Crapity Crap Crap Crap
English 104 Online
First Project - Your Road Not Taken
We’ll start the semester reading Robert Frost. For your first assignment, read the material about Frost on pages 959-960 and then read “The Road Not Taken” on page 966. The Web site, Monster, used this poem for one of the most successful ad campaigns ever developed. Here is some information quoted from the Monster Web site about its use of Frost’s poem:
Monster’s 1999 debut Super Bowl advertising campaign, “When I Grow Up,” was an emotional and amusing spot featuring children professing their career aspirations to “file all day” and “claw my way to middle management.” The spot was an instant success, resonating with consumers and winning numerous awards. In 2000, Monster took a more serious, yet impactful approach with its “Road Not Taken” campaign featuring advice recited from Robert Frost’s memorable poem.
“It was a great place to showcase the brand,” said Zhennaa Gallagher, director of advertising with Monster.com. “We had a traffic spike right after the ads and were able to hammer the message throughout the year.”
Monster's commercial, built from an adaptation of Robert Frost’s classic poem “The Road Not Taken,” had the desired impact. In the 24-hour period after its Super Bowl commercial aired, 4.4 million job searches were processed on its site, compared to 1.7 million job searches processed during a 24-hour period two weeks earlier.
Monster credits its success to a well-rounded marketing campaign. “We’ll not invest millions of dollars for a 30-second ad without being able to follow up with a brand,” Gallagher added.
In the 24-hour period between Monday, January 31 at 6:00 am EST and Tuesday, February 1 at 6:00 am EST, Monster.com experienced:
More than 4.4 million unique job searches, a 100% increase from the number of searches conducted during a 24-hour period following the previous year’s Super Bowl.
A peak of 5,600 searches in one minute in contrast to a peak of 2,600 searches in one minute during a 24-hour period two weeks prior. This represents a 115% increase.
More than 19,100 resume submissions, in contrast to the 11,000 resumes submitted on January 10 (a 74% increase) and to the 8,000 submissions during a 24-hour period following the previous year’s Super Bowl (a 139% increase).
Internet bandwidth peaked at 72 megabits per second during the 24-hour period after the Super Bowl, as compared to an average 44 megabits per second two weeks prior to the Super Bowl, and a peak of 35 megabits per second following the Super Bowl the previous year.
For your first assignment of the semester, please answer the following four questions by 11:55 p.m. Thursday, August 31.
1. Why is Robert Frost called the “nature poet”?
2. Why did Frost go with his family to London?
3. Why do your authors state that Frost’s initial delight of homespun wisdom often covers the darkness and potential chaos that comes with closer reading?
4. After reflecting on “The Road Not Taken,”:
What are three of the more important roads you’ve taken in your life?
Frost says, “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence”. As you reflect on your life, what are some roads you’ve taken that make you sigh now?
In 2026, what roads did you not take that will make you sigh when you look back on your life?
ASSIGNMENT THE SECOND:
ello English 102 students!
Hope everyone is well and ready to get moving. I encourage you to very
carefully read--at least twice--the previous posting, in which course
procedures and requirements are explained.
We now turn to our first major task: reading the novel “We”, written by
Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian novelist who died in 1937. “We” is not well
known by the public, but it has proven to enormously influential on
other writers (George Orwell, for instance) and it has a devoted cult
following. “We” is about, generally speaking, the dangers of what we
might call “groupthink”: that is, the dangers of a herd mentality in
which individuals happily--or not so happily, as the case may
be--sacrifice their individualism for the “greater good”. In another
way, it’s about the appalling harm that do-gooders can wreak upon others.
Our procedure will be straightforward: we will read the novel; we will
deepen our understanding of it by answering some follow-up questions;
and we will do some secondary research that, in your view, places the
novel’s arguments in a contemporary context. Finally, you will write a
research-based essay about the novel and the issues it raises.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves… here’s our immediate task:
1. Read “We” in its entirety. Make sure you FIRST read Olga Gardner
Galvin’s introduction to the novel. Ms. Galvin is herself an
accomplished novelist and editor, and her introduction is worth our full
attention. She places the novel in a very helpful and contemporary
context, as you’ll see. While the introduction is relatively brief, it’s
bristling with good ideas and sharp observations…I recommend that you
read it twice.
