"As you start to walk on the way, the way appears."

Rumi

With my help, you are going to design your own course. You're going to tell me what you want to write. Think about your interests and what you might want or need to compose in your personal, public, or professional life. In these real-world compositions of your design, you will decide what to say and why, and to whom you will say it and how. I'll ask you to set major composition goals, determine the smaller steps that you will need to take to achieve them, and establish a timeline that you'll then follow to complete each phase of your composition. You will also create the tools for evaluating your own compositions. In addition to the composition, you will create and act on a plan to deliver your works to the authentic audiences for whom you composed them. What you compose during your time in this course should be more than just a college assignment read by a teacher. What you compose should have real-world value for you and your intended audience.

Presence & Journal - 20%

Conferences - 15%

Exploration Essay - 15%

Your Portfolio: Your Composition Action Plan, Your Revised Composition Project & Your Self-Evaluation Essay - 50%

One of the most important ingredients of learning is simply being there with others who are learning alongside you. Therefore, your classroom presence counts significantly toward your overall course grade. Please strive to be present for every scheduled class meeting. In class, you not only benefit from lessons, explanations, exercises, and activities, but you also hear the answers to other students’ questions, as well as any important or necessary schedule updates. These experiences cannot be replicated or "made up" if you miss them.

Class begins the second the clock strikes our start time, so if class is scheduled for 8:00, it begins at 8:00 on the dot, not 8:01 or 30 seconds after 8. For full daily attendance credit, the very second that class begins, I look for students to be seated at a desk with notebook and a writing implement in hand. Backpacks, purses, phones, and earbuds should be stowed away. Let's call this "clocking in" for class.

You may be physically in the room, but you are not "present" until you are clocked in. Clocking-in means that you are ready to learn at a moment’s notice; if you’re still zipping and unzipping, getting out materials, checking your messages, etc., you are not yet engaged in the class or ready for learning. If you are not clocked-in when class begins, you may be marked "tardy."

If you do have to miss class, please let me know before the class period and communicate with me (and/or you classmates) after the class period for important exercises, readings, or updates that you missed. Please note that in college, there is no distinction between an excused and an unexcused absence. I realize that sometimes missing class is unavoidable, so students can miss three or four class meetings before absences will start to negatively affect your course grade. If you encounter a verifiable emergency (meaning, there is appropriate documentation) that results in more than one calendar week of absences, please contact me as as soon as possible so that we can determine the best course of action for your situation. 

If you miss fewer than 15 minutes of class (either by arriving late, leaving early, or both), you will be marked “tardy” for the day. If you arrive late, be sure to check with me after class to be marked on the roll for that class meeting. If you miss more than 15 minutes of class, you will be marked absent for that day.

Class engagement may also affect your daily attendance score. You can show that you are engaged by volunteering to speak when volunteers are called for, speaking when called on, engaging in all writing, note-taking, or research activities, responding to questions that I or other students pose to the class, and offering you interpretations and perspectives during class discussion. Essentially, the idea here is that you have a true presence in our class. So, if you are asleep at your desk or constantly on your phone and not engaging in class activities, you will be marked absent for that class meeting.

Deadlines are a fact of life, and this is no different in college. Delgado Community College requires that I submit midterm and final grades by specific deadlines. I do not get to choose these deadlines, but I must meet them, and excuses for turning them in late are prohibited. Therefore, while you will have some flexibility in the creation of timelines for your composition projects in this course, you will need to keep in mind the midterm and final grade deadlines, which we will review and discuss in more detail during the first few weeks of class. We will establish a final deadline by which all projects must be complete and ready for a grade. This deadline will not be up for negotiation once established, so you will need to plan and manage your time accordingly.

If you encounter a true and verifiable emergency during our course, please contact me immediately so that we can discuss your situation. The sooner I know what is going on, the better I can assist you. If you disappear for a month with no communication, it will be very difficult to get back on track. Communication is the key here.

All sections of ENGL 101/ENGL 110 will use the same textbook. This book is an eBook and will be made available in Canvas during the second week of class. However, in our course, we will not really use this book, so if it makes financial sense for you to opt out of Delgado Course Complete, then you should do so. You will be able to do the work in the course without the book. If you're the type of student that finds textbooks supportive to your learning process and it makes financial sense for you to take advantage of Delgado Course Complete, then I will refer to the chapters in the book that will be helpful for you.

Here are the materials that you will absolutely need to be successful in this course:

• A 1" 3-ring binder for organizing handouts and readings

• A journal or a compositing notebook

• Pens/Pencils/Highlighters

• A 3-hole punch

• Access to Canvas and Google Drive

Sometimes, if the weather is nice, we may hold class outside on the campus instead of within our scheduled classroom. If you arrive to class late and the room is empty, check for a written message guiding you to our current location. If, for any reason, you expect holding class outside could be difficult or uncomfortable for you, please email me and let me know as soon as possible!

In the event that classes can no longer continue on campus, we'll move to remote delivery via Zoom. In Zoom, everyone must be as fully present as they would be in traditional face-to-face classrooms.

In order to receive full credit for attendance in Zoom, have your camera on with your whole face visible and adequately lit, not just your forehead or your wall or ceiling. Zoom backgrounds may be used. You should be seated at a desk or table--not driving, lying down, running errands, cooking dinner, shopping, interacting with others not in the class, etc.--with notebook, printed materials, and writing utensils in front of you, and you must stay present, visible, and engaged until class is dismissed. If you need to temporarily turn off your camera during class, send me a private message in the Zoom chat.

Delgado Community College requires that students adhere to the highest standards of academic integrity. Students are entrusted to be honest in every phase of their academic life and to present as their own work only that which is genuinely theirs. Plagiarism or other falsification of academic work is a serious breach of College standards. 

Plagiarism is defined as any attempt to represent the work of another as one's own original work. More specifically, plagiarism is the direct appropriation of the language, thoughts, or ideas of another—either literally or in paraphrase—without appropriate notation of the source and in such fashion as to imply that the work is one's own original work. Plagiarism can be as small as a partial sentence taken from an outside source without proper credit or a basic sentence structured taken from an outside source with a few words changed. No matter how small, plagiarism cannot be accepted. I've found that most cases of plagiarism that I encounter frequently are one of the two above cases and are usually committed by accident or ignorance of the rules. There will never be a penalty for asking me before you submit a composition if certain language is considered original, or if you've accidentally committed plagiarism. Please talk to me if you ever feel unclear on this or have any questions at all pertaining to academic honesty!

All out-of-class compositions will be submitted an originality checker (Turn It In) before the work is graded.

Depending on the nature of the case, a student guilty of academic dishonesty may receive penalties ranging from a grade of "F" for the work submitted to expulsion from the College. 

Here's my main message about academic honesty: We now live in a world with robots that can write papers for us. How close will you come to letting a robot think for you?

We're here to practice expressing what we think. Please never allow convenience to override your natural right to think your own original thoughts.