Syllabus Fr150 Fall 2006 Brian Thompson
What is a First Year Seminar?
This course is a First Year Seminar (FYS). First Year Seminars welcome new students (with fewer than 30 credits) to UMass Boston with small-sized courses designed to prepare them for a successful college experience. Students may choose from a variety of FYS courses, reflecting a wide range of topics and disciplines. A major goal of First Year Seminars is to practice the following habits of mind essential to university-level educational success: Careful reading; Clear writing; Critical thinking; Information literacy and technology; Working in teams; Oral presentation; Academic self-assessment.
All First Year Seminars meet 4 hours per week and carry 4 credits. A mentor, a library buddy and a staff academic advisor are assigned to each seminar. Among other things, the mentor can help you with computer accounts, e-mail, and with library research. The advisor will visit the class once or twice during the semester, and can be contacted for help with choosing courses and a major, with financial aid, and any problems with university life in general. The library buddy will help with library and research resources.
If you entered UMB with 30 or more transferable credits, you should NOT be enrolled in this course. If you do enroll, you will be retroactively withdrawn during the semester and will not receive credit for it. In addition, if you have taken another G 100-level course in any department at UMB, you cannot receive credit for this one.
Student Referral Program. If it appears to the teacher that you might not pass this First Year Seminar, and I cannot figure out how to support your success in the course, I might inform Linda HAMILTON, Director of the Student Referral Program (Campus Advising Center; 287-5500). She or her staff would attempt to help you address the difficulties that are interfering with your success in the class. If you do not want me to let the Student Referral Program know that you are having difficulty, please let me know.
Assessment of these Courses. In addition to course evaluation forms that are routinely administered at the end of each course at UMassBoston, an assessment committee will look at randomly chosen student writing from First Year Seminars. Please save all your writing in this course so that if you are randomly chosen you will have your work available. The purpose of this is to improve the program and to improve particular courses, as necessary. You may remove your name from your papers if you choose to submit them anonymously.
What is this course about?
This course will explore various facets of the dynamic between Self and Other as presented by some major French writers of the 20th century. These writers represent a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, ranging from extreme poverty to inherited wealth, from working-class North Africa to upper-class Paris, from radical believer to radical agnostic to radical atheist. In each case, they ask good questions: Who am I? Do I even know? What makes me who I am? Can I change who I am? Where do I come from? Where am I going? How am I going to get there? Do I have a real choice? Or am I programmed by heredity, society, or others? What is my relationship with other selves? Do I have any obligations or responsibilities to them? Why? Am I free to do as I choose? Are there any limits to my freedom? Set by whom? Can I be myself, can I become myself, without others? Does life have a meaning? Does my life have a meaning? What makes a life, my life, meaningful? Or is it all just absurd, given the fact of death?
The novels and plays which form the major content of the course ask such questions in concrete terms, through characters and situations with which each of us can relate at least vicariously, which can lead each of us into a dialogue with author, character, classmate and, most importantly, our own experience, with our own sense of who we are. It is an opportunity to think about some major questions in a new and critical light, and to become more aware of our own identity within a complex human community of other selves.
The course is also an occasion to become aware of some fine writers—representative of a different culture, which can throw a contrastive and illuminating light onto our own—, to learn how to read novels and plays with greater appreciation for the writer’s craft, to ferret out meaning and significance from between the lines of the “story” being told, and thus deepen our understanding of what makes such works worth reading and rereading.
How will I find out about campus resources and get help?
Each of the First Year Seminars will have an academic advisor and a peer mentor who will provide assistance in orienting you to the campus. There will be specific in-class sessions designed to introduce you to the support they can provide as well as one-on-one meetings with each of them during the semester. In addition, you can make appointments with them for individual help. There are also tutors available for specific help with reading and writing assignments.
Marybeth MANEEN () is the academic advisor for this course. She can help you plan your program of study, guide you to specific campus resources, provide time-management guidance, and meet with you for academic counseling if you feel you need it. She will also help you understand university requirements and register for future courses. She will visit the class early in the semester and again before pre-registration the Spring 2003 courses and is available also for individual consultations.
Frances SCHLESINGER ( , x5943) is our library buddy. She will do an early session to introduce the research resources available in and through the library as well as on the Internet, and is available for help if you run into problems in finding or using materials later in the course.
Peter KOVACH ( ) is our peer mentor, a fellow student who has already been through a year at the university (and an earlier version of this course). His role is to act as a guide, a role model, a technology assistant, a library resource person and a friend. He is someone you can ask or talk to about any aspect of your work (especially things about which, for whatever reason, you’d rather not ask the instructor). He will participate in class frequently, help with group projects, help you to set up an email account if you don’t have one, provide library and information technology assistance, share strategies for managing the demands of student life, introduce you to student services, etc. He is NOT a reading/writing tutor (someone who will work individually with you on a paper or reading assignment).
To get help on a specific reading or writing assignment (for example, if you are having trouble organizing ideas for a paper), you should go to the Reading and Writing Center on the third floor of McCormack, where a tutor will be assigned to you.