2. After reading the novel, produce a summary of the novel: about 500
words will do. Writing summaries helps us grasp the essential dynamic of
a novel, as the best summaries strike a balance between presenting the
novel’s general arc and taking note of the novel’s most essential details.
3. Produce five follow-up reading questions: These questions should NOT
be of the “what happened in chapter three?” or “What is the
protagonist’s name?” variety; these questions reduce a novel to trivia
and, more importantly, don’t compel us to think more deeply about the
narrative.
Here are some examples of questions that I’ve provided in the past to
get the ball rolling. You’ll see that they’re a mix of the rather
specific and the rather general; the trick is to produce a mix of
questions that strikes a balance between the TOO narrow and the TOO
broad. For instance:
“What, in your opinion, is the real reason D-503 could not let go of his
life behind the green wall and join the rebellion for freedom?”
“In her introduction to the novel, Olga Gardner Galvin claims that
ultimately, D-503 is used manipulated and discarded by both sides. Do
you think this is true? Why or why not?”
“What does “We” teach us about religion?”
“In the introduction Gardner refers to being assaulted from all sides by
never ending demands on our time. In this excerpt where does the
relevance lie?”
Okay, those are four pretty solid sample questions. Of course, I
recognize that, since we haven’t read the novel yet, the questions
themselves aren’t fully meaningful. But they WILL be after you read the
novel, and they serve as good examples of the kinds of questions we’re
after here.
Each of your five questions must be accompanied by:
a. A brief answer to your own question (it needn’t have the detail that
a more fully developed answer might have…just nail down the essentials
for now).
b. A brief explanation of WHY your question is important: in other
words, how does your question drive us to a better grasp of the novel?
DUE DATE: Tuesday, 8-29-06. I will respond to your ideas on Wednesday,
8-30-06. At the risk of stating the obvious: do not postpone beginning
this assignment. Get rolling NOW, or you’ll perhaps fall behind very
quickly.
INTRODUCTION TO THIS CLASS:
Hello English 102 students!
Below you'll find a rather detailed introduction to the course. It
should answer most of the questions you have at the outset. Read the
information carefully; to pass this course, all students must meet the
terms and conditions as stated below.
This course, like my classroom 102 course, is based upon the following
assignments and projects:
A. The close reading of literature: short fiction, drama, and poetry. In
the first three weeks of the course, we will read, discuss, and write
about short fiction. For roughly the next three weeks, we will read
drama, and near the end of the course we will study poetry.
Typically, students will read the assigned pieces and then respond to
questions that I post on our English 102 homework page. Frequently, I
will post follow-up questions to the student responses. As you will see,
the course will at times get very text-heavy: lots of reading, writing,
and responses to both my questions and the comments of other students.
B. The completion of the following essays:
1. A literary analysis of short fiction. I will describe
the essay in great detail as the assignment approaches. Briefly, the
essay MUST contain a minimum of 1,200 words and a maximum of 1,250.
2. A psychological analysis of drama. Again, I will describe the essay
in detail as the assignment approaches. Like the essay about short
fiction, the required length shall be 1,200 to 1,250 words. In this
essay, however, you will use psychological approaches
(Freudian or Jungian) to the play you write about. I will, of course,
provide fundamental information about the psychological approaches as
preparation for writing the essays.
3. A research-based persuasive essay. You perhaps wrote a persuasive
essay in English 101. Your research essay in this course is also
persuasive. You will gather evidence (much of it gathered from the
Internet) to support your arguments. The essay will be based upon our
reading and discussion of the novel “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The
minimum length of the research-based persuasive essay shall be 2,000
words. Note that the 2,000 words does not include the required Works
Cited page. This essay will use the Modern Language Association (MLA)
method of gathering and organizing your research. I will provide clear,
detailed information about the MLA style at the appropriate time.
Your formal essays are graded according to the following criteria:
1. Fulfillment of the essay's major purpose. In some cases, I will
provide background material that is essential for writing the essay; in
other cases, I will assign research resources that are available via the
Internet.
