DELGADOCOMMUNITY COLLEGEDEVELOPMENTAL ENGLISH II
DEVELOPMENTAL COMPOSITION II
COURSE SYLLABUS
ENGL 062/503
Spring/2005
Tuesday-Thursday 11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
“The ability to read and write has long been the
fundamental skill of an educated person.”
(We read this syllabus aloud on the first days, paragraph by paragraph, completing written responses as we go along.)
BASIC INFORMATION
Prerequisites
- Willingness to learn and recognize your own potential
- English Placement Test Score 6, or successful completion of English 061 with Y grade
Required Texts and Materials
- Sentence Skills With Readings (2nd or 3rd Edition; ISBN 0-07-242981-X) by John Langan
*42 new and used from $9.67 on Amazon.com “New and Used Textbooks”*
- A GoodCollege Dictionary
The Pocket Oxford English Dictionary (personal favorite of mine)
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition
Random House Webster’s College Dictionary
Webster’s New World College Dictionary
- A 3” three-ring binder with subject dividers
- Lots of wide-ruled notebook paper inside the binder (no spirals—ever)
- DEVE/ESLN Exit Exam Study Packet
(available in Delgado bookstore, but don’t run out and get it just yet)
YOUR INSTRUCTOR
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DELGADOCOMMUNITY COLLEGEDEVELOPMENTAL ENGLISH II
Name
Angela Breckenridge
Office Hours
Monday and Wednesday: 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. in Covington Faculty Office
Tuesday and Thursday: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. in Slidell Faculty Office
By Special Appointment
Phone Numbers
Covington Office – 899-6286
Slidell Office – 646-6457
Dire Emergencies – 624-8943
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DELGADOCOMMUNITY COLLEGEDEVELOPMENTAL ENGLISH II
Background
Up until last year, I was a pretty successful corporate consultant for about 10 years. I had my own business and also worked for one of the big global accounting/consulting firms. I worked with CEOs and other executives on how to be good leaders, and I worked with all kinds of employees from managers to janitors on how to find their potential and work toward their own kind of success. But nothing beats being back in the classroom, especially at Delgado. I’m very lucky to be back and have the chance to work with people like you who want to learn and take that learning somewhere into the world.
I love Shakespeare. (Are you ready to run away far and fast now?) It’s just my thing. I read it, teach it, perform it, write about it, and wish everyone would love language like he did. Next summer, I’m even going to fulfill a life-long dream and play the role of Hamlet in New Orleans—you should come!
I’m a student, too, working on a doctorate in Human and Organization Development—kind of fancy way of saying I’m learning how to help people and groups recognize and reach their potential. I like it when others succeed. Most recently, I’ve been doing research on developmental programs in community colleges. I think they’re pretty important, a way to add a lot of value to our community by supporting the folks in our community. So, lately, a lot of my work has been trying to figure out how to be the best instructor of English I can be to you.
I like to think of myself as an idealist. If you’re not sure what that means, stop and look it up right now! It’s a good word. But what it means for you in this class is that the only thing that will keep me from doing whatever it takes for you to succeed is your own disinterest. That always gets to me. But I am a believer in personal achievement, and I’ll tell you right now I believe in your potential and will do just about anything to help you to realize it.
But that’s enough about me. Let’s get to the important stuff.
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DELGADOCOMMUNITY COLLEGEDEVELOPMENTAL ENGLISH II
PURPOSE AND OVERVIEW OF THIS COURSE
I’m wondering what you’re thinking about this class and how you feel about the idea of “developmental” courses. Your attitudes about that will make a difference on how you approach the class. Here’s a way of looking at it from one side of the coin—the educator’s.
Developmental education, as an umbrella term for a wide range of learning-centered activities, has several key goals:
- To preserve and make possible educational opportunity for each postsecondary learner
- To develop in each learner the skills and attitudes necessary for the attainment of academic, career, and life goals
- To ensure proper placement by assessing each learner’s levels of preparedness for college coursework
- To maintain academic standards by enabling learners to acquirecompetencies needed for success in mainstream college courses
- To enhance the retention of students
- To promote the continued development and application of cognitive and affective learning theory
What does all that mean? Look at it line by line. What does that mean to you? (We look up the words in bold above, add them to the Vocabulary List, and paraphrase in their own words below its meaning to them.)
