If your blogs have left something to be desired......

Hey all:



So I have been looking through your blogs again and I am really impressed by what many of you have been doing this semester. You have such good insight into the novels, you have built a community by commenting on each other blogs and you have infused your posts with your humor, personality and intelligence. Really superb and it has been a pleasure to read through them week in and week out. I hope that this large chunk of your work load this semester wasn't just "busy" work but that it helped you actively work out your thoughts in this class. I am very much looking forward to your presentations in class.



Some of you, however, really dropped the ball. I realize that you all have extremely busy lives and that work/kids/other classes/life issues/etc/etc all add to a week where time is limited. I get it (in fact I get it too well). But I made sure everyone in this class from the first day onward realized how much importance I was putting into your blogs. I talked about it every class, showed blogs in class, had time for you to work with other students in a class if you were having trouble with them, met with every single one of you to talk about your progress, etc..... So 30% of your final grade is your blog and you will have to just deal with this grade.

However, there is another 10% up for grabs in your presentation. And if you give a presentation in which you only have a handful of blogs and you don't really have anything to say about it, you will lose another 10%. And while you have been completely aware from day one that this was going to be the case, I want to give you another option so that you can redeem yourself and get a better grade. So instead of doing the presentation, I will give you an option of doing a paper instead.

In this paper, you need to take 4 texts that we have read so far in this class. Your job is to write a one page reaction to EACH one of these texts. In these reactions, you do not want to write whether you liked the text or not but rather you want to write, as specifically as you can, what the text was centrally about. After you have done this, I then want you to do a close reading of at least ONE section of the text and show how it is connected to this central idea. Each reaction MUST be at least a page and then upload the whole thing onto your blog AND bring in a hard copy to class on Wednesday (you must still come to our last class). This, then, will take the place of your presentation.

I would suggest if you did not put much effort into your blogs that you take this option.