Instructor Info and Course Overview | Materials | Schedule | Grades and Assignments | Policies

Overview

These assignments' purpose is to incentivize you undertake some learning experiences that, while quite worthwhile on their own, aren’t suitable as mandatory assignments.

You will watch or read a work from the list below. Before the due date listed, submit in Canvas a document that includes a 2–3 sentence summary and a 500-word mini essay.

Each assignment is worth two points added to your final course grade in Canvas. Points earned in this way will will be added to your calculated final grade after the semester’s end.

This may be helpful to you if your final course grade in Canvas happens to fall near a break point between letter grades. As noted elsewhere, I do not round up final grades.

You are free to complete either assignment or none at all.

Works and Due Dates

Extra Credit (EC) 1

The Work
This assignment requires in-person attendance for the duration of the event. If you arrive after the start time or leave early, you will not earn credit.

On October 24,2023 at 12:00pm (Sparks Building 124), attend the Humanities Institute Resident Lecture "Unravelling the Nation: Criticality and Agency in Contemporary Syrian Women’s Fiction."

Due Date Follow the below instructions and submit your project in Canvas no later than November 1, 2023 at 11:59 p.m.

Extra Credit (EC) 2

The Work
Watch the film essay Inhuman Figures by Michelle N. Huang and CA Davis. As described on the project website, this essay "excavates three popular science-fictional archetypes—the robot, clone, and alien—to reveal how imagined futures are produced from a long history of treating Asian Americans as tireless workers, indistinguishable copies, and forever foreigners."

Fun fact: Michelle N. Huang (Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University) received her Ph.D. in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2017.

Due Date Follow the below instructions and submit your project in Canvas no later than November 17, 2023 at 11:59 p.m.

Gateway Criteria

The following minimum criteria must be met for the project to be considered submitted:

• The mini essay is at least 500 words long.
  • Note: 2–3 sentence summary of the work doesn't count towards this total.
• The mini essay is on one of the works listed above.

If this criteria is not met, your submission will not earn credit. Late submissions will not earn credit.

Instructions

1. Read or watch the assigned work.
   1. A tip: While watching, take notes on things that caught your attention; things that interested you; things that you disagreed with.
2. Write a 2–3 sentence summary of the work.
3. Write a 500-word mini-essay about a single topic or idea from the work that caught your interest.
   1. Note: Do not spend this time on summary. You've already done that in the summary.
   2. Note: As with the Course Journal entries, this mini-essay should focus on a single argument or claim, and should be well-organized, making use of topic sentences and paragraphs to structure the piece.

Evaluation Criteria

I will evaluate this assignment on a binary: it either will or will not earn credit.

This determination will be based on:

• Whether the summary and mini essay demonstrates that you attentively read/watched the work, took notes, and (to a reasonable extent) comprehended it.
• Whether the mini essay demonstrates a well thought out and good faith effort to engage with a single topic or idea from the work.

While you are not prohibited from using generative AI tools to write the project, writing that might lead the reader to believe that the project's been AI generated without much of your engagement as a writer in refining and developing the material cannot earn credit. The following may lead the reader to believe such a thing: evidence that does not exist in the work, nonsensical sentences, or bizarre grammatical constructions that sound awkward when read aloud. Best to avoid any misinterpretation of your work and carefully revise, edit, and proofread.