The Policy of Policies

In order to be fair and consistent, I don’t make exceptions to the following policies (that’s the point of a policy).

Attendance and Participation

Please arrive at discussions having done the reading, prepared to ask questions and actively participate. That means having opinions, asking questions, making observations. Attendance will be taken at every class, or at each discussion section (if this class has a discussion section), and factored in to your participation grade. Students missing more than three weeks of class (or discussion sections) over the course of the semester should be on notice that this will have a particularly significant effect on their grade; students missing five weeks or more of class (or discussion sections in 242) over the course of the semester will automatically fail the course, regardless of the reasons for their absence (if you have missed five weeks of a class, this is not something you can make up; you should contact the Emergency Dean; if you haven’t had a serious emergency in your life, then why have you possibly missed five weeks of class?). For a class that meets Tuesday/Thursday, for example, if you miss 10 classes, then you must either drop the class, or receive an F. Much of what we learn in the humanities comes not just from doing the readings, but from being in the class, from the discussions and comments from teachers and fellow students—from human contact and conversation, which is one of the reasons they are called “humanities.” Missing more than a third of that experience means that I cannot fairly compare you or your performance to that of your fellow students.

Screen Time

Very few people love their electronic devices more than I do. I’ve been online since 1987, and have stayed totally up to date with the latest technologies as they’ve emerged. And so it is with a heavy heart that I say: close your laptop lids, put away your phones, leave your tablet in your bag. I didn’t want to do this. I really didn’t, but the last several years have been terrible—huge numbers of students who are clearly very, very distracted by digital devices in class. Part of this is a no-brainer: it is not surprising to learn that students don’t pay as much attention to lecture and discussion when posting to Instagram and buying shoes at Zappos. But many, many people think that they are an exception and, while other people have trouble multitasking, they can do it. Unfortunately, studies show that no one can actually multitask and pay attention at the same time. Some younger people assume that this is just a problem for older people who grew up not immersed in a world of continuous Twitter feeds, but again, I am sorry to report that all the studies show that 18 year-old “digital natives” have exactly the same problems paying attention, focusing and remembering when confronted by a glowing screen as people my age do.

It gets worse. According to studies summarized in “Why the Brain Prefers Paper” (Scientific American 309.5 (2013)), even reading on a screen diminishes both comprehension and recall later on. Again, the effect appeared for all age groups, including studies done only on today’s college students. In one study on college students, those who read on screens were more confident and thought they were better prepared—but they got lower grades on the exam. Students who took notes on a laptop consistently typed a lot more words—but got lower grades. Reading for escapist pleasure? By all means, use your iPad, Kindle or Nook. Reading for class? Get a book. I still provide .pdfs of some readings because they are searchable and super convenient, but you should use a coursepack to actually read when one is available; you should print out readings before reading them. Bring a piece of paper to class to take notes. I will reiterate: every study to date shows that you will understand more, remember more, and get a better grade in the class, if you read on paper, take notes on paper, and leave your Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, Vine, KiK, Chat Roulette, Yik Yak, and everything else alone for 50-70 minutes.

Finally, every teacher I have spoken to at the U of I has had the same experience of teaching a class, making an amazingly important point, and looking at the students to find that half of them are staring at their crotches, faces lit by blue-white light, and smiling idiotically. This does not make us happy. Once again, in the work world, if this happened at work while your boss was speaking at a meeting, it would have consequences. Don't do it here, either.

Late Work

Late work will be marked down one notch (an A- becomes a B+) for the first week it is late; two notches for the second week. Work more than two weeks late will be given a maximum grade of 50% (still substantially better than nothing, however). You should always contact me or your TA about late work or work not handed in, well in advance of the due date whenever possible, or as soon afterward as you can.

Conflict Final

Unfortunately, students sometimes wish to take the final early: they may wish to attend a sibling’s graduation or start a family vacation early, or they may just want to end the semester as early as possible.  I cannot accommodate such requests—it’s against university policy, and I have no way of knowing whether you’re just knocking off early or whether your twin sister really is graduating from Cal State Long Beach on that day. The only students that the university stipulates may take conflict finals are those who would have to take three final examinations in the same day (see this part of the student code); I will schedule a conflict final only in those cases, or for students with disabilities.  For everyone else, plan to stay for the final exam, even if it is the last final exam scheduled for the semester.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism means “handing in work that you claim is your own original work when it is not.”  Any student who hands in any work of any kind for this course that contains material written by someone else (usually taken from the internet, but not always) that is not clearly cited (i.e., with quotation marks, title of essay, page numbers, etc.) will receive a failing grade for the entire course.

Let me give a few examples, so we’re clear about what constitutes plagiarism:  if you hand in even a rough draft in which a paragraph is copied from SparkNotes, you will fail the class.  If you hand in an essay in which one sentence is copied from someone else’s personal web site, you will fail the class. If you hand in a response paper in which a couple of unimportant sentences are copied from a web site or a essay you found in the library, you will fail the class. If you write every word of all your essays and are a model student all semester, but copy a couple of sentences on your very last paper, you will fail the class. If you missed all the lectures where I explained this policy, and you didn’t know about the web site where I explain it, and you missed that part of orientation where they explained what plagiarism is, and somehow you grew up not knowing that stealing things from other people was wrong, you will still fail the class.

Almost every year that I teach, at least one student fails because of plagiarism or some other form of academic dishonesty—sometimes more than one.

Machine translation

Writing a paper in Italian? If you use Google Translate, you will sound like an Italian-speaking robot that suffers from a combination of dementia and schizophrenia. Even short phrases usually have comical mistakes in them, and a whole sentence or a paragraph is much harder for me to understand than anything written by a human being, no matter how bad their Italian may be. It's also unethical (you're not doing the work you claim you are doing) and you learn nothing about how to write in Italian, but mostly it is guaranteed to earn you a lower grade (and make me think you're a really, really strange person).