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I must have been a sophomore in high school at the time, circa 1986-1987. The song that you hear in the background was just Da Bomb as far as I was concerned.  Life simply got put on pause when this song played.  Yes, this is corny now but, hey, it was the 1980s and I was living in Ohio!  I think about this song every semester when it's time to talk about grades.  "Why You Treat Me So Baaaaad? Why You Do Me The Way You Dooooo?"  It seems like this is how most students feel so I'm going to ask you to just take it on faith, for now at least, that I am not out to use grading to treat you bad.
You are going to be asked to do some heavy lifting in this class— reading deeply, charting closely your thoughts, writing freely, talking openly! So be ready!  This is NOT a difficult class, but it will require seriousness and commitment to doing the work. I am doing the best that I can in my teaching to make that work worthwhile.
Assessment in this class is based on an overall 100-point spread for all projects in the course.  Each project in this course weighs in and gets counted towards the overall 100 points.  You will receive details for each project, especially since much of your work could generate multiple public audiences in digital spaces. For some of you, the point-spreads may feel very new and different.  18-21 year old young adults today are often described in terms of the web 2.0 technologies that have saturated their childhood and early adulthood.  However, there might be a better way to historicize young people in this age range: the group who has witnessed and been subjected to the most rubrics, norming standards, high-stakes tests, etc than any other group of K-12 students in the history of education in the United States.  In this COLLEGE class, we will not be replicating the kinds of assessment strategies that you experienced in K-12 standardization regimes.  Be prepared to comment on and think critically about the point-spread that you are given for each project.  These point-spreads are designed rhetorically: to give you a more persuasive digital presence. Think of writing and designing in this class as giving you more than just an “A” at the end of the course.  Understand yourself as establishing a digital/critical ethos. 

the 2021 point distribution chart!

PictureCarmen's Ph.D. advisor, John Mayher, always displayed this cartoon on his office door. It seemed too good not to share it here!
Here's a story that might drive things home a bit more.  In spring 2015, I asked my college students a question I wanted to hear their thoughts on at the end of the semester: what was the best piece of writing that you did this schoolyear (in any class) and why do you call that your best?  The students' answers astounded me, particularly the way in which those students most interested in social justice (and I mean social justice as a process and life commitment, not a graded school assignment) answered so fundamentally differently.

The students who I would most call activist and conscious talked about what they learned about the world and themselves; how they had committed to social justice issues more than ever before; why they saw themselves as people who had creative and/or political agency to change the world, help their families, and/or write in a way that reached and impacted people. Some of them even wrote this final reflective essay as a letter to their mothers explaining their gratitude and respect or as a letter to a younger version of themselves explaining all that they would soon become if they could just survive that current, ugly moment.  It would have brought tears to your eyes.

But then there were those others students in the "special and smart" cohort...  I was bored.  A large number of them talked about assignments where the teacher changed every word, gave them a new research topic when the teacher did not like the topic they had selected, told them what arguments to make, corrected every single mistake, drew arrows all over their papers showing them where each new paragraph and idea should go.  For these students, successful writing was when you got your paper back from the teacher and there were no marks on it.  No one talked about any ideas, content, or dispositions they had learned or developed.  No one even talked about writing as a process other than collecting teachers' corrections and finally receiving an A after correcting all  the flaws (always called "correcting," NOT revising).  The crazy thing is that I have heard other professors call that kind of teaching: providing students with DETAILED FEEDBACK.  That's not feedback. When someone takes over and owns YOUR ideas, that does not help you.  When I told my own family about this--- family members who have never gone to college and some, not even to high school--- they were perplexed: why is it that when high school teachers give students the answers to state tests, they are arrested while college professors can tell students exactly what to say and how to say it and no one even thinks that's a form of teacher-cheating?  It was a good question.  I tell you these stories because if you are expecting a teacher to "correct" your writing, you are in the wrong class!  I comment to big ideas, not microscopic language units. There will come a time when we write public/digital, edited texts where we will look at the form and the surface issues, but that won't be the entire driving force of writing in this class. 

There are two kinds of teacher approaches to writing that happen most often in college classrooms: 1) the tricky examiner: when a teacher gives you an essay to write but it's really more like a quiz or an exam because the teacher just goes through it to see if you have a thesis statement and if you got the facts and information correct (a multiple choice exam would be more suitable for this exam-approach but this teacher likes to be able to say he assigns essays); 2) the hunter in the woods: when a teacher, like the one in my above example, goes hunting through your writing, guns blazing, looking for any stir or rattle that he thinks should not be there and then SHOOTS it down. Neither of these is the approach to writing in this class so make sure you understand this fact UP FRONT!  Make sure that this is the classroom you want to be in.