WELCOME TO COLLEGE

You’re in college now.  How does it feel?  Maybe not so different.  To read the FYS syllabus, you’d think that somebody here is really looking out for you.  But the truth of the story is that you have an enormous degree of freedom.  Ok, there are still plenty of people here to help—professors, advisors, counselors. But the fact remains, you’re not in high school anymore.  You are free to sleep in every Tuesday morning.  You are free to spend every Wednesday night running wild with your friends.  That’s right, free.  I’m not going to check your bed. 

But understand, if you sleep in every Tuesday morning or stay out drinking every Wednesday night, you will likely end up with a one-way bus ticket back to the family homestead. 

If you really want to drop out of college, do it soon so that your parents can get some of your tuition back.  There are plenty of jobs out there that can be done with professional training or an associate degree.  If your parents complain, tell them that Bill Gates didn’t finish college. 

Ask yourself now: do I really want to go to college?  Think about it for a little while.  If the answer is yes, read on, and come back to class on Thursday.

If you want to stay in college, accept now that you are going to have to do a significant amount of work.  Sometimes it will be frustrating and difficult.  Sometimes it will seem pointless.  Chances are, however, someone who has spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject believes that there is a point to what you are doing.  Understand this.

Take responsibility for your learning.  College is not an assembly line.  If you treat it that way, you may leave with a diploma and not much else, or you may not finish it at all.

Take responsibility for yourself and your work.  In the upper middle class high school I attended in the early 1980s, cheating was rampant–-papers plagiarized, tests stolen and crib sheets passed around.  I don’t know what kind of high school you come from, but there’s a good chance you may have had some similar experiences.  That’s alright.  It’s behind you now.  You’re in college.  Here, cheating is a roundabout way of asking to go home.  Every time you put your name at the top of a paper or on the cover of a bluebook, you should be saying: this is my work.  If you know students who have lower standards of personal integrity, frown upon them.

PLAGIARISM

Let me just add a few words on this subject, as it is one I’ve thought a lot about.  I seem to send a handful of students to the Dean for plagiarism every year.  For the most part, it is pretty easy for a professor to spot plagiarism.  There are, I think, two basic scenarios of plagiarism

Scenario one.  Our fun-loving student hasn’t left enough time to write his paper.  It is two o’clock in the morning, the paper is due at nine, and he has no idea what to say.  He starts browsing around for something that might help, in introductions, encyclopedias, web sites, and finds, surprise, a few words that seem to help.  Oh, he doesn’t just cut and paste.  Most of what he writes are his own words.  Or at least some of it.  A lot of his paper is composed of sentences and fragments from some slacker’s web site.  Result: a failing grade for the class and an appointment with the Dean of Students.

Scenario two.  Our student has been working on her paper all week.  She has quotations picked out that she would like to use.  She has some ideas for what she wants to say.  But she’s left feeling like her paper needs something more.  She starts browsing around for something that might help, in introductions, encyclopedias, web sites, and finds, surprise, a few words that seem to help.  In fact, they seem to say exactly what she wanted to say.  As she sits down to write, those words keep cropping up in her mind and before long she’s writing her paper with the Cliff Notes (or some introduction) next to her computer, borrowing phrases and sentences.  Result: a failing grade for the class and an appointment with the Dean of Students.

An important aspect of taking responsibility for yourself and your work is to not let yourself become the subject of either of these scenarios.  Start your paper with time enough to finish it successfully.  If you don’t have time enough to finish well by the deadline, do your best and accept the D you receive.  If you just don’t finish, explain yourself to the professor, keep working, and turn in your paper as soon as you can.  Yes, you’ll get a penalty on the paper, but that’s better than failing the course.  If you really find some outside source that really does seem to help you, quote it and cite it in your paper. 

For the most part, though, you will do much better to take a close look at the assignment and the reading and to develop your own point of view.

ATTENDANCE and PROMPTNESS

Before long, viruses and bacteria will be laying siege to your body.  You will be sick sometime in this first semester.  And there will be days when you just don’t feel like going to class.  On days like these—days when you are sick, or worse, indifferent—get yourself out of bed and get to class.

There is no substitute for regular attendance.  That means: don’t miss class.

If you are hospitalized or quarantined, please contact the professor and arrange to make up for your absence.  In cases such as these, you may be able to make up for an absence by consulting with me and submitting additional written work.

As a general rule, I will allow one absence across the semester without penalty.  If you miss more than one class, your final grade will suffer, dramatically after the third absence.  Please note: telling me in advance that you will miss a class does not constitute an “excused” absence.

Coming in late is a disruption to the class and will count as half of an absence.  If you do wake up late, please come to class anyway.  You’ll pay a price, but it is better than missing the entire class.

OFFICE HOURS

The office hours listed at the top of the syllabus are the hours when I’m sitting in my office just waiting for students to drop in.  No appointment is necessary.  Nor do you need a specific reason to talk.  Feel free to drop by to discuss FYS, college, your future plans, outside interests, Italian automobiling, whatever. 

Note that I am also available by appointment if you’re not free at my office hours. 

I’m often in my office at other times, and I’m happy to take time out to answer questions.  If you drop by my office outside of office hours, just knock.  I’ll let you know if it’s a bad time.  If I don’t have time to talk it is because, like all Wooster faculty, I am also busy with advising I.S. students, preparing classes and pursuing my research.  If I’m busy, I’ll make an appointment to meet in the future.

If you are having problems with the class, please come to see me immediately.

Note that these guidelines for office hours are typical of Wooster faculty.

DEADLINES

Just one more word on this topic.  Begin working on assignments so that you can complete them on time.  You should feel rather foolish if you are trying to print out your paper with ten minutes to go to the deadline.  If you find yourself doing this more than once, ask yourself why.

I.S.

This is your first year of college.  Your Senior Independent Study is years away.  But what you are doing now—here, in this seminar—is learning the habits and skills to succeed in Senior I.S.  Oh, when you have found your major you will learn the methods proper to the discipline.  But for now, you are acquiring something vastly more important (because the methods are useless without these): the habits of independent learning, the skills of critical thinking.

EXPECTATIONS AND TIME MANAGEMENT

A typical high school class will assign twenty minutes of “homework” for every hour of class.  The expectations of college are dramatically higher.  It is expected that you will devote three hours of working and learning outside the classroom for every hour of class time.

That means you should typically spend nine hours a week doing work for your FYS.  You will often need to do more to do well.  The same is true for any other full credit class at Wooster, though the demands of classes vary dramatically.

There is a simple lesson to this.  If you want to succeed in college, if you want to make college easier, start now to manage your time.  Planning your schedule on a weekly basis will leave you more time for friends, sports, fun.  If you don’t already have a weekly agenda, you should buy one and begin using it now.

CRITICAL THINKING

You will often hear professors talk about critical thinking.  It is, we hope, a central accomplishment of a liberal arts education.  But what is it, anyway?

Critical thinking does not mean criticizing, or finding fault with what you read and watch.  It means thinking, going beyond your personal beliefs and opinions to construct reasoned arguments based upon evidence.

In the classic detective story, gut feelings are almost always wrong.  The likely suspect is generally innocent.  It is deduction, based on clues, that leads the detective to the solution to crime.

Critical thinking is not about having the answers to all of the professor’s questions.  Much more than this, it is learning how to ask intelligent questions and how to try to answer them.