What You’ll Do in This Course
You’ll use your own thoughts and language to communicate through writing. Unlike some other courses or maybe your own experiences with school, this course is not about sitting silently in a desk while someone presents you with information. It’s about learning how to communicate information clearly. You can’t learn to communicate if I do all the talking or “lecturing.” You won’t be an answering machine, recording and giving back information that comes from a book or someone else’s brain. You’ll need to be something much more exciting than an answering machine. You’ll need to be the pilot of your own learning, and I get to be the air traffic controller. Or, to use another metaphor—
Stop.
Do you remember what a metaphor is?
Let’s look it up right now if you forgot or never knew.
It’s a good thing to know for writing.
To use another metaphor, I am your coach. You do the workouts, get in great shape, and compete in the championships. Meanwhile, I watch you carefully, give specific coaching and feedback along the way, and support your hard work. You don’t start out as a star athlete! Or a fabulous writer! We’ve got to take a learning journey that begins wherever you are right now and ends wherever you take it, which means that you should expect A LOT of attention from me along the way . You should expect me to push you, to acknowledge your progress, to support your effort, and to give you the feedback I feel you need to reach your potential. You should expect to fall down sometimes, to work hard, to get frustrated, to get stronger step-by-step, to gradually see the results of your efforts not only in this class but also in other areas of your education and professional life.
Learning is not a comfortable thing. In fact, you’ll know you’re learning something when you feel uncomfortable, like you’re in unfamiliar territory. Think of the very first time you drove a car, or rode a bicycle, or (if you can remember that far back) the first time you stood up and took steps alone. Or if your life has not had these experiences, think of the first time you had to do something completely new in order to grow into the person you are now. You were not perfect when you started. And it was probably a little scary at first. But you worked at it and learned what you needed to do to survive. It takes courage and will to learn. You have a lot of courage to enter into this new experience of college. Don’t forget that. It’s a source of strength.
In this course, we’ll gradually work toward writing a certain type of thing—an essay. The college essay is probably not like anything you’ve ever written. If you’ve written a research paper in school, it probably was nothing like what you’ll write in a college essay. If you’ve ever written an editorial to a newspaper—
Aha! Editorial!
Don’t keep going.
Let’s look it up right now!
If you’ve ever written an editorial to a newspaper, you’ve probably come really close to writing an essay. If you’ve ever written a complaint letter to a company, describing your complaints and telling them just what you think of their product or service, you’ve probably come really close to writing an essay. If you ever had to write a proposal for your job, you probably came slightly close to an essay. These are examples of how a human being can use written language to communicate his or her thoughts about some kind of information for a particular purpose.
So, you see, essays are not repeated information that you read from a textbook or that someone lectures about. Essays are your thoughts and ideas about some kind of information, and they are meaningful because of that. But it brings up a good point. In order to write a meaningful essay that communicates your thoughts about some kind of information, we’ll need to have two things: your thoughts and some kind of information. But, in a writing class, we don’t have anything like History stories or Psychology theories or Math formulas to provide us with content to write about.
Stop! “Content” may not be completely clear.
Look it up right now before you go on.
Writing classes don’t have content like most other classes. We have to come up with content ourselves. We have to have something to write about so you can practice writing. So, we’ll do a lot of reading in a lot of different areas to get information/stuff to write about. From there, we’ll do things like talk, discuss, ask questions, freewrite, “mind-map” (we’ll define that one together), reflect in order to stir up the other ingredient of your writing: your own thoughts and ideas. No one will have exactly the same thought as you about the same topic—wow! See how that’s different from a high school research paper or a typical response on an essay test? You’re going to have to use your brain in a different way for this type of course and, incidentally, for real learning to occur in any other college course you take.
In this course, it’s YOU who bring the thoughts to the class. I just help you clearly communicate them through written language. The challenge will be to communicate your own thoughts and ideas in the clearest way possible, using a format for essays. This course is about developing the skill and the confidence to do that. Right now, begin to prepare yourself for the time it may take, especially at the beginning, to do this. Expect to struggle; expect to learn; expect to work hard at clarifying your own thoughts in writing; expect to have support.
Process what you’ve just read for a few minutes. What comes to mind when you think about what you just read? What seems weird, confusing, or unclear? What sparks your interest or makes you nervous about anything you read so far?
Your “Notebook “
Things You’ll Be Doing In This Course
Even though the class will be focused on the same ultimate goals for this course, each person will have a different way of reaching them. Each of you has unique style, experiences, values, and ways of looking at the world. Because of that, everyone will be at his or her own spot in the learning journey. You and I will figure out where that is for this class, and you will develop your own learning plan with specific assignments, goals, and a process to get you where you want to be by the end of the semester. You will include things like a personal grammar log, spelling and vocabulary list, special quizzes, writing lab appointments, and revision recommendations for your work. I’ll explain all that in more detail as you need it. This goes in a special section of your notebook called “Learning Plan.”
