Hello 372;

Due to the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic and in accordance with guidance from the English department, I have revised the course syllabus to offer three options for grade distribution. You can see these options below and on our course website.

For the sake of expediency, please post your questions on our private group Facebook page so everyone can see my answers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/english470/

But, please do not hesitate to send a private email at any time.

I will distribute Comment sheets this week with updated grades. Please do not feel rushed or anxious about making the choice as to which option is in your best interest. Due dates are now flexible and late penalties are excused.

Option One: For those of you completing the course the grade distribution remains the same:

• 30%: 9 Blog Assignments
• 20%: Dialogues
• 30%: Conference Presentation
• 20%: Final Paper

Reweighed Grade Options:

Option # Two

• 9 Blogs: 50 %
• Dialogues: 50%

Option # Three

• 9 Blogs 50%
• Dialogues: 20%
• Final Paper: 30%

The above options require that students complete Unit Three to receive a complete grade.

The Conference is much trickier; i.e. there are four members in each team that all need to make the same choice to continue smoothly to the end of the semester. Under these circumstances research teams can be as small as two people and as large as five people.

NOTE: Due dates from March 16^th forward are flexible (the day campus closed) – there will be no late penalties applied.

The final date for submitting assignments is Friday April 17^th.

Please notify me with an email that has one of these three subject lines:

1. Engl. 372 Completing course
2. Engl. 372 Option Two
3. Engl. 372 Option Three

Good Monday Morning English 372;

I hope you are all well and adjusting to this strange and scary situation. I am back at work today with the goal of updating all of your evaluation sheets as quickly as possible. I am also answering your emails fast as I can. I will limit my comments on your evaluation sheets in the interest of completing this task quickly.  Once I have updated everyone, I will rewrite and repost our Syllabus – I am aiming for Friday. April 3rd. In the meantime, if you wish to continue working – please do so.

The best way to communicate your choice of the three options posted on the previous post, is to send me an email with a subject line that reads one of the following:

• 301 Re-weight my Grade
• 301 Withdraw with W
• 301 Change Registration

Please do not stress yourself, you have time to make this decision.  As you consider your options, please read the following conclusion to the email I received from the Head of the Department, thank you all.

Arts Academic Advising will be available Monday-Friday to answer your questions as responsively as we can, but please be aware that processes and timelines are still being developed. We will do everything we can to support students who had applied to graduate this term; please understand that it has to be a priority to make it possible for them to complete their degree. Information is changing rapidly right now. We remain committed to your academic success and will provide you with additional information as soon as possible. Please continue to follow public health guidelines and work with your instructors, knowing that we will be in touch shortly.

Good Tuesday everyone;

O.K. we all have some choices to make and I want to work toward as much flexibility for people as possible. I figure there are two ends to your feelings as a class; at one end there are people who really want to focus on school work during this crisis and at the other end there are people who can no longer focus on their school work during this crisis. I land in about the middle myself. The way I see it, we are all in the same boat, but some are in the bow some are midship and some are in the stern, and we all have the same goal: to stay afloat and make our way through this semester with no casualties.

I will say one thing about how I am viewing this crisis, personally; I believe Mother Nature is giving us all a “Time Out!!’ – She has sent us to our rooms alone to think about the mess we have made of our planet and quite frankly the ways we govern ourselves as a peoples.

Now, onto our options. First, no matter which option you choose you need to be aware of the following message I received from the Head of the English Department;

Should the course instructor wish to make a material change to the syllabus after the last day by which students are permitted to drop the course without receiving a ‘W’ on the transcript, the course instructor must explain the rationale to the class. The course instructor must ensure that registered students have access to the changed details in a revised and dated version of the syllabus and should send electronic communication to students to alert them that a change has been made.

O.K. – so what that says to me, is no matter the outcome, if anyone is unhappy with their final grade, there is a clear course of action to be followed. First, talk with the Instructor, next ….. . I hope that elevates stress.

Now, our options:

“Some faculty will also be implementing “reweighting”, meaning that your total work to-date in the course will constitute your entire grade. Specifics about what will happen in each course will be up to the instructor, but all are being encouraged to be as generous as possible under the very difficult circumstances of the pandemic.”

I like the above option, but in our case, I need to complete the Unit three evaluations before many of you are able to make this choice with a sense of security, and I will, there is no panic or rush to make your individual choice as to which option is best for you. And, of course, not all team members will want to choose the same option – but, we will deal with that when the time comes, no worries.

Next, I quote the message from the Head:

1. Students who believe that their grades have been negatively impacted by this unprecedented global crisis will be able to withdraw from their course with a W, with no credit received and no tuition refund. We will offer more information regarding the implications of this choice by the end of the week, along with a form to request the W.
2. A third alternative will be to request that Arts Advising change your registration in any or all of your courses (including two-term courses) to Credit/D/Fail standing. These standings will appear on your transcript, and we will offer more information regarding the implications of this choice as well as how to apply for it later this week. The standing works as follows:

• “Credit” is assigned when the grade is 55% or higher. Degree credit is earned.
• “D” is assigned when the grade is 50-54.9%. Degree credit is earned.
• “F” is assigned for grades below 50%. Degree credit is not earned.

