English 101, Spring 2011 Ground Rules and First Entry

For this semester, I've reconstructed my Freshman Composition class (I'm contractually obligated to 1 per semester) around the concepts of Begging, Borrowing and Stealing. If you're here as part of that class, welcome and keep reading because there is some information here that you'll find useful. If not, you may find the work here more pedantic than usual. Please bear with me because it should get interesting as our semester progresses.

Some general background: every semester, I rebuild my Freshman Composition class because I'm never completely happy with it. For this class I hit upon the idea of beg, borrow and steal while I was thinking about how, in my other job, one of the things I'm charged with is gatekeeping, and how monitoring and preventing plagiarism is part of that process. And so as I was considering the ways that we attempt to do this, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to build an entire class around acts of plagiarism.

I had originally considered starting a new blog space for writing along with this class. The answer lies in the simple act of modeling. Some of my entries have the potential to be interesting, others are quite dreadful but in either case they are writing for the purposes of discovery, which is one of the goals of this class. Thus, I decided to build on what I already have rather than start over.

A little information for my students:

As I will continually remind you in class, my posts are largely unedited except for spelling and grammar. I expect that yours will be similarly proofread, but I'm not concerned about perfect prose.

I do not expect you to comment on my work. I do, however, expect you to thoughtfully comment on at least 3 of your classmates' posts.

I strongly recommend making a note of which classmates' posts you find the most interesting. This will serve you well later in the semester. Trust me.

Finally, this course is rated PG. If you fail to recognize that boundary, you will lose many points. Not sure what PG means? That information is available from the MPAA.