What I Grade
Want to know how your fate in this course is determined? Here is the place! First for the grading scheme:
Blog Post: 10%
Each student will compose one blog post with a partner, which will be written in full sentences and a minimum of 1000 words. Its content will relate to material discussed in class. It will be evaluated based upon both form (i.e. correctness of grammar, organization, citation format) and content (5%/15%).
Presentation: 10%
Each student will deliver one or more presentations, which includes taking a substantial role in leading the remainder of the class discussion for that day.
Attendance and Participation: 15%
Attendance is mandatory and I will follow university regulations for the maximum number of classes that can be missed. Less than four absences has no penalty. After this point a progressive penalty will be applied.
Paper Draft: 15%
Students will compose a standard essay-style paper of no less than 3500 words on a topic agreed to with the instructor. A draft of this paper will be submitted and commented upon well in advance of the deadline for the final paper, and will then be revised and submitted as a final paper.
Final Paper: 30% (20% Content/5% Form/5% Effectiveness of Revisions)
Weekly Reading Summaries: 20%
Every week students will hand in a brief summary of the reading (at least 1 page), in full sentences, or perform some other task to show that they are reading.
How I Grade (Papers Too)
Now for how I grade. To understand my grading, you need to keep a few things in mind. The first thing you need to know is that my classes focus on improving skills, reading skills, reasoning skills, writing skills and discussion skills. You are succeeding in this class when you are reading the text closely, struggling to understand it, working to formulate questions about it, comparing it with other things we have read in the class, coming up with interpretations and testing them against actual passages in the text. So, to do well in this class, you must aim to show you have read the text in some detail and can recall specific features pose specific questions in class that you think are important. Secondly, you must be able to answer a question and provide specific support from the text for your answer.
From this you can draw some conclusions about how you could go wrong in this class, such as:
- Focusing only on information. Although you will learn many things and should supplement your reading with personal research about the text, author and background as much as you can, this class is not about learning information about these texts. It is about learning to read them and understand them.
- Relying on secondary sources instead of the texts. There is no real need to search for secondary sources in a course like this. If you want some basic background there are plenty of options. But if you want to know what the text says, there is no other way than to read the text. Realize that every secondary source is someone else's understanding (not yours or mine!) of what the text says, not what the text actually says. No secondary source can improve your skills at reading a text.
You can also draw some conclusions about what you can do right:
- Read the texts.
- Study specific parts closely so you can incorporate them into your essays. As a rule, knowing less more deeply is better than knowing everything very shallowly.
- Do as much personal thinking about the texts as you can, such as trying to come up with ideas or keeping an eye on certain themes that interest you as you read. Be an idea generator. Ask questions. Pose problems in class. Challenge yourself and others to get to a deeper understanding of what you read.
However, in papers and presentations I look for several things in addition to textual knowledge. I look at:
- Clarity of writing. Kant writes difficult prose; you need not. In fact, the simpler and clearer your writing style, the better. You must always keep in mind that the burden of explaining yourself is yours alone. This may seem unfortunate, but its the way the world works. If you express yourself in ways that are difficult to read most people will not take the time to read it. Moreover, you should notice that communication of complex ideas is always difficult, perhaps often impossible. So complications coming from your style of writing should be avoided.
- Analysis of arguments. Arguments are at the core of what philosophy is all about. Indeed the reasons why Kant or someone else maintains something to be true is often more important than what it is that they think is true. So extracting and spending time thinking through specific arguments should be one of your key goals in the course, and one of your key goals in writing any philosophical paper. Still, you will probably quickly realize that it is almost never so easy as locating an argument and then evaluating its validity (i.e. logical correctness) or soundness (i.e. truth). Any argument usually has many unstated premises and often has a logical structure that itself is open to interpretation. For this reason, part of what we must do with a text like Kant's is to try as much as possible to get into the kind of thinking Kant was doing, to make it our own, and to try to see why he thought a given argument to be true. Of course, he might have been wrong. But you must always first try to understand why he thought it to be true, before rejecting it out of hand. Often this means just assuming a philosopher is right, and then searching for how this can be so. If ultimately you fail to become convinced despite your best efforts at understanding, then perhaps the argument is faulty. When to make this turn is something each person has to decide for themselves.
- Formulation of a clear thesis. Every short paper should have a clear thesis. When you were in high school, you probably had to practice writing thesis statements. That was a good lesson! Whatever you are writing, paper, blog post, monograph, whatever, it should have a central claim that can be stated within a few sentences. This is what you want to convince your reader of. It is your contribution to the discussion. It should also be the unifying point of everything you write and the criterion by which to determine what your paper must include and what it must exclude. A paper without a thesis is just rambling.
- Support of the thesis. Following from this last point, a paper should aim to be dead focused on providing arguments in support of its thesis. This can range from textual support via paraphrase, quotation and citation, or argumentative support. Each paragraph of your paper should form a link in the chain of one sustained supporting argument.
- Formatting and citation. I'm not a stickler about formatting and citation. Just make your text clean, proofread and grammatically proper. You can use any method of citation you prefer as long as you make sure I can easily get from your citation to the original lines of text it refers to (that is what citations are for!). Basically, that means I need to know the specific book, the edition you are using and the page number. If you want more guidance on this, just ask me.
