PHIL/REL 150P
Life, Death, and Meaning
3 Credit Hours
TR 11:00–12:15
Dr. D.E. Wittkower
BAL 9016, x33864
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Email: dwittkow@odu.edu
I designed this course during the pandemic to use work from our field to help students to work through the distinctive problems of our moment in history. I hope you enjoy the course, and hope it is of value to you in your life right now, and of lasting value in your life.
Keep in mind that in this course we will be discussing death and dying regularly. While we will address topics in general terms, and there will be no expectation that you share personal details and histories in our in-class discussion, if you are not comfortable with frank conversation about facts and implications of death, it may be better for you to sign up for a different course. Please let me know ASAP and I will help to find you a place in another course.
About the Syllabus
Going through the Syllabus Module
The syllabus for this course is organized as a module. Read through and jot down questions as you go. At the end of the syllabus module, there will be a syllabus quiz, which is due at the end of the first week of classes. There will also be a downloadable version of the syllabus at the end of the module that you can use to complete the syllabus quiz and also keep on file for future reference.
The purpose of the syllabus quiz is to make sure that you’ve read and have a basic understanding of the “ground rules” of the class, to avoid misunderstandings, but also to help to motivate and reward a higher-level engagement with the goals and methods of the course. I hope that if we all understand the goals that motivate the course design, it will be more likely that we will share those goals and pursue them as a team. A course where we’re all working together toward a common goal, through intrinsic motivation, is much more effective than a course focused on extrinsic motivations, where students completing tasks like jumping through hoops and the instructor metes out rewards and punishments.
What is a Syllabus?
There’s a common perception that a syllabus is a sort of contract, and they are similar in that both sort of lay out expectations, but there are also a lot of differences. A syllabus is subject to change, not binding like a contract, and its purpose is more about letting you know what to expect from the course, and how to plan for it. Also, a contract aims to lay out all terms and conditions and provisions, and a syllabus doesn’t aim to be complete, and won’t include general expectations of the kind that would be covered by the Student Code of Conduct or by the ODU Catalog. So, for example, if something is “required” or it’s stated that “no late work will be accepted,” that won’t apply when there are university-recognized exceptions—if you don’t do an in-class presentation because you’re in a coma, you can’t be held responsible for that, no matter what any syllabus says. So keep in mind (for all your classes!) that the rights and rules are in the student handbook and the catalog, and the syllabus is just about what we’ll be doing in this particular class and how things fit together.
Workload and Support Structures
Workload
In a college course, each credit hour is supposed to represent three hours of course-related activity per week over a regular semester. Since this is a three-credit-hour course, that means you should plan on spending 9 hours or 540 minutes per week on this class. Since we’re scheduled for two 75-minute class meetings per week, during most weeks that means you should plan on spending about 390 minutes (6.5 hours) per week outside of class on this course.
That’s the standard expectation for workload for college courses. Some courses will take less time than that for you, and others will take more. This often isn’t because some classes are easier and some classes are harder—more often, I think, it’s because some classes will be easier for you and others will be harder for you. I can say for sure that some students say my classes are easy and low-stress and others say my classes are way too hard.
If you find work for this course to be taking more time than it should, or if you find it to be difficult or frustrating, the issue is either that you have less preparation for the kind of work that we’re doing, or that the kind of work we’re doing is more difficult for you. We have students with a diverse set of experiences and a diverse set of strengths and weaknesses, and this is how it always works out for some students, and it’s not unusual, and it’s not your fault, and we have support structures in place. Those support structures include office hours, accommodations, academic coaching, and tutoring.
Office hours
Office hours are spans of time that faculty set aside specifically to be available for you. Don’t ever worry about imposing on our time during office hours—office hours are there for you to use. You are welcome to come by office hours with questions about the course, about assignments, about readings and theories, or about entirely different or even unrelated topics. If there’s something you didn’t understand in class, we can go over it again; it’s okay if you didn’t get it the first time, and you’re not imposing. Sometimes there may be things you’re interested in that you think of in class, but which aren’t really on-topic for the class discussion. Office hours are an ideal time and place to take up those topics. Office hours are parts of my time that I have set aside for you.
My official office hours are TR 12:30–2:00, but in my role as Department Chair, I have a lot of meetings, and there are periodic conflicts with office hours, so it’s best to check ahead.
I’m also often in from 11:00–2:00 on MWF if you want to try dropping by, and we can always make an appointment too.
You can also drop in my Zoom room (Links to an external site.) anytime and it will send me an email saying that someone joined my room. If I can I’ll head in there to meet you, but if I’m not there in 5 minutes or so, you should probably assume I can’t make it and send me an email instead.
Accommodations
I am committed to supporting students who have disabilities, and I encourage any student who stands to benefit from accommodations to discuss the matter with me and with the Office of Educational Accessibility. Accommodations allow all students equal ability to succeed based on their talent and effort, and allow all students to devote as much of their work for each course to the actual content and purpose of the course—they shouldn’t be thought of as a benefit, as a crutch, or as something to be used only if necessary. Please feel free to discuss the matter with me either formally or informally.
