Reading reactions
You should actively participate in class, do all the readings, and discuss them outside of class. To that end, you should send me reactions to at least 14 of our readings over Canvas. You may (and should) also engage with questions you see posted on Slack. However, it’ll be up to me to decide whether a comment engages with the assigned reading and adds to the discussion, meaningfully.
After you finish working through the content, I want to hear about what you learned and what questions you still have. These questions are crucial for our in-class discussions.
To encourage engagement with the course content—and to allow me to collect the class’s questions each week—you’ll need to fill out a short response on Canvas. This should be ≈150 words. That’s fairly short: there are ≈250 words on a typical double-spaced page in Microsoft Word (500 when single-spaced).
These check-ins are due by 11:55 PM on the day before class. This is so I can look through the responses and start structuring the discussion for our class.
Each of your reading reactions should answer these two questions:
- What were the two (2) most interesting or exciting things you learned? Why?
- What were the two (2) muddiest or unclear things? What are you still wondering about?
You can include more than two interesting or muddiest things, but you must include at least two. There should be four easily identifiable things in each reaction: two exciting things and two questions.
I will grade your reaction using a check system:
- ✔+: (1.1 point) Response shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
- ✔: (1 point) Response is thoughtful, well-written, and shows engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
- ✔−: (0.5 point) Response is hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.
Notice that is essentially a pass/fail or completion-based system. I’m not grading your writing ability, I’m not counting the exact number of words you’re writing, and I’m not looking for encyclopedic citations of every single reading to prove that you did indeed read everything. I’m looking for thoughtful engagement, two interesting things, and two questions. That’s all. Do good work and you’ll get a ✓.
You will submit these reading reactions via Canvas, not Slack. We will use Slack as a separate class chatroom, and so everyone can see my answers to any questions you may have for me. I’m sure you won’t be the only one with your question!