Reflection is a big part of taking control of your learning, so you’ll do a lot of reflecting about your work, your writing, your progress, the class, other people’s writing, and what you need from me or the class to help you become a better written communicator. You’ll keep these reflections in a section of your notebook called “Reflections.”
Along the same lines as reflection, you’ll prepare a “Self-Evaluation” and “Instructor Feedback” around mid-term and bring them to your one-on-one conference with me (Yea!). The Self-Evaluation will be what guides that conversation. I will also have a mid-term progress report and feedback for you, based on the work you have done and my own recommendations. You’ll provide me with Instructor Feedback, too, so that I can learn how to be a better coach for you. In addition, you will periodically receive and give feedback to the other students in class on a “Peer Feedback” form. All of this will be kept in a section of your notebook called “Evaluation and Feedback.”
You can’t learn how to communicate clearly unless you practice doing it and learn from your mistakes—through talking or writing.So you can’t learn how to communicate clearly if I’m doing all the talking! Talk in class everyday. Prior students of mine have often said that their advice to new students in this class would be never to leave the classroom confused or unsure of what to do next. This means that you mustjoin the conversation of the day, adding your own thoughts or ideas—even if those thoughts are that nothing is making sense whatsoever! Every question or confusion in your mind is an opportunity for you and everyone around you to learn. We can’t have learning without confusion and questions. And, hey, how would anyone know the stuff isn’t making sense if no one says so? Let’s face it, if all this writing and grammar stuff was clear as a bell, you wouldn’t need me and I wouldn’t have a job! So, your questions and confusion are natural, important, expected and REALLY IMPORTANT!
A couple of times a week, you’ll be asked to summarize what we’ve been discussing in class Putting a lesson into your own words on paper not only helps you retain the information; but it also helps you see exactly what pieces of information that you didn’t realize you didn’t understand! Then you’ll have questions! Learners are people with questions. Could come in handy if you want to learn in other courses, too. . . These summaries and other notes that you make will be kept in a section of your notebook called “Class Notes.”
You will have other daily writing assignments in different forms, including sentences, summaries, paragraphs, revisions, peer feedback, and different types of brainstorming. Since this is a course in essay writing, all of these smaller assignments will somehow relate to larger essays. You’ll end up with three final out-of-class essays (one of which we’ll carefully build together, learning at each step in the writing process), and three in-class essays (preparation essays for the “Exit Exam”). You will be expected to use a standard essay format, which we will learn. These assignments will go in a section of your notebook called “Writing Assignments.”
We will have frequent “Grammar Busters,” which will include mini grammar lessons of all sorts, individual assignments, practice on certain grammar annoyances, and the “Student Lessons.” In pairs, you will present and lead a lesson with the class on a particular grammar. Out of class, you will learn the lesson inside and out, using me as a resource of course if you choose to. Together, you and your partner will come up with a creative way for the class to learn, practice, and demonstrate understanding of your grammar lesson. You’ll actually teach the lesson, follow-up with a method to practice it, and then use another method to make sure they learned it. Another sure-fire way to learn something is to teach it. These assignments will go in a section of your notebook called “Grammar Busters.
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DELGADOCOMMUNITY COLLEGEDEVELOPMENTAL ENGLISH II
Take a few minutes to process what you’ve just read. Write down the different sections that you’ll have in your notebook. Write down concerns, questions, and thoughts you have about each of these sections. If you are not sure what your thoughts are yet, reread these paragraphs and write down the importance of each section in your notebook.
The last three weeks of this course will be spent learning how to communicate your thoughts under pressure. You’ll already know how to write an essay by then, how to summarize and respond with your own ideas to a given topic. So the last three weeks of the semester will be an intense “Workout Schedule” to get you in shape for the English “Exit Exam,” which is a timed “Reader Response” essay on a topic chosen by the department. You’ll have three opportunities to practice similar timed essays, to get feedback, and to learn exactly what YOU need to do in order to fulfill the requirements of the writing exam and achieve the standards of written language Delgado is committed to.
Bear in mind, however, that this course and the “Workout Schedule” is your personal TRAINING. As 061 students, you have the benefit of TWO WHOLE SEMESTERS of this kind of training before you are expected to plunge into the demands of ENGL 101. You can take the Exit Exam, get the feel for what its like, go back for another valuable semester of training in 062, and be that much more confident and prepared to ace the Exit Exam and enter ENGL 101. How often do you get to learn how to succeed in a class before you take the class for a grade? Not a bad deal.