If you experience a disability that will impact your ability to access any aspect of my class, please let me know so that we can work together to ensure that appropriate accommodations are available to you. If you feel that you will experience barriers to your ability to learn and/or testing in my class and do not have an accommodation letter, please let me know, and consider scheduling an appointment with OEA to determine if academic accommodations are necessary. Additional information is available at the OEA websiteLinks to an external site..
Academic Coaching
ODU offers academic coaching from both professional and peer coaches, in both in-person and online formats. Academic coaching is not course-specific, but focuses more on general academic skills. For this class, academic coaches may be especially helpful if you find you’re having difficulty working through our readings, taking effective notes in class and while readings course materials, or organizing your schedule to get work done before class. Coaches can work with you on other issues too, of course, and issues in other classes or across all your classes. Academic coaching can be done in a focused single-meeting on a specific issue, or over multiple meetings through the academic year, and you can always set up a single meeting and continue things if you end up finding it valuable. More information and a link to schedule hereLinks to an external site..
Academic coaching is also part of the TRiO Student Support Services programLinks to an external site., which is open to first-generation college students, students from limited-income families, and disabled students. Particpation in TRiO SSS is by application, and in addition to academic coaching, also includes financial advising, graduate school and career planning, mentorship, and other forms of support.
Tutoring
Tutoring is available through tutor.com, on Canvas—the link is on the left there; “Tutor.com.” At the time of writing, we have five tutors available for this course, all of which seem likely to be very helpful, and three of which hold Master’s degrees in Philosophy! As with Academic Coaching, you can meet for a single session or repeatedly through the semester.
Learning Objectives
About General Education Courses
This is a general education course Students sometimes approach general education courses as just obstacles they have to get through, or otherwise of less importance than in-major courses, especially when general education courses are not clearly connected to their major. This approach is exactly wrong.
General Education courses are courses that meet Student Learning Objectives that the ODU faculty have decided are so essential that they should be required of every student in every program. These courses often focus on skills and on ways of thinking and knowing, and in most cases should be taken prior to most of your in-major work. This is intended to ensure that you enter into your major coursework having already received training in a variety of ways of generating knowledge in a variety of disciplines and methodologies, so that you have a wide perspective and several different ways othinking that you can bring to bear.
General Education is the most central and definitional part of a University education, and in more technical fields, General Education is the most distinctive difference between a University education and a vocational school training program—and the most distinctive reason why the one is valued more than the other. Your in-major courses will train you in the current state of the field and how things are done, but General Education gives you training in the different skills and ways of knowing that you will need to train and retrain yourself as the field changes, as technologies and best practices change, and as you discover your own pathway through your field, or between fields, or into fields that don’t even exist yet. Your major coursework may matter most when it comes to getting a job, but your General Education training is crucial to building a career.
About the P/E General Education Requirement
This course meets the P/E (Philosophy and Ethics) general education requirement. Students in any P general education course should acquire
- a basic understanding of several foundational questions in one or more of the major areas of philosophy, e.g., metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory (including ethics)
- a basic familiarity with the answers that diverse schools of philosophical or religious thought have proposed to foundational philosophical questions and the arguments with which they have supported these answers
- a facility with critical thinking and reasoning, especially concerning the construction and evaluation of arguments
Those Learning Outcomes may leave you wondering why this is a General Education requirement, since it may not be at all clear what these outcomes, or the first two at least, have to do with your long-term success in life and career. You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder: the first two Learning Outcomes really don’t get at what’s most valuable about training in philosophy. That’s just because Student Learning Outcomes for General Education courses are written in order to give faculty a way of assessing whether courses are doing the right things, and how successful courses are in doing them, not to communicate to students what lasting value General Education outcomes are supposed to have in your lives.
P and E courses all provide training in at least three areas that are foundational for a University education and of lasting value for lifelong learning: critical thinking, critical reading, and thesis-driven communication.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has many components and taken on different forms in different fields but at its core it is about analyzing an idea or claim to determine its internal structure and mechanisms. What are the premises and assumptions it’s built on, and what happens to it when we remove or alter them? What parts of it are necessary for it to work, and how do they fit together? Are there hidden assumptions—internal parts that make it work, but that aren’t easy to see, and may not be supported? What does it do, and how?
Philosophy certainly isn’t the only field that can provide training in critical thinking, but we are uniquely focused on critical thinking, and training in philosophy has been the primary source of training in critical thinking for thousands of years across educational traditions around the world in different cultures and traditions. It might even be better said that the part of an educational tradition that is directed most specifically toward critical thinking is the part that we call philosophy. So this is why the outcome is about learning philosophy, even though the real goal and value is to gain skill and experience in critical thinking.
Critical Reading
Critical reading approaches a text in the same way that critical thinking approaches a thought; just as critical thinking analyzes an idea or claim to determine its internal structure and mechanisms, critical reading analyzes a text to determine its internal structure and mechanisms. How is the text put together; what sections and parts does it have, and do they connect to each other? What is the cultural, historical, practical, or disciplinary background of the text, and how does this change how we should read and understand it? What are the primary and what are the secondary claims and ideas of the text, and how can they be identified? What evidence is provided in support of these claims and ideas, is it of the right kind, and is it sufficient? What conclusions or actions follow from these claims and ideas?
