February 28

Paper Two Results
As a whole, the class did very well on paper two. Even those people who are not yet passing are, by and large, still making significant progress, which suggests they will still do well in the semester. The grade breakdown is:

A: 0
B+: 1
B: 1
C+: 2
C: 4
NP/NP+: 3
Missing: 3

The majority of the class, then, is passing. Hooray!

General Paper Two Comments
One of the things I noticed in many papers is a need for clarification and specification. This usually takes place on two levels:

• Project: you want to make sure you state your project clearly in the introduction of the paper. There should be ONE sentence that anyone could point to and say "Aha! Here's the project of this paper!" You also want to work on making your project specific. Saying "I will discuss how Drucker and Pollan relate to knowledge and responsibility" is a project, but it's very general. Contrast to something like "Although Drucker calls for the social sector to take up the responsibility of knowledge, Pollan illustrates how the motives of the private sector will always thwart these efforts." In general, the more specific a project, the better.
• Working with text: I saw two kinds of problems when people went to work with quotations. The first is that people would have reference to Pollan and Drucker but would not explain how the two functioned together in the paragraph and then the project. The way to fix that is to work on specifying and clarifying the point you want to make with the essays at hand. Notice that I usually put comments at the end of each paragraph--that's because the end of the paragraph is the place where you should be bringing all the pieces together. Think, then, of the paragraph itself as a mini-paper: the first sentence is the "project" of that paper--it states what you want to accomplish in that paragraph. The rest of the paragraph is like the body of a paper where you prove and support what you want to say. The end of the paragraph is like the conclusion--it brings us back to the beginning to explaining how the work with text supports the point of the paragraph and how that point relates to the larger project.
  
  The second problem I saw as people worked with text involved choosing the text you want to work with. Sometimes, the quotations given didn't seem to say what people wanted them to say. This is a matter of making sure your analysis comes out of the quotation. If the quotation does not lend itself to your analysis, find a better quotation.

Flex Time Update
Given how well people did on Paper Two, I am making no more changes to the flex time arrangement. BUT, let me warn you: people are NOT dropping into the forum daily. People are NOT posting frequently, which gives people something to work with when they visit the forum. People are discussing just a bit. This didn't seem to hurt you all on Paper Two, but Paper Three is a horse of a different color. The task is more challenging since you have to work with three essays, and Blackmore is more challenging as well. I would NOT be surprised if grades dipped a bit across the board. In part, that's par for the course in 101 since the third paper is a more demanding task, but I also think people don't yet realize how crucial forum discussion is to their own grades.

In the space of TWO days, there was ONE respons eto the thread I started last "class." I won't bitch and moan about that, but I will say that if you see your grade dip, understand that you have had a part in that.

Peer Revision
See the Rough Draft sub-forum for instructions on peer revision this time around. Peer revision must be completed by Monday 4pm. As a reminder, drafts must be posted by Friday at 7pm in the forum, or they will be marked late.

To Do for Next Class:

1. Rough drafts are due by Friday at 7pm. Drafts will be posted in the forum--no need to email me a copy. If your draft is not posted by then, it will affect your final grade for paper three.
2. Complete Peer Revision fully by Monday at 4pm.
3. Read Henry Petroski, "To Engineer is Human"