- 10% preparation and participation:
- weekly short commentary on reading
- submission: Canvas discussion
- assignment description and marking: Canvas > Week 2 discussion
- due: week 2 onwards
Explanation
Quick short version
Welcome to the world of post-Medieval / Medievalist commentary! Before our Friday class: prepare
- a quick question,
- a long question,
- and a passage/excerpt from this week’s reading that you found striking; comment here below as to why (you’ll also be working on this in class). It could be an episode/scene, a few lines, a metaphor or image, a concept, a word …
Write that as one post in “reply” to this week’s discussion. If one of your questions or your comment is related to what someone else has already written here, please post in reply to them; this is a threaded discussion.
Long version
[For the first weekly discussion] As this is the first “reading commentary” session proper, I’ll add a few notes. I hope this enables free comment and the progressive building of a community of readers in our course.
- you can post there any time, and as often as you wish, before Friday’s class
- Friday’s class session will be guided by your contributions to the discussion: your questions, comments, replies to others
- in previous courses with this structure, the Friday discussion is often where we fill in background outlines and contextual details: cultural, technological, and historical (in its several senses)
- your / our comments and commentary = on this week’s reading and/or on the Wednesday lecture-part of our classes this week.
What to do
Before our Friday class, accompanying and/or following your reading:
- (1) Ask one simpler question, of the sort that you could answer yourself. Just compose the question: don’t answer it.
- (2) Ask one more difficult question, that would tax an expert or the writer/maker of the text in question. Similarly, just the question, not the answer.
- (3) Comment in response to your readings and our classes this week. Comments can be as simple or complex as you like,
—any length (though they tend to be around a couple of sentences to a paragraph long on average; this can also be audio or video instead of writing),
—in any form or style (so long as it’s coherent and comprehensible),
—might include links (images, sites, resources, etc.),
—and pertaining to any aspect of or angle on the reading, lectures, and discussions. - These are your reactions to your reading, by you the individual reader and critic.
- As the course progresses, for (3) above you might choose to:
—comment
—comment on an earlier comment, thus starting a conversation / discussion-thread
—or comment on a comment on an earlier comment
—etc.: this section of the course site allows for nested comment-threads…
NB: You are of course at liberty to write more, and more frequently, and to add further comments. Whether you prefer to wax eloquent or to be aphoristic is a matter of personal style. You can keep adding comments, and questions, and so on all through the course.
Criteria, form, length
- Write in the Canvas discussion textbox, or record audio or video directly there.
- No lower or upper word-limit: aim for interest and quality of ideas. You all think and write differently, and your ideas will also vary, so I expect some replies to be wordier than others.
- For weekly discussions like this one, you may use tools to help with the mechanics of your writing (which isn’t graded), in the interests of best communicating your ideas (which are important): dictionaries, synonym-dictionaries, online spell-checking and grammar-checking.
- Do not use GenAI tools to generate ideas, including as a substitute for reading: that’s missing the point of this exercise, of learning, and of university arts/humanities work. Also, your audience isn’t just me: it’s a whole class of fellow students for whom cheating in a discussion would be disrespectful to their work and them, and a betrayal of the trust that is the foundation (or heart, or roots, choose your metaphor …) of a community of peers.
- Your writing here can be individual or collective: if you are reading together with other students from class as a group, you can post as a group. Make sure to add all of your names each time.
Advice about reading
especially if you’re worried about not finishing the week’s reading before Friday’s class:
- Be aware that I know that reading speeds and experiences vary, and I know that some weeks will be heavier for you (for me too).
- Being a course that’s about literature, our course will necessitate time for reading outside class time
- The usual expectation in designing university undergraduate humanities courses is: 3 hours outside class per hour in class, on average, for preparation and assignments
- This will vary from week to week, and there are ways to reduce that time and use it more efficiently
- Tip #1: for the first weeks of this course, especially if you are getting (back into) a habit of reading, set yourself regular reading time. Start smaller: don’t try to do 9 hours this week! Try for:
- 1 hour of reading before Wednesday’s class: something like the Pomodoro technique can be helpful, blocks of 15 intense minutes punctuated by pauses. If using an electronic text, make a copy of the PDF so that you can annotate it. If using an audio version, keep a second device (ex. tablet/laptop + smartphone) to record talking to yourself while reading.