And finally, the best way to communicate your choice of these three options, is to send me an email with a subject line that reads one of the following:

• 372 Re-weight my Grade
• 372 Withdraw with W
• 372Change Registration

NOTE – remembering to put the course number before the option will be helpful 🙂

As I say above, you have time to make this decision, I am still taking the remainder of the week off. The first case of the Corona Virus has hit the little Island I live on – and I now have 5 other people sewing mask and everyone is collecting elastic and fabric. Next Monday, I will be back in full force and focused for you all. As you consider your options, please read the following conclusion to the email I received from the Head of the Department, thank you all.

Arts Academic Advising will be available Monday-Friday to answer your questions as responsively as we can, but please be aware that processes and timelines are still being developed. We will do everything we can to support students who had applied to graduate this term; please understand that it has to be a priority to make it possible for them to complete their degree. Information is changing rapidly right now. We remain committed to your academic success and will provide you with additional information as soon as possible. Please continue to follow public health guidelines and work with your instructors, knowing that we will be in touch shortly.

Again, breath as deep as you can often and listen to your favourite music and vision a new future for us – set you minds on creating positive paths out of this chaos. Thank you all.

A small note on language: the word “slave’ as in — My ancestors were ‘slaves’ – is a noun that names without recognizing, or one could say, with hiding the act of enslaving people.

As if a person is innately ‘a slave’ – so, try to replace ‘slave’ with enslaved’ – this way there is an actor; a guilty party who is the enslaver.

So, “My ancestors were slaves.” becomes “My ancestors were enslaved”

Even better, would be to name the act and the enslavers, “My ancestors were captured and enslaved by the British … , or the Spanish, or the Dutch, or the USA or …..

Hello 372;

It is time to submit your three favourite blogs from the first two units for evaluation. The best way to do that is to post a blog with links to the three and a short intro to each blog. I will be reading through blogs steadily all of the upcoming week, so the sooner, the better. Thank you!

“Home’ is where the heart lives”

Here is something else to think about that words ‘do’ – with words we create metaphors, and metaphors are both real and not real. “

***

At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons.

“Being active in all kinds of social media myself, I have a couple of good examples of the advantages and disadvantages of social media.”

It is interesting how many people read my question as a prompt to measure advantages and disadvantages of new digital technologies. Why is that? The question explains itself clearly enough. I am asking people to think about technical advances in context with orality and literature, most specifically in context with a narrative that wants us to think in divisive and hierarchical categories. The question is providing “ the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality,…”

So, why do so many responses go directly to categorizing the impacts into good and bad; advantages and disadvantages? – this is the same old narrative that wants to divide and categorize; to create binaries and make judgements: good and bad. This is the narrative that needs to be ‘unlearned’.

I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?

With a Great Title:

The Mutual Interdependency of Oral and Written Culture

Titles are wonderful, please do invent titles for all of your blogs. Visuals are really nice too.

Sometimes I get involved with your dialogues and can’t help but to stop and add to the conversation. I’ll post on your blog when that happens, but I also post here snippets of our conversations; simply for your interest and my increased sense of connecting with you all.

Here is a conversation from this morning:

Assignment 1:5 The Young Girl’s Story of Evil

Thank you for a great story Maya, I too appreciated the conversational ‘a la King’ style – and couldn’t help thinking about the ‘second truth’ you talk about in your previous blog : The second truth is the formalities of expression, which are separate from us. King writes in a story-telling style, a conversational style – this is a ‘formality of expression – otherwise called a ‘genre’: the story-telling genre of literature. This is actually quite a complex conversation. Because categorizing, which is what we are doing when we ‘make’ genres’ and then expect writers and readers and story-tellers to stay inside of the ‘formalities of expression that each category we make requires in order to be ‘truthful’ or ‘correct’. A little like Chamberlin eating his pees with the fork (was it a fork?), at any rate, it was the ‘incorrect’ way to eat pees according to the formalities of that table’s eating practices. The point here being: genre making is a powerful tool which can both oppress and liberate ‘stories’. And as such, this is a good thing for us to be thinking about in the effort to understand colonizing narratives. Thank you.

***

“I am eager to learn much more about Canada’s indigenous people through the literature we will be engaging with.”

NOTE: Canadian / Indigenous-> both are proper names, and both need capitalizing. Of course, we often read material in which Canadians are capitalized but Indigenous, or First Nations is missing the capital, and this is a reflection of the power of language to oppress and discriminate (silently).

Good Saturday ‘it’s February already?- 372

I am up bright and early with the birds and the sun determined to get comment sheets out to all of you today. Many of you have received my comments, but too many of you have not. I like to be able to connect with each of you before the end of our first cycle, which is what I like to call the units – cycles. Alas, I am late, but I am old too. And, elders have special privileges that young people do not have because we are smarter — and we need more sleep.

I will post on FB today as well as here. As I read through your Blogs, I will make some of my comments open to all of you when I come across common mis-understandings (for example when to capitalize Indigenous and Aboriginal *always, just like Canadian and European), and interesting questions or even lovely sentences, sometimes. I’ll share some links, here and on our FB page – I always double up what I put on FB because some people do like to be there.

So, here I go; I begin the reading-dialoguing process once again – hot coffee beside me and the sun rising out my window in the east ….

I hope you all have a lovely Saturday

Good Tuesday morning;

I have started our Student Blog page this morning with the first link received, thank you Georgia Masaki. You can post the link to your blog on our Chat Page via Canvas, or our Group page; whichever you prefer to use.  I will add you to the Student Blog as you post. Reading each other’s introductory Blogs is how we will begin to come to know each other and begin our process of working together. I look forward to learning a little bit about each of you and putting our ideas together.