As with critical thinking, critical reading is part of every field and you can and will receive further training in critical reading in your other courses. Philosophy is distinctive in the way that we combine training in critical thinking and critical reading, typically by reading original texts that have shaped world cultures, from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and understanding them in historical and cultural context as well as working through what bearing they have on us today. Your work in philosophy should provide wide and adaptable critical reading skills that will be of lasting value in your field of study and practice, as well as in lifelong learning.
Thesis-driven Communication
Thesis-driven communication is when you want to say or write things as a way of providing someone with good reasons to think that your position on some issue or question is the right or the better position. The thesis could be a position on a moral or political issue, or on the best theory to explain a given dataset, or the best way to interpret a poem. Thesis-driven communication, too, is a part of every field in one way or another. In most fields, though, there are set bounds for which considerations are relevant or what sort of evidence or methodology is used. In philosophy, though, the only limits are the limits of logic and reasoning, which is why this is another area where philosophical training is considered to be the best and most foundational training.
Learning Objectives for this class in particular
In this course in particular, my goal is for you to engage with diverse philosophical and religious traditions and ideas to find ways that death can help bring focus and purpose to life, and to gain skills in critical thinking, critical reading, and culturally and historically contextual interpretation of texts. It is also a goal of this course to provide you with a view of what the fields of Philosophy and Religious Studies are like so that you can see whether they may be majors or minors you’d like to pursue.
Course Topics
Course Description
What is the meaning of life, and what role might the end of life play in living meaningfully? This course provides an introduction to philosophy and religious studies through an investigation of different views on death and the meaning of life from diverse cultures and identities.
My version of this course emphasizes Philosophy more than Religious Studies, but will hopefully give you a good enough idea of both that you’ll be able to tell whether you might want to consider further study in either area, either by taking an elective course or two, or in the form of a major or minor.
In the first half of the course we will follow a historical thread from the Ancient Levant to a 20th Century global context, looking at Ancient Hebrew and Greek views of meaning and purpose, influences from South Asian traditions including Hinduism and Buddhism, modern European responses and adaptations, and finally considering how the global fascist movements of the 20th Century tapped into and misused these sources of meaning and purpose to manipulate people for their own aims.
In the second half of the course, we will turn to critiques of the ways of thinking about meaning and purpose covered in the first half of the course. By looking at the limits of these ways of thinking, we will be able open up new ways of thinking about our meaning and purpose. We will cover critiques from Native American thought, from feminism, from disability studies, and from Black Liberation Theology.
Finally, we will bring these threads together and tie them to our current context by reading Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.
Readings and Materials
All readings will be provided in electronic form on Blackboard except
Camus, Albert. The Plague. Laura Marris trans. Knopf. 0593318668 (Links to an external site.).
It’s easy to find a PDF of a different translation of this book online, but you must buy this translation of this book, and you must buy it in print. We’ll be using it in class, and we’ll be talking about specific page numbers and passages, and if you have the wrong translation you won’t be able to complete assignments because we’ll be talking about terms that don’t appear in other translations and passages that you won’t be able to find. The Kindle version won’t work either—the page numbers are different, so you won’t be able to follow along in class or complete assignments.
I wouldn’t insist on this except that (a) I think this new translation is much better, and (b) It’s like $15, so sorry not sorry. Also, FYI, if you pre-order the paperback on Amazon, they will deliver it on its release day, 25 October, which is perfectly timed for this course.
No additional materials are required.
Coursework
Overview
This is an introductory-level course, so our assignments are aimed at providing the support you need to read, understand, and apply our course materials in a way that provides you with some experience and training in critical thinking, and some knowledge of the field of philosophy and how it works. Assignments won’t focus on you remembering who said what, but instead on how different views of the world from our readings work, and how to put them to use in understanding ourselves and the world.
There are several weekly assignments that work in approximately the same format every week and these assignments will be your regular work for the course. These are the Reading+Response assignments (typically two per week, due before class) and the Weekly Activity assignments (typically one per week, due at the end of the week). In addition to these assignments, there are also two one-time assignments at the beginning of the course (the Syllabus Quiz, Schedule, and Office Visit assignments), one on-time assignment around the 2/3rds point of the semester (the Daily Practice Journal), and one one-time assignment at the end of the course (the Final Reflective Writing Assignment).
Most instructional weeks will follow this structure: Reading, Response, and Activity. Most weeks will focus on a single reading which will be broken into two parts.
Readings
The reading will usually be on Canvas, in a VoiceThread assignment. Readings in the first Part of the course will have embedded audio commentaries to guide your reading, each being about 1 to 5 minutes. You’ll have to listen to all the audio at 1x while reading through, and then a “submit” option will appear at the end. In the second Part of the course, instead of listening to the embedded audio, you’ll be required to ask and answer questions along the way.