-
Want to know how your fate in this course is determined? Here is the place! First for the grading scheme:
Blog Post: 10%
Each student will compose one blog post with a partner, which will be written in full sentences and a minimum of 1000 words. Its content will relate to material discussed in class. It will be evaluated based upon both form (i.e. correctness of grammar, organization, citation format) and content (5%/15%).
Presentation: 10%
Each student will deliver one or more presentations, which includes taking a substantial role in leading the remainder of the class discussion for that day.
Attendance and Participation: 15%
Attendance is mandatory and I will follow university regulations for the maximum number of classes that can be missed. Less than four absences has no penalty. After this point a progressive penalty will be applied.
Paper Draft: 15%
Students will compose a standard essay-style paper of no less than 3500 words on a topic agreed to with the instructor. A draft of this paper will be submitted and commented upon well in advance of the deadline for the final paper, and will then be revised and submitted as a final paper.
Final Paper: 30% (20% Content/5% Form/5% Effectiveness of Revisions)
Weekly Reading Summaries: 20%
Every week students will hand in a brief summary of the reading (at least 1 page), in full sentences, or perform some other task to show that they are reading.
How I Grade (Papers Too)
Now for how I grade. To understand my grading, you need to keep a few things in mind. The first thing you need to know is that my classes focus on improving skills, reading skills, reasoning skills, writing skills and discussion skills. You are succeeding in this class when you are reading the text closely, struggling to understand it, working to formulate questions about it, comparing it with other things we have read in the class, coming up with interpretations and testing them against actual passages in the text. So, to do well in this class, you must aim to show you have read the text in some detail and can recall specific features pose specific questions in class that you think are important. Secondly, you must be able to answer a question and provide specific support from the text for your answer.
From this you can draw some conclusions about how you could go wrong in this class, such as:
- Focusing only on information. Although you will learn many things and should supplement your reading with personal research about the text, author and background as much as you can, this class is not about learning information about these texts. It is about learning to read them and understand them.
- Relying on secondary sources instead of the texts. There is no real need to search for secondary sources in a course like this. If you want some basic background there are plenty of options. But if you want to know what the text says, there is no other way than to read the text. Realize that every secondary source is someone else's understanding (not yours or mine!) of what the text says, not what the text actually says. No secondary source can improve your skills at reading a text.
You can also draw some conclusions about what you can do right:
- Read the texts.
- Study specific parts closely so you can incorporate them into your essays. As a rule, knowing less more deeply is better than knowing everything very shallowly.
- Do as much personal thinking about the texts as you can, such as trying to come up with ideas or keeping an eye on certain themes that interest you as you read. Be an idea generator. Ask questions. Pose problems in class. Challenge yourself and others to get to a deeper understanding of what you read.
However, in papers and presentations I look for several things in addition to textual knowledge. I look at:
- Clarity of writing. Kant writes difficult prose; you need not. In fact, the simpler and clearer your writing style, the better. You must always keep in mind that the burden of explaining yourself is yours alone. This may seem unfortunate, but its the way the world works. If you express yourself in ways that are difficult to read most people will not take the time to read it. Moreover, you should notice that communication of complex ideas is always difficult, perhaps often impossible. So complications coming from your style of writing should be avoided.
- Analysis of arguments. Arguments are at the core of what philosophy is all about. Indeed the reasons why Kant or someone else maintains something to be true is often more important than what it is that they think is true. So extracting and spending time thinking through specific arguments should be one of your key goals in the course, and one of your key goals in writing any philosophical paper. Still, you will probably quickly realize that it is almost never so easy as locating an argument and then evaluating its validity (i.e. logical correctness) or soundness (i.e. truth). Any argument usually has many unstated premises and often has a logical structure that itself is open to interpretation. For this reason, part of what we must do with a text like Kant's is to try as much as possible to get into the kind of thinking Kant was doing, to make it our own, and to try to see why he thought a given argument to be true. Of course, he might have been wrong. But you must always first try to understand why he thought it to be true, before rejecting it out of hand. Often this means just assuming a philosopher is right, and then searching for how this can be so. If ultimately you fail to become convinced despite your best efforts at understanding, then perhaps the argument is faulty. When to make this turn is something each person has to decide for themselves.
- Formulation of a clear thesis. Every short paper should have a clear thesis. When you were in high school, you probably had to practice writing thesis statements. That was a good lesson! Whatever you are writing, paper, blog post, monograph, whatever, it should have a central claim that can be stated within a few sentences. This is what you want to convince your reader of. It is your contribution to the discussion. It should also be the unifying point of everything you write and the criterion by which to determine what your paper must include and what it must exclude. A paper without a thesis is just rambling.
- Support of the thesis. Following from this last point, a paper should aim to be dead focused on providing arguments in support of its thesis. This can range from textual support via paraphrase, quotation and citation, or argumentative support. Each paragraph of your paper should form a link in the chain of one sustained supporting argument.
- Formatting and citation. I'm not a stickler about formatting and citation. Just make your text clean, proofread and grammatically proper. You can use any method of citation you prefer as long as you make sure I can easily get from your citation to the original lines of text it refers to (that is what citations are for!). Basically, that means I need to know the specific book, the edition you are using and the page number. If you want more guidance on this, just ask me.
-