Phone & email: As soon as possible, I will provide all members of the class with a class list including phone numbers and email addresses. This list is intended to facilitate cooperative learning and group preparation of course work. (Any abuse of this list should be reported to me immediately, and will be dealt with both by me and by appropriate university authorities.) If you do not have an email account, it is important that you establish one immediately. Our peer mentor will help you to do so. It is free through UMass, good for life, and will prove useful throughout the course and otherwise. If you have internet access at home, I suggest you also set up a web-based email account with Yahoo or Hotmail. It is free, and may be accessed from any computer with a connection to the web. My own email address is but I deal with it via Yahoo ( ). My office phone is (617) 287-7569. On campus, dial 7-7569.
Internet: THIS course web site includes pages where we can communicate with one another about issues and questions raised in the course and share our thinking and writing. If you are not up to speed on use of the Internet, make it an early goal to reach for. It will bear fruit throughout your college career and beyond (plus, it’s a lot of fun!). My home page, which has lots of other things, is http://www.faculty.umb.edu/brian_thompson/home.htm.
Course Objectives (skills):What are the goals of this course?
• Self- assessment: The first goal of the course is to become conscious of the strengths and learning strategies you already have. At the beginning of the course you’ll explore how you read and write through specific assignments which ask you to reflect upon your processes. You will look at the specific capabilities which the university has identified as necessary for academic success, as well as identifying your own learning goals. At various points during the semester, you will evaluate your learning in relation to your goals and capabilities and at the end of the semester you will look back at what you have accomplished by responding to a portfolio of your work.
• Conscious and critical reading: As we proceed, you will add to your repertory of reading and critical thinking strategies through directed pre-, during- and post-reading assignments. You will try out new strategies and evaluate their helpfulness. In addition, we will explore a range of text types that you may encounter at the university: narrative and autobiographical accounts, plays, essays, critical studies; we will identify the organizational structures and styles of each of these genres. By applying and reflecting on a range of reading strategies, you will develop awareness of which strategies are most useful for which text types.
• Clear and effective writing: There will be a range of writing assignments including formal journal entries, summaries, autobiographical essays, analytical essays, and a final research paper. They will move from using one reading source to integrating multiple sources. We will explore specific strategies for generating ideas, incorporating responses to texts, organizing and drafting essays, revising, and editing papers. While many of the assignments will be ungraded, there will be three graded papers.
• Active listening and confident speaking: Through the course you will learn the oral skills of doing active listening, interviews, oral reports, and project presentations. These skills will be developed by moving from informal to more formal and from small to large group, starting with informal one-on-one interviews, proceeding to small-group reports, more formal interviews, and large-group presentations.
• Research and information-gathering: Students will become familiar with a variety of information-gathering tools (through library and computer technology assignments), and will assess both primary and secondary sources.
• Critical analysis: We will start the semester by posing the questions of self and other for ourselves: our personal identity and what constitutes, modifies or threatens it, and our relationship to other selves or to one or more communities. As we progress, we will explore various facets of these issues, analyzing how these questions are worked out imaginatively and critically in a range of texts by a variety of writers from differing backgrounds and holding very different views.
• Teamwork: At various points during the semester students will work together to accomplish specific tasks, offer peer evaluation of one another’s writing or speaking, and share resources.
• Technology: Students will be introduced to the computer lab, will set up email accounts, will learn to do web-based research, and will become familiar with other technology resources on campus such as data bases.
•Academic Self-Assessment: At the beginning of the semester, each student will complete a self-assessment form addressing each of the capabilities listed above. Students will be asked to evaluate their progress in each area at mid-semester and again at the end of the course. These documents will become part of each student's course portfolio.
Requirements: What are the requirements for this course?
• Attendance: Because each person’s experience and perspective contributes to the knowledge of the whole group, everyone’s participation is important. Note also that this is a 4-credit course. Attendance at all four hours is required. Each student is allowed two absences during the semester: please save these for emergencies, illness, baby-sitting or transportation crises. Further absences will automatically lower the final grade. Students with more than four absences may be required to withdraw from the course. You must also attend all library or computer lab sessions as well as meetings with the class mentor or advisor.
• Homework: There will be LOTS of homework for this course. I will assign reading and/or writing for virtually every class period. This means that is will be important to budget your time carefully and allow for at least two hours or preparation for every hour of class time. Getting into the habit of budgeting your time will serve you well as you proceed through the university; leaving things to the last minute is a sure way of falling behind or doing inadequate work. You must complete homework on time and do it in a thorough and thoughtful way.
• Class participation: Many professors across the university expect students to participate actively in their classes. One of the goals of this course is to help you to develop the confidence and skills to do this appropriately. Participation is a delicate balance: on the one hand, I do not want to force you to participate when you’re not comfortable doing so; on the other hand, I hope you will become increasingly confident in speaking. Equally, it is important to know when to STOP talking and to refrain from dominating discussions. Over-participating is no better than under-participating! Learning to listen is an art that we will cultivate. Thus, as the semester progresses, I will evaluate you on the basis of how actively you pay attention, how often you take risks in speaking (even when you’re not fully confident), whether you make an effort to contribute to others’ understanding by sharing perspectives, experiences and opinions, and whether you demonstrate respect for other students through active listening and monitoring your own contributions. I will also evaluate your oral presentations in class.