The embedded commentaries are meant to ensure that you have information “at the point of need,” so that you have the background and context needed to do the reading on your own and get at least a basic understanding of its content. This way you can show up to class with a basis for us to discuss the reading and we can spend our time together getting into the details and discussing implications.
We switch to questions and answers in the second Part because the readings don’t require as much interpretative and cultural work, since they’re from approximately our time and place. The questions and answers help to make sure, instead, that you’re thinking about how the text is related to our other topics and ongoing conversations while you’re doing the reading.
Responses
After completing the reading, the prompt for your reading Response will appear in Canvas. Responses will consist of (a). 3 words you learned (or learned more about) from the reading, (b). 3 ideas or concepts you learned about (or learned more about) from the reading, and (c). your short answer (100–200 words) to a writing prompt that draws on the reading and on my commentary in the reading.
Completing the response before class is intended to make sure that you’ve thought enough about the reading to take a position on an issue or a question, so we’re ready to engage at a deeper level during our time in class together. It also makes sure that you’ve put something of yourself into the topic, since taking a position means thinking about your view and your reasons for it, and this provides a starting point and some motivation for in-class discussion. To help to make sure that you have a concrete starting point, the prompts will often be about how your experiences, thoughts, or beliefs fit with or are challenged by the reading.
Activities
There will be an activity for you to do each week. This could be interviewing a friend about their views. It could be going for a walk every day for a few days. I might ask you to write a letter to your future self. If this activity generates writing or another artifact, I’ll ask you to submit it; if it does not, I’ll ask you to complete and submit a short reflection on the activity. In about the first half of the course these will be around 400 words; in the second half they’ll be a bit longer, around 500–600 words.
This class is concerned with critical thinking, especially in the context of life-long learning. That means that understanding the readings isn’t enough—it is at least as important that you learn to use our materials in working through problems and situations in your life. Activities will require you to show an accurate understanding of the readings and in-class discussion, but they will ask you to extend and apply that understanding, often to your everyday life and your own confrontations with meaning and purpose.
Typical Weeks
For most weeks, your workflow will be:
Monday: Complete first reading section and response and submit on Canvas.
Tuesday: Class meeting today.
Wednesday: Complete second reading section and response and submit on Canvas.
Thursday: Class meeting today.
Friday–Sunday: Complete Activity before the end of the week.
Some weeks, I’ll ask you to start the Activity at the beginning of the week because they have a “daily practice” element. These weeks, the workflow will look like this:
Monday: Complete first reading section and response and submit on Canvas. Do the daily practice for the week’s Activity.
Tuesday: Class meeting today. Do the daily practice for the week’s Activity.
Wednesday: Complete second reading section and response and submit on Canvas. Do the daily practice for the week’s Activity.
Thursday: Class meeting today. Do the daily practice for the week’s Activity.
Friday: Do the daily practice for the week’s Activity.
Saturday: Do the daily practice for the week’s Activity.
Sunday: Complete Activity before the end of the week.
I realize you may need to rearrange things a bit if you’re traveling over the weekend, or working a double-shift, or for any number of other reasons, but that’s the general idea.
The Schedule lists Readings for the days on which those readings are discussed in class. Be sure to plan ahead so that you finish the reading in time to write and submit your Response before class!
Syllabus Quiz
At the beginning of the course, you’ll have three other assignments.
The Syllabus Quiz will be due by the end of the first week. It will be short-answer, and I’ll expect you to show an understanding of the structures of the course, and to be able to explain the purpose and goals of these structures. The purpose of the syllabus quiz is to make sure that you’ve read and have a basic understanding of the “ground rules” of the class, to avoid misunderstandings, but also to help to motivate and reward a higher-level engagement with the goals and methods of the course. I hope that if we all understand the goals that motivate the course design, it will be more likely that we will share those goals and pursue them as a team. A course where we’re all working together toward a common goal, through intrinsic motivation, is much more effective than a course focused on extrinsic motivations, where students completing tasks like jumping through hoops and the instructor metes out rewards and punishments.
Schedule Assignment
For the Schedule Assignment, you’ll fill in a schedule for yourself for the first three weeks of the course, blocking out time to complete readings, responses, and activity assignments. You don’t need to fill in details about your schedule, but I want you to at least mark time when you plan to complete work and “flex time” when you can complete work if your schedule gets disrupted and you can’t complete work on time. The purpose of the assignment is to make sure that you’re planning ahead to think through how the schedule for this class fits in with your schedule for other courses, for work, for family, and so on. Seeing where the schedule works and where things don’t go as planned will also help you to reset and find a successful way through the semester.
Office Visit Assignment
For the Office Visit assignment, you’ll visit me in my office. Within the first three weeks of the course, come by during office hours for a chat, or make an appointment to come by if my office hours don’t work for you. Bring two questions with you, either about the course or about philosophy. Plan for at least 15 minutes, but we can talk longer if time permits! The goal of this assignment is to break down barriers that might make it less likely for you to seek out help when you need it by making sure you know where my office is, and making sure we reduce any awkwardness or social anxiety by having at least some interaction outside of class at the beginning of the semester.
