The process of writing this research paper has certainly been a long one no doubt. However, I think weekly smaller papers would be more worthwhile. These weekly papers could be the fight club topics and then you could spend more time in class going over something else of interest such as the multimedia project.
As far as having resources like Strunk and White earlier in the course, I wouldn't be opposed to that, however, I feel like that could be taught in class and that resource could be linked on Blackboard or the class blog under a tab called "Useful Resources" or something similar to that. I enjoyed reading TSIS however. While a lot of what was taught in that book seemed relatively like common knowledge, it was nice to get a reinforcement of those ideas and see different templates to see how they could be worded and add some spice to one's writing. That is what I learned from that book: the templates and how to use them. I would definitely keep that in the curriculum of the course.
To elaborate on the research paper assignment. Personally, I enjoyed reading all the research affiliated with my topic because it is about a subject in which I care deeply, and the resources and help available has made it nowhere near as stressful as it might have been otherwise, it has just been an agonizingly slow process (or at least it seems like). We have been working on this paper since September and it has been demotivating since it has been such an arduously long process. Another struggle with writing the research paper has been an internal one of finding the motivation to crank out the pages. Again, this is a more personal issue with the assignment because I tend to work well under pressure and because the paper has been spaced so far out, it has been a struggle to find the drive to work on it. However, there is an upside to making the research paper (if the assignment was to be kept) assigned and due sooner: it would not take as much time to read and grade all of the papers. Also, getting this assignment out of the way sooner could also lead to more free time in the classroom enabling different assignments that would be fun or interesting to be done. Also, maybe instead of the vocab being quizzed (which could be replaced by reading quizzes over articles relating to fight club or something else), it could be assigned as extra credit and at the end of the semester, there could be an optional vocab quiz or scattered ones throughout the semester offered as extra credit. This would encourage students to look at the vocab list more often and not a day or two (or minutes) before class.
As a whole, the class is a great class. With some of these minor improvements or suggestions, the class could be much better because there would be more time to teach other material, or, enjoy more time to the self because there wouldn't be as much to grade all at once (like there inevitably will be for the research papers when they are due), and who would not want more time to the self?
I liked your idea about exploring other ares of interest with fight club papers rather than only writing about one topic all semester. This would make the volume of writing more bearable.
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