2. Development of detail in support of the essay's thesis. Typically,
your major claims (in other words, the points you're trying to make)
must be supported with fully developed evidence. Claims left unsupported
are of almost no value in this course (even if I happen to agree with
your claims).
3. Clarity of prose. In other words, your sentences should be easy to
read. Readability of prose is actually a complex subject, but in this
course I'm simply interested in teaching you how to improve the
readability of your prose. For many students, clarity of prose will be
one of this course's major challenges.
4. Correctness of punctuation, spelling, and standard English
grammatical conventions. In short, your essays must be very thoroughly
proofed. Misspellings are unacceptable, as all word processors feature
spell-check functions.
5. Submission of completed essays by their due date. You will have
sufficient time to work on your essays. Therefore, the major essays must
be submitted by their deadline (I will announce the due date of each
essay well in advance). If technical difficulties prevent you from
submitting your work, contact me immediately by e-mail or phone. Your
essays will be sent to me via course e-mail in the form of file attachments.
The essays will receive a letter grade of "A", "B", "C", "D", or "F".
Any essay that contains more than four fundamental editing/punctuation
errors (such as misspellings, grammatical errors, comma splices,
fragments, and/or run-on sentences) will receive an "F". Beyond all
else, you must write CLEARLY, and poor editing quickly destroys an
essay's clarity.
C. Thorough responses to questions and writing prompts posted online in
the Discussion area of the course. I will post frequent discussion
topics, problems, and questions on our homework page. Each student will
respond to these topics, problems, and questions; some responses will be
quite brief--a few paragraphs, for example. Other prompts require
considerably more detail. The responses, whether brief or relatively
lengthy, are an important part of this course because we don't meet in a
classroom--rather, our thoughts "meet" in the Discussion area. Your
answers to these homework questions, while not graded as formal essays,
must be competently written. Questions with more than a very small
number of editing errors (misspellings, weak sentence clarity, etc.)
will not be credited.
Also, all students enrolled in this course MUST satisfactorily complete
eighty percent (80%) of the posted assignments. These assignments, which
I post on our Discussion board, typically contain questions about
assigned readings, about writing assignments, and so on. Students who
fail to satisfactorily complete 80% of the posted assignments will
receive an "F" in the course, no matter what other grades have been earned.
Your final grade is the average of your formal essays. As noted above,
however, failure to satisfactorily complete 80% of the posted
assignments will result in a final grade of "F," no matter what other
grades have been earned.
Textbooks: We have two books for the course. One of them is a literature
anthology, daringly entitled "Literature." It is edited by X. J.
Kennedy, and it’s the “compact” edition of the book. It's available in
the South Suburban College bookstore. Make SURE you buy the CORRECT
text…there are plenty of textbooks down there. It’s a PAPERBACK…again,
make sure you get the right book. Many students carelessly pick up the
wrong book and find themselves immediately behind in the course. Don’t
let this happen to you.
The second book is the novel “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It too is
available in the SSC bookstore.
This course is ideal for students who can work independently. I will
provide much of the course's structure--the assignments, the writing
prompts, exams, responses to your writing assignments, etc.--but a
student's success depends very much upon an ability to work
independently, outside the traditional classroom. Most fundamentally,
this course will work well for students who wish to improve their
reading, writing, and thinking abilities, and are willing to expend the
labor necessary to do so. I look forward to working with you.
Final Grade: Your final grade is simply the average of your essay
grades. Students often ask, “How am I doing?” by which they mean, “What
is my grade at this point in the course?” You can always calculate your
grade at any given point by simply averaging the grades you’ve received
on your essays. Remember, however, that to pass the course, you must
satisfactorily complete eighty percent of the homework questions that I
post in the Discussions area.
Questions? ALWAYS ask any questions you have about any point raised in
class! Use our course e-mail to send me your questions, and I will
answer them in detail. You may of course call me at my office
(708-596-2000, extension 2323) but I recommend that you simply get in
the habit of using the course e-mail. DO NOT send questions about the
course to ANY OTHER e-mail address I might have at the college. I do not
look for questions about coursework ANYWHERE but in the course e-mail.
If you ever send me a question via e-mail, make sure you write the word
“HELP!” in the subject heading.