Daily Practice Journal Assignment
Around 2/3rds of the way through the course, between Part 2 and Part 3, you’ll complete a Daily Practice Journal assignment. I’ll be presenting at an international conference (and, as a bonus, will be in Dublin for Samhain!) during the week of 1 November, and then we have 8 November off for Election Day, so there will be a full week and a half during which we won’t meet. Rather than record a lecture or conduct class in a distance format, I want to ask you to use that time to work on integrating things you’ve found valuable from the class into your day-to-day life. During this time there will be no new readings; instead, you’ll do some daily journaling, reflecting on what you want to take away from this course and how to use that to make real changes in your life. The workload for this week will not be greater than usual, just a little different.
Final Reflective Writing Assignment
At the end of the course, you will complete a Final Reflective Writing Assignment. The purpose of this assignment is not to test you or to have you demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of our materials, but instead for you to bring together several ideas that you’ve found interesting or compelling, and for you to put them together in a way that will be valuable for you. You’ll identify a foundational philosophical question that our readings have dealt with—“How should we live?”, “What is a good life?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, “What is the meaning of death?”, or some other similar question—and then answer the question from the perspective of three of our readings. After that, you’ll provide your own answer and your reasons for it, responding to these three readings from the course.
Reflective writing of this kind has been shown to help long-term retention of information, so it is a good sort of final assignment in many or most courses. In this course, it also serves to integrate different parts of the course. Having the topic be a question of your choice and allowing you to answer it using readings that you select allows you to choose what parts of the course you want to carry forward with you, and what you want to do with them.
During the last week of classes, we won’t have new readings and will spend our in-class time doing review and synopsis. This is designed to support your work in the Final Reflective Writing Assignment, and you can finish this final assignment during this week if you like. It won’t be due, though, until the date of our scheduled final, so you’ll have lots of flexibility in how you schedule your work for this course during the last week of classes and during finals week. I hope this flexibility is helpful, and lets you plan your work for this course around other demands on your time, including your other classes that may not be as flexible.
Grading
What are Grades For?
Grades are supposed to communicate something to your future employer or graduate school admissions officer. Everyone knows that the meaning of a letter grade is at least ambiguous and certainly doesn’t tell much of a story, but taken together they do seem to recommend you either highly or not as highly.
Recommendation systems like these are always sort of fraught. As faculty members at ODU, I have an interest in assigning high grades, since that will help you to get opportunities, which will in turn improve ODU’s reputation. But we also have an interest to assign low grades to students who are less likely to succeed in those opportunities, because if we assign high grades to everyone, then the grades we assign become meaningless because they don’t reliably indicate that one student is more highly recommended than another, and that will in turn harm ODU’s reputation. In balance, we have a pretty reliable incentive to try to make sure that the grades we assign correspond to your future prospects as we can best determine them through our particular courses.
Those prospects depend on your abilities, but also on your follow-through. Everyone has some greater or lesser degree of “raw talent” in any given area, and then of course that can be cultivated or not, depending on your interest in the area and your work on it over time. For example, some people have a sharp insight and a disposition toward critical reasoning, but someone without this disposition and base ability who invests time and effort in practicing careful analysis of claims and texts can most definitely have better analytical abilities in the end. And there is also the matter of just getting things done—neither is going to be successful if they never finish doing things. So to reflect future prospects, we want to pay attention to your abilities, in some mix or another of innate and cultivated elements, as you demonstrate them through completing work on time and following instructions.
But our role certainly isn’t just to measure your abilities! Our job is even more centrally about helping you to cultivate those abilities. Here, again, the function and meaning of grades pulls things in different directions.
If your grade is also supposed to indicate how much you’ve learned and improved, then poor grades indicate we have not succeeded as teachers (assuming we take responsibility instead of just blaming students, which I can’t say all of your instructors will do haha). But if we just assign high grades because we want to feel successful, it’s pretty obvious to us that we’re lying to ourselves. Taken together, this again produces a pretty stable balance of competing interests—taken together, it means we have an interest in using grades as a tool to motivate your learning and improvement, where a good grade distribution works as a series of incentives and rewards. For that to happen, you need to feel like you can work effectively toward earning the grade you want. If grades seem unfair or arbitrary to you, they don’t give you a reason to work hard and learn! This also produces a reason for us to make sure that you can’t get a good grade without putting in the work to learn and improve by engaging with the course materials. If you can get good grades by just saying smart things, then you’re not improving yourself. To make sure that we’re meeting our goal of teaching you and helping you improve your abilities, we need to make sure that grade don’t just measure your abilities, but also incentivize and reward putting in work in the training programs we’ve designed our classes to be.
So, grades are a recommendation, a measurement of abilities and prospects, and also a system of incentives and rewards that we can use to spur you on to continually improve yourselves. These systems only work, though, if the measurement is honest, and if the incentive structures are fair and transparent, so that you know what you need to do, and how to earn the grade you want to work toward.
