Welcome to Great Books 192! As your GSI (Graduate Student Instructor), I am responsible for designing and running the recitation section and evaluating your work. The goals of this course are many: to make you better readers, better writers, and better thinkers, while we explore together some great works of the western tradition.
Attendance and active participation in section are mandatory, and will count toward your grade. If you are unable to attend a class for some good reason, please contact me in advance to make your excuses and come to my next office hours to find out what you have missed. Bring your book to class every day.
The goal of the recitation is a lively and interesting discussion. I will occasionally present outside material, but my role is to lead the discussion, not to lecture. Come to section with something to say: a question, a comment, a disagreement, or some connection you have made. If discussion is boring you, don't fall asleep, object. Tell us what you think really matters. Challenge us to look at the book in a different way.
I will give quizzes once every week or two or at anytime that I sense that class participation is lagging.
On the day of your presentation you will be responsible for presenting the text and facilitating class discussion. Your formal presentation should be brief, no longer than ten to twelve minutes. You should provide us with your interpretation of the text. You can refer to lecture, but the purpose is to give you a forum for original thought. You may want to avail yourself of outside sources, secondary materials, or supplemental readings. You may bring in visual aids or additional texts. In any case, make your presentation creative and interesting.
After the formal part of your presentation you will lead class discussion. This should follow smoothly from your provocative presentation. You may want to prepare a list of questions or issues that you want the class to discuss.
You are required to hand in a short paper (4 pages) which explains the argument of your presentation and lays out the significance of your interpretation. This paper must be turned in on the day of your presentation. No late presentation papers will be accepted. Your presentation grade will be based upon the originality and clarity of your formal presentation, your ability to evoke and sustain a lively discussion, and the cogency of your paper.
There is an email discussion group for our section: plato.dante@umich.edu. Send a message to this address and it will go to everyone in our section. I will encourage (and to a certain degree require) that you post comments to the class discussion group. This takes the place of response papers.
I require you to post at least six messages of twenty lines or so. These must be distributed across the semester, so that you post at least one message in any two week period. You may post messages in response to class discussions or in response to other messages, but at least half of your messages should be posted before we are going to discuss the work in question.
These messages encourage you to respond in a relatively informal way to the assigned reading. While each message will not be graded, the quality and the interest of your messages will count toward your final grade.
In addition to your presentation paper and your email responses, you are also responsible for two more papers.
I will suggest paper topics in advance, though, in general, I will encourage you to develop your own paper topics. Papers should be left in the drop box located just outside of the Great Books GSI Office, G216 Angell, by 6:00 pm on the due date. You may turn in papers before the deadline if you know that you will have a conflict.
Late papers will be penalized.
Your grade will measure your effort and achievement in this course. It is based on class participation, the written work, quiz grades, your in-class presentation, and your exams. A very rough equation (and I reserve the right to change this) is: short writing assignments (presentation paper, email responses, short paper): 25%; final paper: 25%; midterm: 10%; final: 20%; class participation and quizzes: 20%.