Course Banner: English 102 OSC. Dr. Halbert. Summer 2020.

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READING REACTIONS

Background:

This course requires you to read assigned texts in order to have content for the papers you need to write. A fundamental challenge for instructors is getting students to actually do the reading: as former students ourselves, we know that reading for a course is often a very low priority for many students for a variety of reasons:

All of these challenges are real for students—and for the instructors who need students to read in order to have a better grasp of the content of the course. 

I believe that reading is one of the most basic skills educated individuals need to be successful students, professionals, and citizens. Without the ability to read, you have to depend on other people to provide you with information or ideas, making you a receptacle for the ideas of others rather than thinking for yourself. The idea of being at the mercy of others to tell me what to think or believe frankly terrifies me, and so one of the most important skills I can attempt to help you either acquire is to learn to read efficiently and analytically so you can form your own opinions and support why you believe them.

 But reading in college is hard, and I acknowledge that.

In a face-to-face course, I "solved" the problem of making students read by requiring them to mark the assigned texts by underlining key ideas and making marginal comments. I would start each class by physically checking every student's readings for marks and assign a grade to each reading based on their annotations. For students, it's initially quite hard to mark in a book, but over time, it becomes much easier and provides the following advantages:

Marking a text helps you to own it in a way that simply running your eyes over the page does not.

Unfortunately, showing that you've marked a text in an online class is pretty labor-intensive for both instructors and students, so I have come up with the following plan to deal with evaluating if you have done the readings or not: the reading response.

Instructions

Grading

What's the Point of Doing All This?

The reading reactions and responses to classmate's reactions do the following:

I generally run my face-to-face courses with long discussions in class. My goal is to try and recreate that with these responses. I hope they help you to develop more complex reactions to what you read and to find ideas worth writing about both formally and informally.