My goal is to have everybody earn an A in this course. I want to do everything I can to make sure that you can complete work at a high level of achievement, and that the function of grading in this course is not just to recognize mastery of the material, but to encourage mastery. Grades in this course, in other words, should reflect individual student success, but should also encourage work in and for the course that supports your success and the success of all students in the course.
Grading Reading+Response Assignments
Reading+Response assignments are worth 10 points each, and are graded using a rubric focused on whether it shows good engagement with the reading, not a fully accurate understanding of the reading. This is because our main goal in class will be to gain an in-depth understanding of the ideas and theories from the readings and how to use them, so you need to have the basic components in place, but that’s all. They are due before class, and will only be accepted late if you can’t make it to class, because their purpose is to motivate and reward being in class prepared for discussion, and they can’t serve that purpose anymore after class. Instead, accepting them after class would undermine the motivation and reward of the assignment, making class less valuable for everyone.
Grading Activity Assignments
Activity assignments are worth around 30 points each, and are graded using a rubric focused on whether they show an understanding of and an ability to apply a good understanding of the reading, informed by our class discussion. Where the grading of the Reading+Response assignments is intended to motivate and reward coming to class with a preparation that will allow you to get the most out of participating in discussion, and for your peers to get the most value from your participation, the grading of the Activity assignments is intended to motivate and reward thoughtful and attentive engagement in class by demonstrating a depth of understanding and a range of application of the material which you couldn’t easily reach on your own. These don’t need to be done at any particular time to be valuable to you and to motivate and reward your mastery, but the longer it takes to get them done, the lower in quality they are likely to be. If they aren’t done before the beginning of new material, finishing them will also interfere with work going forward, which will hurt your performance and your grade there too. So, in effect, a “late penalty” is built in. At the same time, though, if there isn’t a cut-off point, these could linger on for some time and lose their purpose entirely. So, each is due at the end of the week (Sunday night), but I’ll accept them up to one week late without penalty, but not after that.
Grading the One-time Assignments at the Start of the Semester
The Syllabus Quiz, Schedule, and Office Visit assignments are 20 points each even though they should not be difficult to complete, and the Schedule and Office Visit don’t clearly measure any level of effort or work. For example, the Schedule could be filled in with entirely false information, which would make it pretty useless for you, but so long as it looked like a reasonable schedule it would earn a high grade. Grades for these assignments is not intended to reflect effort or reward achievement, but is instead intended to motivate participation. This is also why the point level is set comparatively high. They have due dates at the beginning of the semester, with no late work accepted, because they can’t serve their intended function in promoting your learning and success if they aren’t completed early on.
Grading the Daily Practice Journal Assignment
The Daily Practice Journal Assignment is worth 50 points, since it replaces a week’s worth of assignments—typically, two Reading+Response assignments and one Activity assignment—which are generally worth around 50 points in total. It shouldn’t require any more work than those assignments would usually take; maybe a little less. It should be completed over a series of several days, about a week, between finishing the Activity for the week of 24 October and starting on the Reading+Response due on 10 November. To help to make sure you say on schedule, it will be due on Wednesday, 7 November, but I’ll accept them up to a week late without penalty, but not after that. The logic here is the same as for the weekly Assignments.
Grading the Final Reflective Writing Assignment
The Final Reflective Writing Assignment is worth 100 points, since it is about the equivalent amount of work as three Activity assignments. It’s intended to motivate and reward encapsulating the parts of the course that you most want to take with you to be a part of your life-long learning, so the rubric focuses on your ability to accurately summarize ideas from readings of your choice, on a topic of your choice, and to take a position of your own that responds to each of them. This doesn’t need to be done by any particular time to be of value to you, but it is best done after we have completed going through all materials. So it won’t be accepted until after the last day of class, and will be accepted until midnight on the day of our scheduled final, since that’s the last day I can accept work and still be able to have everything graded by my grade submission deadline (48 hours after the scheduled final).
(There is no final, and we will not meet on our scheduled final date.)
Participation
Expectations for Participation in Class
Our class sessions is the part of the class that is most directly connected to the educational outcomes that I want this class to reach, and the assignments are all oriented toward either making sure you’re ready to get the most out of our time together in class and incentivizing focus and engagement in our class meetings by measuring and rewarding the understanding you reach during our time together in class. All the grades are either about getting you ready to get the most our of class or about rewarding attention and work during our class.
You should be in every class, and should participate in every class discussion. “Participate” doesn’t necessarily mean talking, although that’s good too. You should have the reading done, and you should have thought about it some. You should be listening to me and to your peers, thinking about your own views on things, and taking notes throughout. We’ll do in-class writing sometimes, so you should have paper and something to write with.
