ENGL 1C – Critical Thinking and Composition
Lesson 1
Introductory Instructions
There will be 8 lessons total; they will be available to access through the Barstow College online course system. Most students will access one lesson at a time, finish it, and email the assignments for the professor grade to Dr. Hanson. Then the student will progress on to Lesson 2 and so forth. Dr. Hanson will email you each week, letting you know that the assignments were received, and what grade you received on that week’s assignments.
If you have problems doing your assignments for Lesson 1 or any lesson, just email me for help or clarification: mhanson@bcconline.com.
***The first thing you are to do is to email the instructor, Dr. Hanson, and let me know that you are in my summer session ENGL 1C online course. This way I will have a working email address for you and can contact you whenever I need to.*** As part of this email, you will also write a brief biography/personal profile about yourself of about 5 to 10 sentences (5 sentences minimum), so that the instructor can get to know you better. Tell me about your past life, family, friends, favorite subjects in college, favorite foods/colors, sports interests, leisure time activities, hobbies, and/or languages you speak. Please note this introduction will also be posted in the discussion group so you can get to know your classmates as well.
Here is some information about Dr. Hanson:
A graduate of SDSU in California (BA) and UNLV in Nevada (MA,
PhD), I will be celebrating my 32nd year of teaching in secondary and
post-secondary settings in September 2008. In September 2008, I will be working
full-time at Barstow College, and I am very excited about moving and starting a
new life in California. I am also looking forward to working with the students
of Barstow College. I grew up as a child in San Diego, CA, went to high school
in the San Fernando Valley, and taught high school for 15 years in central
California.
I write and publish my academic research. My most recent publication is the book
"Decapitation and Disgorgement: The Female Body as Text in Early Modern
English Drama and Poetry" (8th volume in the series "Studies in
English Literatures," Edited by Koray Melikoglu, published by
Ibidem-Verlag, Hannover, Germany, September 2007, also available on Amazon.com).
My personal interests include swimming, knitting, embroidery, cooking, home
decorating, travel, letter writing, and the fine arts including painting, opera,
ballet, and theatre. I have traveled to England, France, Italy, Switzerland,
Germany, Austria, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Canada, Mexico, and Japan as well as
taking a cruise down the Mississippi River and taking car trips all over the
west coast and mid-western, southern, and south-western United States.
I have a number of collections including figures by Lladro and Royal Dalton,
limited edition plates, masks from my travels, Wizard of Oz and Betty Boop
memorabilia, hummingbirds, and Japanese art and decor. I love Mexican, Italian,
and Chinese food, but ice cream is at the top of my list of favorite foods. Also
in the first email, please re-type the following paragraph, typing your name at
the end of the paragraph as a signature:
I will maintain a working email address during the time that I am in Dr.
Hanson's ENGL 1C summer class 2008. I consent to having Dr. Hanson email me
whenever she needs to. I understand the course grading policy and all other
policies set forth in the course syllabus. I understand what materials I must
hand in to pass this course and that I must hand in all assignments by
July 24 at midnight. I am aware of
the BC plagiarism policy.
Information about Lessons:
You will be given 6 lessons with instructions, lecture, reading, and assignments to complete. Each lesson will include reading from the textbook, a written exercise that accompanies the reading, and a discussion/commentary, an essay to compose, and critical thinking lecture and sometimes an exercise. Each assignment will be graded on quality and quantity; the assignment should be complete, thorough, creative, and should meet the sentence or page-length requirements to receive full credit. If the assignment is done poorly, I will send you an email asking you to redo the assignment, giving you instructions on how to do this, and then asking you to re-submit the assignment for full credit.
There will be an online midterm short and long essay exam and a proctored final essay exam; these 2 exams will be graded A through F -- 90% or above correct is an A, 80% to 89% correct is a B, 70% to 79% correct is a C, 60% to 69% correct is a D.
Lecture #1 – Critical Thinking -- A Definition and an Introduction
Critical Thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with the goal of improving one’s thinking capabilities. Good writing requires sound judgment and good critical thinking.
