Welcome letter

Dear Students, 

Welcome to the Fall II (isn’t January!?) semester! I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts about the literature we will explore during this semester. My hope is that the reading will open important questions for you and that the writing assignments will give you the space to examine these questions. 

Before you read this long-ish announcement: 

• Everything concerning course assignments will be posted in the syllabus
• Here is a short course tour video
• If you have any questions for me you can email me (pfess@lagcc.cuny.edu) or meet with me on Zoom (Mondays & Wednesdays 1:00-2:00, or by appointment–which you can make by emailing me.) 

But first, here at the beginning we must engage in the sometimes clunky task of making sure our technology is in order. 

I am not a fan of Blackboard, so we will only use this system for two things: announcements (but these will also be posted here on the course site) and your grades. 

You will primarily use our CUNY Commons course site to access the material, so your first task is to create a CUNY Commons account. I have posted a short video tutorial about how to create an account if you are confused by the form. The crucial aspect of creating an account is that you use your LaGuardia student email account (the one that ends @live.lagcc.cuny.edu). You will also need to be able to check this email account for a confirmation email from the Academic Commons. If you don’t have access to this account you should contacted the LaGuardia Help Desk today. 

Once you have an account it is important that you send me your username. You can send it to me email: pfess@lagcc.cuny.edu 

After you have completed these steps, you will be an author on the site, which means you will be able to post to the course blog. The first post I would like you to create is an introduction of yourself. I have posted a video that walks through how to create a blog. Here are also some written instructions that convey the same information. Your introduction will give you a chance to practice posting to the blog and give me and your classmates a chance to get to know a little about you. 

There is one more account that you will need to create, but we will save this for next week. 

I want to close by giving a brief overview of how the course will be structured. 

Again, all information about course policies can be found on the syllabus and information about what is due during a given week can be found in the course schedule. Both are part of the same Google doc (which can be found here), and I will be making the links live as we go along. 

I will be primarily communicating with you through announcements that will be posted here (as well as in Blackboard). I will also be posting short videos about course material from time-to-time. When I create an announcement each week I will include a link to that week’s schedule of assignments. Like this. 

In my teaching style I try to ask open-ended questions that get you to think about concepts concerning literature, ideas, the nature of reading and writing. These don’t have definitive answers; they are meant to give you a chance to process what we are doing in the course for yourself. One of the biggest advantages of taking this course as part of your college education is that it gives your the opportunity to think about how you find meaning in the material you read, which is a great habit to have even if you are only reading business-oriented documents, text messages, and emails.  

In terms of assignments, there are three types: 

• Blog posts, which I will give you prompts for and you will post to CUNY Commons
• Annotations, which you will do on the readings in CUNY Commons starting next week
• Papers, which are longer, more traditional essays. 

These assignments are meant to feed into each other, so, for example, something you write about in a blog post may trigger something you want to write about in a longer essay. 

OK, this has become a long message. Thank you for taking the time to read it. I look forward to meeting you virtually and reading your work.