Assignment Overview:

  • A growing portfolio of documents, composed in MultiMarkdown and committed to the reading-prep folder of a Github Classroom repository
  • Students work individually
  • Includes written questions or observations about course readings or drafts of writing-in-progress
  • Students will prepare individually
  • Due at the beginning of each chapter (typically once per week)

Reading Responses

For each unit in this class, you will be assigned articles or books to read, files to watch, websites to browse, etc. In order to help you attend closely to our course texts and prepare for each class, you should prepare 3 questions or observations prior to each chapter of the class syllabus (in general, the Monday of each week, with marked exceptions). These reading responses will serve as prompts for our conversation and demonstrate your initial engagement with the ideas of our class. Your responses should be written down and ready to submit at the beginning of class. In order for your reading responses to be “Satisfactory,” they should, in general:

  1. Get beyond basic questions or observations of fact and instead work toward questions or observations of significance.
  2. Demonstrate close thought about the themes, style, arguments and other elements of our texts, as well as about the relationships among them.
  3. Emerge from (and refer to) specific ideas, pages, quotations, scenes, &c. from our assigned texts rather than broad or generic concepts.
  4. Genuinely open toward discussion and debate during class (i.e. no leading the witness, your honor).

Reading prep will be deemed “Unsatisfactory” when it indicates lack of preparation or inattentive reading, and will have consequences as outlined in your grading contract.

How to submit

In our first lab, we will learn how to create Markdown files, as well as how to commit those files to our Github Classroom repository. Your reading-prep files should be submitted as Markdown files in the reading-prep folder in your Github repository, following the structure of the provided template file. Files should be named following this convention: 2019-MM-DD-readingPrep-CHAPTERNAME.md (Year dash two-number-month dash two-number-day dash readingPrep dash name-of-chapter-from-class-schedule period md).