Critical thinkers routinely apply intellectual Standards to the Elements of reasoning to develop Intellectual Traits.
Future lessons will discuss these sections in depth:
1. The Standards – Clarity, Accuracy, Precision, Relevance, Depth, Breadth, Logic, Significance, and Fairness
2. The Elements – Purpose, Question, Information, Concepts, Assumptions, Inferences, Point of View, Implications
3. Intellectual Traits – Humility, Courage, Empathy, Autonomy, Integrity, Perseverance, Reason, Fairmindedness
The critical thinking lectures will be applied to Essay #, so the student needs to pay close attention to these lectures.
Instructions for Homework #1 – Due June 9 at midnight
Be sure to keep copies of your work on disk or on your hard drive in case assignments are lost; that way if Dr. Hanson needs you to email or re-paste your assignment, you still have a copy.
If you have to email your assignment to Dr. Hanson as an attachment, put all of the work for the week in one file. If you cut-and-paste assignments or attach assignments to Dr. Hanson’s email, be sure the assignments are typed and saved as an MS Word document. Dr. Hanson cannot pull up any other files. Do not create separate attachments for each assignment you complete for this class:
1. Reading #1
In Cultural Conversations textbook
Chapter 1 -- Gender: Is One Born a Woman?
Read pages 30-35 from Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) famous literary work A Room of One’s Own and the essays by Monique Wittig, pages 99-111 and by Eve Sedgwick, pages 113-122. The word "feminism" is controversial for many people: they envision political feminists picketing and marching in the streets for women’s rights as the suffragettes did at the end of the 19th century and as 1st wave femininsts did during the 1970s. However, there is a group of feminists who are primarily writers, not activists. They try to change people through the use of words. Monique Wittig and Eve Sedgwick are two of these contemporary feminists. Wittig is a contemporary French feminist and Sedgwick is an American feminist. French, British, and American literary feminism encompasses different areas of study. The French feminists are concerned with language and manifestations of language; they are greatly influenced by psychoanalytic theory, especially the ideas of Jacque Lacan. American feminists are more interested on literary texts than language. They study the works of male writers and the way female characters are oppressed in these literary works. They also study the works of female writers from the past, attempting to recuperate voices that did not loom large in the literary canon (the list of literary works that most people are required to read in school -- the cream of the crop in writing) years ago. British feminists are more interested in how politics and history affects women’s issues. They write because they want to create social change. Virginia Woolf definitely falls into this group; her book A Room of One’s Own was written in the hopes of creating social upheaval.
The title refers to Woolf’s discussion of the gender roles of men and women in English Victorian society (from 1850 to the turn of the century). A woman in a patriarchal culture (a society governed by men) had no possessions and few rights; this woman had no space that was private in which to think or write, no space to be alone. A woman from the aristocracy or upper middle class would be expected to make her husband’s life an easy one; she must also keep the household in order and tend to the children. To be a writer of consequence, the writer must have a quiet space in which to think. How could women in past history become great writers if they were oppressed in this manner? In the passage you will read, Woolf speculates on what would have happened if William Shakespeare (1564-1616) had a sister named Judith with the same intellectual capacities as her infamous brother, Will. Would Judith have been a successful author, one to rival her brother’s brilliance?
Reading Discussion
The discussions/commentaries in each lesson are connected to the textbook reading and exercises. Your reading responses and discussion comments in this class can be in expository/essay form, but they don’t have to be. You could write a short story, an obituary, a diary entry, a business letter, or a paragraph (10 sentences minimum). If you prefer, your reading response could be a poem, a skit, a recipe, or a list (10 lines minimum). I encourage my students to be creative in their reading response writings.
Reading Exercise
Write a 10-sentence minimum response to question #3 on page 42, using the life of Judith Shakespeare as the fictional thread. Completely cover all aspects of the question.
Reading Exercise #1 Submittal Form