIT UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE!
I am also going to ask you to pay careful attention to the ways that you work with your reading. We will take time during the first couple weeks to practice the art of active reading by exploring our reasons for selecting passages from the texts we read and by examining and discussing the kinds of questions and comments we write in the margins. If you have never written in a book or on a copy of something you've read in the past, this will be new to you. Don't worry! We'll do it together in class first.
Our writing will be directly related to the questions and ideas that arise out of our reading and discussion. Because writing about inquiry requires a rigorous process of examination, critical assessment of ideas, reflection, and revision, you will need to set aside enough time to actively engage this process. Don't sell yourself short by thinking you can whip out an essay in 30 or 40 minutes. The best way to approach the writing assignments for this class is to think of your reading and discussion as the beginning of a process that begins a writing project. I have built this idea into the course by requiring you to write in class before final essays are due. You should also keep more extensive notes in a journal or on three-ring-binder paper that you save for future use as you work through the process of each writing project. You should also keep notes on any small or large group discussions we have and combine these together with your reading notes in order to accumulate more material for each writing project. Indeed, your essays should begin in these notes to yourself. It would be wise to begin notes to yourself by writing about the thoughts you have regarding our topic. You will want to determine the central question or problem that is at issue in the reading-decide what is "in dispute"-and in your notes begin to draft your answer (or answers) to that question. With feedback from classmates, your instructor, and tutors in the Writing Center, you will begin to learn how others receive your ideas and whether or not what you wanted them to know about your ideas comes across. You will also be required to revise throughout the semester.
I strongly recommend that you keep a Reading Journal. I will not collect or read these journals (unless you would like my feedback and specifically ask me to read them)-they will be for your benefit, and should help you immensely during the time I ask you to respond with in-class writing. If you keep a simple, inexpensive Composition Notebook and use it to jot down notes and ideas while you read for this class, and if you also use it as a place to develop burgeoning ideas that are brewing in the recesses of your mind, you will be able to keep track of how your thoughts are turning and shifting, and you will thus begin digging deeper into ideas you encounter in reading, discussion, television viewing, film and life in general. Having a compact, handy book full of thoughts and feelings is an extremely useful tool for recording ideas, pulling thoughts together, organizing information, and generating valuable material to be used in drafting writing projects.
All Essays (the Inquiry Essay and the two Thesis Essays) need to be posted to Turnitin.com before you can receive credit for them. The process is simple and takes only a few minutes. I will give you a handout explaining the procedure, and you will be able to do it in the Writing Center or anywhere that you have access to the Internet. I have decided to require this not only because the CR English Department recommends it but also because I have had so many cases of plagiarism in the past several years that I want to curb the temptation as much as possible. Plagiarism, which is the act of claiming another writer's words or ideas as your own without citing them as a source, is a serious breech of academic conduct and will result in failure of the assignment and possible failure for the course. We will discuss it in detail during the term. If you aren't sure whether you're about to plagiarize or not, ask an instructor.
Because people operate at various levels of proficiency with the grammar and mechanics of written English, teachers cannot tailor college courses to hit only those aspects each individual has difficulty with. To achieve a balance, a variety of the most common problems will be focused on during the semester. The English Department has agreed on a list of "Minimum Sentence Skills" in which students are expected to show competency. They are: 1) identifying subjects and verbs; 2) identifying dependent & independent clauses and differentiating these from phrases; 3) recognizing and correcting fragments; 4) recognizing and correcting comma splices & run-ons; 5) vague pronoun reference; 6) pronoun agreement; 7) comma usage; 8) apostrophe usage; 9) semi-colons and colons. To ensure that students in 150 classes understand these concepts, you must complete online exercises and participate in grammar review in the Writing Center and during class time. There will also be regular grammar quizzes during the term and as part of the Final Exam. If I discover persistent problems for individual writers, I will give people Grammar Worksheet Assignments that they will have to complete before receiving final grades on their essays. I might also assign individuals more grammar work online. If you find yourself covering concepts and rules you feel you already know well, good for you! If you find yourself struggling with many of the concepts and doing poorly on writing assignments because of grammatical errors, please come to me for extra help. Feel free to come meet with me in my office as a group or to ask me or any other instructor for grammar help in the Writing Center. Although instructors will not "proofread" your writing, they will help you to understand grammatical concepts that should, in turn, help you with your proofreading.
You must attend every possible class. If you don't, you will not succeed. Every time you come late or leave early, I will count it as 1/2 of an absence. I will not give make-ups on missed in-class writings or quizzes. More than 5 absences will drop your grade a full letter (e.g., from a B down to a C, from a C+ down to a D+, etc.) and more than 7 absences without documentation of medical emergency or other valid reason will cause you to fail the course.
The Assignments
The Essays: We will be writing three out of class essays of different kinds and lengths during the term. The first will be a short, two-page Inquiry Essay in which you will try to discover your ideas through the process of questioning and the development of adequate reasons. We will move on to two longer, three-to-five-page Thesis Essays following the same pattern of inquiry into ideas derived from our reading and discussion but focusing more specifically on thesis and essay structure. For each of the three formal out-of-class essays you will need to attach in-class writings, invention materials and early versions as well as tutorial forms with feedback from Writing Center tutors. Finally, in the last month of the term we will write three in-class essays responding to prompts. The first two will be practice essays and the final writing of the term will be the required 150 Competency Exam, a one-and-a-half-hour in-class writing based on readings I will give you one week before the exam. Note: Do not expect to pass this class without handing in all of the writing assignments. Also, make sure you never give me the only copy of an assignment-it is your responsibility to keep backup copies (electronic or on paper).
Grading: I will give you credit for class work on the following basis:
Grades will be assigned on the basis of this scale: 93-100=A / 90-92=A- / 88-89=B+ / 83-87=B / 80-82=B- / 78 - 79=C+ / 70 - 77=C / 60 - 69=D / 59 and below=F.