Our discussions may involve some of our deep commitments, which can create some uncomfortable conversations. Keep in mind that our discussions are taking place in an educational context, so you should not bring up anything unless you are okay with being asked follow-up questions and being asked to explain the reasons for your views and judgments, since our primary goal together is understanding. If you want to respond to something another student has said, you should respond to them directly rather than speaking to me or to the class in general. It isn’t necessary to raise your hand before speaking, but be sure to look around the room to make sure that nobody else is having trouble jumping in. Our goal in discussion is to hear and learn from each other, and to build an understanding stronger and broader than we can get on our own, and that requires both talking and listening. When you have something that you think is of value to contribute, I want you to be proactive in bringing it to the discussion, and you should also be a proactive listener by being sure to make room and to hold space for others, and to speak in a way that invites discussion.
Given that our discussion is taking place in an educational context, the focus should be on our shared project of learning more about life, death, and meaning through talking about the material and our understanding of it informed by our thought and our lived experience—if your response does not contribute to and support a shared project of understanding and exploration, it is probably better saved for your written work or for office hours.
Attendance
In my experience, attendance via Zoom is rarely comparable to attendance in class, and running a hybrid class also tends to lessen the quality of the class for those in-person as well as those attending at a distance. On the whole, it is clearly a net loss. But if you can’t make it to class, I also don’t want to just give up on that materials, since that’s where the most important part of the course is taking place! For these reasons, attendance by Zoom will not be an option, and any class meetings missed must be made up through an alternate assignment that will ensure similar engagement with the materials covered.
Missed classes may be made up by viewing a recording of the class meeting and then either meeting with me to discuss the missed materials or completing an individually-assigned writing assignment. Either way, the purpose of the assignment is to ensure that you’ve engaged with the most central points covered in class and are prepared for later conversations that draw on our work in class. For this reason, missed classes must be made up within a week.
If you show up more than a little late or leave early, you should get in touch with me or assume that I’ve counted you absent, and you’ll have to get in touch with me to make up classes, since I may not be able to follow up on all absences in a timely manner.
Making up for classes is necessary, since absences are inevitable, but making up more than a few classes would quickly begin to reduce the quality and impact of the class, not only for the student missing the class but also because the in-class experience is diminished without having a stable and consistent group of students. For this reason, no more than three absences may be made up, and missed classes not made up will lower a student’s overall final grade by one fractional letter grade each (e.g. B+ to B; C- to D+, etc.).
It’s true in general, but important to reiterate here that some circumstances will require exceptions to these policies. In cases like a lengthy illness or other extended emergencies, we will have to come up with an alternate plan.
Technology and Participation
Studies have shown that classroom use of digital devices negatively impacts student learning—even when these devices are used in class-relevant ways, such as for taking notes. Worse yet, studies have also shown that there is a negative environmental effect: the use of screens not only diminishes the learning of students using screens, but also negatively impacts students next to and behind students using screens.
If you have accessibility needs that require the use of screens in class please let me know. I will however have you sit in the back of the class if possible, so that negative impacts on others are minimized.
Children in Class
Ideally, you will all be able to be present and focused in every class session, and having children with you diminishes this attention, but things don’t always work out. Illnesses, school closings, and other circumstances are likely to, at some point, create problems for students who are parents. In these circumstances, I invite you to bring your children to class at your discretion.
As with the use of screens, the presence of children presents a possible distraction to other students. If you are bringing your child to class, please sit near a door so that you can easily step outside if necessary.
Basic Needs Policy
If you experience homelessness, domestic abuse, mental illness, or onset of mental or physical disability, and feel comfortable approaching me for support, please know it would not be the first time I’ve helped one of my students with these issues. If you experience these or other problems, such as injury or hunger, I will be glad to help and will do my best to offer support and connect you with appropriate resources. If you prefer not to talk to me about problems like these, write ODUCares@odu.edu and they will help you to get support and to navigate administrative hurdles. Please be aware that with the exception of Counseling and Student Health Services, all ODU employees are Title IX mandated reporters, so I cannot maintain confidentiality about sexual harassment or assault, so please don’t tell me about these issues unless you are ready to take action on the issue.
Honor Code
Our use of assignments to motivate and recognize learning is based on the assumption that each student has completed the work they hand in on their own, and that it reflects their work and their understanding. This is part of why we take plagiarism so seriously—it undermines fundamental mechanisms of educational institutions and ultimately diminishes the value of your degree as well as all of your peers’.
All work handed in should be your own. All quotes should be exact quotes, and should be in quotation marks. All writing which is not an exact quote and which is not in quotation marks should be entirely your own composition. Taking someone else’s writing, rearranging it, and switching some words out with synonyms is plagiarism, not paraphrasing. A paraphrase should indicate the source of the idea you’re explaining, and should be entirely your own writing, starting from scratch.
You may certainly discuss our course materials with others outside of class, and are free to compare notes and brainstorm. You should not, however, write together or share outlines, unless you have specifically discussed the idea of writing together with me ahead of time.
Unsure about how to paraphrase correctly, or when a source needs to be cited? Ask me, or ask a librarian. We are glad to help. You should be confident about your writing; if you are nervous about doing something wrong, come talk to one of us about it, and let us help you gain that confidence.
Additionally, keep in mind that re-using any or all of an assignment completed for another course also constitutes academic dishonesty. This kind of “self-plagiarism” is less frequently discussed, and students less frequently realize its wrongness. In part, this is because of the term itself—so-called “self plagiarism” isn’t entirely the same sort of wrong as plagiarism.