- 15-30 minutes after that first reading-hour to collect your thoughts. Make notes—written or audio—and skim-reread what you read in your first reading-hour.
- 1 hour of reading between the end of Wednesday’s class and the start of Friday’s class
- and 15-30 minutes after that second reading-hour to collect your thoughts (notes, reread) and post in the weekly discussion
- Tip #2: Make your reading time focussed, engaged, attentive
- No distractions, except … tea, cookies, cake, appropriate snacks of choice.
- I recommend silence, or being in an environment with light ambient sound (ex. forest, beach, Museum of Anthropology), or music that has no words.
- Tip #3: read together
- You could form a reading-group of 2-6 people from our class
- Plan time (one hour per session) when you will meet and read silently together: library, café, or online
- Set up a private online chat channel to make notes along the way (whatsapp, slack, discord, chat in a zoom session, whatever is easy and comfortable for you)
- Tip #4: don’t rush.
- For this course, it’s better to have read a small part of the set reading closely, deeply, and slowly; than to try to speed-read everything set that week. (It’s also more respectful towards what you are reading.)
- And better to have spent (in the above example) 2.5-3 hours of quality time, than 9 hours multi-tasking or cramming.
- If you like to have a general sense of a text as a whole before you start reading it, Wikipedia is your friend.
The reading advice is quite serious and based on a mixture of
(1) how students—who were very diverse—worked with this kind of course in the past, and
(2) how faculty changed their teaching of reading and their own reading habits during COVID-19 lockdown.
I am still in online reading reading-groups with colleague-friends around the world that date back to that period. For many of us, our reading suffered—some were ill, all of us overworking with no remaining time or energy—and we had to relearn how to read.
Perhaps our time now might become a golden age of reading!
Deadlines
Recommended date of submission:
- of at least your first contribution to the discussion
- (remember, you might add more during Friday’s class or later)
- = Friday January 17, 2:00 p.m., the start of class.
Canvas “due date”:
- a.k.a. soft deadline
- if Canvas says “late” to you, ignore it (as will I)
- = Friday January 17, 11:59 p.m., end of day
Deadline-deadline:
- for a weekly discussion like this, there is no “available until” date after which it would close
- as this is a community activity to which you might be continuing to contribute over the course of the term, its practical end is the last day of our time together as a class: the last day of the teaching term, which is the last day when it would be reasonable to expect students to be doing term-time coursework
- = Tuesday April 8, 11:59 p.m., end of day
Marking rubric (during term, week by week)
- This is the first of 10 such weekly discussions, each for 1 point/%, for a total of 10% of your final grade
- Marking: done/not done
- You will also be able to comment qualitatively on your individual contributions separately, in your Self-evaluation at the end of term (5% of final grade)
Marking criteria (end of term)
- 10 weekly contributions, for 10 points
- week 1 = no points, for practice
- weeks 7 and 10 = no regular weekly discussion: project stages 2 and 3
- weeks 2-6, 8-9, and 11-13 = 1 point (and 1% of final grade) each
- due: for each discussion, on the Friday of that week
- for a total of 10% of your final grade
- the first marking of your first reply to a discussion:
- on completion (complete/not)
- the second marking after the end of classes:
- = completion, complemented by completeness and complexity
- (1) you engaged with that week’s reading, choosing and doing close reading of a textual excerpt
- (2) you responded pertinently, in the light of the topics of that week (Wednesday lecture), chapter (of the 1-3), and/or in relation to the course overall (as appropriate – this will of course vary from week to week)
- (3) you showed breadth and depth of reflection, qualitatively appropriate to a 300-level Arts course
- (4) your longer questions and comments voiced individual independent ideas through external reading and/or lateral thinking; your comments might be simple or complex, and might be in various forms, but they expressed your reactions to readings by you the individual human thinking feeling reader and critic
- (5) you posted and discussed online (at least your initial quick and longer questions and comment) before or during the Friday discussion session in question
- perhaps afterwards too, but in relation to that Friday live discussion: perhaps also posting during and after class, continuing or concluding your conversations afterwards, responding in online interaction to others’ questions and comments
- as this is a community activity to which you might potentially be continuing to contribute, after your first contributions before or during the Friday sessions, over the course of the term: its practical end is the last day of our time together as a class, the last day of the teaching term, which is the last day when it would be reasonable to expect students to be doing term-time coursework