About the Assignments
Most of your grade in this seminar will come from the assignments you undertake during the course of the semester. The assignments will be varied: you will read books, articles, and newspapers, you will conduct interviews, and you will watch movies. You will submit all of your assignments to me in writing, and we will also discuss them in class.
Requirements for the assignments will vary; some will involve responses to what you have read, others will require you to conduct reseaarch and write up your findings. All assignments, however, have several elements in common.
- Honor Code. All of your work in this course is subject to the Honor Code. This means that you guarantee that all of the work you submit is your own; it also means that you must credit (and provide a proper reference for) any information, opinion, or ideas that you get from any other source.
For the purposes of this course, the Honor Code does not mean that you have not discussed your work with anybody else. In fact, I strongly encourage you to talk about your work with classmates, friends, relatives and anybody else who will listen to you. I also encourage you to get someone else to look over your written work before you submit it, and to give you feedback. (Note: This may not be the case in other UMW courses; check with your individual professors.)
- All assignments ask you to present a point of view. Sometimes this will be in writing, sometimes it will be oral, and usually it will be both. But I will always ask you to present your ideas, findings, or opinions. And I will always ask you for evidence to back up your conclusons. Opinions or ideas without evidence belong in the realm of faith, not academic argument.
- Proper writing. Please be sure that all of your written work in in clear, comprehensible, and correct English. This doesn't mean that your writing should be stuffy or pedantic. It does mean that it should be properly organized, and should be free of spelling or grammatical errors. I strongly encourage you to make use of the excellent services of the UMW Writing Center to assist you in writing assignments in this and your other classes.
- Submission of assignments. All written assignments must be e-mailed to me at my umw.edu address. Attach your assignment as a MS Word document to your e-mail, and name the file yourlastname x, where x is the number of the assignment (e.g. Jones 3.) Also include your name and assignment number in the subject line of your e-mail.
- Deadlines. Every assignment has a deadline; if you miss any deadline without good reason, you will be penalized. (Good reason includes illness, it does not include athletic practice or pressure of work in other classes.)
- Advance preparation. Few, if any, of the assignments can be done at the last minute. Most require reading or some other form of research, and in some cases you may need to do this over a period of days or even weeks (One assignment, for example, asks you to follow news coverage of Africa for several weeks, another entails selecting and reading a novel.) So please consult the course schedule regularly, and be sure plan ahead.
- Fun. All of the assignments are meant to be interessting, intellectually stimulating, and, yes, enjoyable. If they aren't, then you, I, or both of us are doing something wrong.