In plagiarism, you are passing off someone else’s work for your own—this obviously is not happening in self-plagiarism! Instead, you are passing off work already done for new work. What’s being misrepresented is not the author and the effort and creativity, but instead only the effort and creativity.
If we view writing as merely demonstrating knowledge—the “vessel” view of education encouraged by our overemphasis on standardized testing—you’re not learning anything by writing, but merely exhibiting the knowledge that you’ve internalized and are able to repeat. On this view, the wrongness of self-plagiarism is not apparent. However, there is, or ought to be, much more to writing than merely repeating information. The writing process, when approached properly and in a thesis-driven context at the very least, is a process of learning and discovery. It is this value which is being falsely represented in self-plagiarism.
Plagiarized work will not be accepted, and will receive a zero. Repeated plagiarism is disruptive and time-consuming to document, and will result in an F in the course. Should you and I disagree about whether work is plagiarized, the Office of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity will be asked to make the determination.
Policy Changes
I’ve done my best to explain the purpose, function, and mechanisms of all policies and assignments. If you’d like to propose an alternative structure, process, or assignment, I’m glad to consider it, and will assess it based on my educational goals.
Schedule
Reading+Responses are due before class on the day listed. Other assignments are due anytime on the day listed. M = Monday, T = Tuesday, W = Wednesday, R = Thursday, F = Friday, S = Saturday, N = Sunday
T, Aug 30 Introduction (read syllabus before class if possible)
Part 1: Themes from the Ancient Levant, 450 BCE–1945
R, Sep 1 קֹהֶלֶת (Kohelet), selection
F, Sep 2 Syllabus Quiz due
N, Sep 4 Kohelet Activity due
T, Sep 6 Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια (Nicomachean Ethics), Aristotle, Chapter 1, Part A
R, Sep 8 Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια (Nicomachean Ethics), Aristotle, Chapter 1, Part B
F, Sep 10 Schedule Assignment due
N, Sep 11 Aristotle Activity due
T, Sep 13 Ἐγχειρίδιον Ἐπικτήτου (Epictetus’s Enchiridion), Part A
R, Sep 15 Ἐγχειρίδιον Ἐπικτήτου (Epictetus’s Enchiridion), Part B
F, Sep 16 Office Visit Assignment due
N, Sep 18 Epictetus Activity due
T, Sep 20 „Nachträge zur Lehre von der Nichtigkeit des Daseyns,” (“On The Sufferings of the World”) von Arthur Schopenhauer
R, Sep 22 „Nachcträge zur Lehre vom Leiden der Welt,” (“The Vanity of Existence”) von Arthur Schopenhauer
N, Sep 25 Schopenhauer Activity due
T, Sep 27 „Der tolle Mensch” (“The Madman”) aus „Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” (The Gay Science) von Friedrich Nietzsche
R, Sep 29 „Zarathustra’s Vorrede” (“Zarathustra’s Prologue”) aus „Also Sprach Zarathustra” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) von Friedrich Nietzsche (selections)
N, Oct 2 Nietzsche Activity due
T, Oct 4 『葉隠』(Hagakure, “In the Shadow of Leaves”): 山本常朝 (Yamamoto Tsunetomo) (selections)
Part 2: Critiques: Indigenous, Feminist, and Black
R, Oct 6 Pierotti and Wildcat, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge: The Third Alternative”
N, Oct 9 Yamamoto Activity due
T, Oct 11 Fall Holiday
R, Oct 13 Pierotti and Wildcat, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge: The Third Alternative” (continued)
N, Oct 16 Pierotti and Wildcat Activity due
T, Oct 18 Virginia Held, “Birth and Death,” Part A
R, Oct 20 Virginia Held, “Birth and Death,” Part B
N, Oct 23 Held Activity due
T, Oct 25 “Conclusion: Legacies of the Cross and the Lynching Tree,” from The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone, Part A
R, Oct 27 “Conclusion: Legacies of the Cross and the Lynching Tree,” from The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone, Part B
N, Oct 30 Cone Activity due
T, Nov 1 (no class meeting)
R, Nov 3 (no class meeting)
T, Nov 8 Election Day Holiday
W, Nov 9 Daily Practice Journal Assignment due
Part 3: Reconsideration
R, Nov 10 «La Peste», Albert Camus
T, Nov 15 «La Peste», Albert Camus
R, Nov 17 «La Peste», Albert Camus
N, Nov 20 Camus Activity 1 due
T, Nov 22 «La Peste», Albert Camus
R, Nov 24 Thanksgiving Holiday
N, Nov 27 Camus Activity 2 due
T, Nov 29 «La Peste», Albert Camus
R, Dec 1 «La Peste», Albert Camus
N, Dec 4 Camus Activity 3 due
T, Dec 6 Review (no reading)
R, Dec 8 Closing discussion (no reading)
T, Dec 13 Scheduled final day, no meeting
Final Reflective Writing Assignment due