First Project - Your Road Not Taken
We’ll start the semester reading Robert Frost. For your first assignment, read the material about Frost on pages 959-960 and then read “The Road Not Taken” on page 966. The Web site, Monster, used this poem for one of the most successful ad campaigns ever developed. Here is some information quoted from the Monster Web site about its use of Frost’s poem:
Monster’s 1999 debut Super Bowl advertising campaign, “When I Grow Up,” was an emotional and amusing spot featuring children professing their career aspirations to “file all day” and “claw my way to middle management.” The spot was an instant success, resonating with consumers and winning numerous awards. In 2000, Monster took a more serious, yet impactful approach with its “Road Not Taken” campaign featuring advice recited from Robert Frost’s memorable poem.
“It was a great place to showcase the brand,” said Zhennaa Gallagher, director of advertising with Monster.com. “We had a traffic spike right after the ads and were able to hammer the message throughout the year.”
Monster's commercial, built from an adaptation of Robert Frost’s classic poem “The Road Not Taken,” had the desired impact. In the 24-hour period after its Super Bowl commercial aired, 4.4 million job searches were processed on its site, compared to 1.7 million job searches processed during a 24-hour period two weeks earlier.
Monster credits its success to a well-rounded marketing campaign. “We’ll not invest millions of dollars for a 30-second ad without being able to follow up with a brand,” Gallagher added.
In the 24-hour period between Monday, January 31 at 6:00 am EST and Tuesday, February 1 at 6:00 am EST, Monster.com experienced:
More than 4.4 million unique job searches, a 100% increase from the number of searches conducted during a 24-hour period following the previous year’s Super Bowl.
A peak of 5,600 searches in one minute in contrast to a peak of 2,600 searches in one minute during a 24-hour period two weeks prior. This represents a 115% increase.
More than 19,100 resume submissions, in contrast to the 11,000 resumes submitted on January 10 (a 74% increase) and to the 8,000 submissions during a 24-hour period following the previous year’s Super Bowl (a 139% increase).
Internet bandwidth peaked at 72 megabits per second during the 24-hour period after the Super Bowl, as compared to an average 44 megabits per second two weeks prior to the Super Bowl, and a peak of 35 megabits per second following the Super Bowl the previous year.
For your first assignment of the semester, please answer the following four questions by 11:55 p.m. Thursday, August 31.
1. Why is Robert Frost called the “nature poet”?
2. Why did Frost go with his family to London?
3. Why do your authors state that Frost’s initial delight of homespun wisdom often covers the darkness and potential chaos that comes with closer reading?
4. After reflecting on “The Road Not Taken,”:
What are three of the more important roads you’ve taken in your life?
Frost says, “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence”. As you reflect on your life, what are some roads you’ve taken that make you sigh now?
In 2026, what roads did you not take that will make you sigh when you look back on your life?
ASSIGNMENT THE SECOND:
ello English 102 students!
Hope everyone is well and ready to get moving. I encourage you to very
carefully read--at least twice--the previous posting, in which course
procedures and requirements are explained.
We now turn to our first major task: reading the novel “We”, written by
Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian novelist who died in 1937. “We” is not well
known by the public, but it has proven to enormously influential on
other writers (George Orwell, for instance) and it has a devoted cult
following. “We” is about, generally speaking, the dangers of what we
might call “groupthink”: that is, the dangers of a herd mentality in
which individuals happily--or not so happily, as the case may
be--sacrifice their individualism for the “greater good”. In another
way, it’s about the appalling harm that do-gooders can wreak upon others.
Our procedure will be straightforward: we will read the novel; we will
deepen our understanding of it by answering some follow-up questions;
and we will do some secondary research that, in your view, places the
novel’s arguments in a contemporary context. Finally, you will write a
research-based essay about the novel and the issues it raises.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves… here’s our immediate task:
1. Read “We” in its entirety. Make sure you FIRST read Olga Gardner
Galvin’s introduction to the novel. Ms. Galvin is herself an
accomplished novelist and editor, and her introduction is worth our full
attention. She places the novel in a very helpful and contemporary
context, as you’ll see. While the introduction is relatively brief, it’s
bristling with good ideas and sharp observations…I recommend that you
read it twice.
2. After reading the novel, produce a summary of the novel: about 500
words will do. Writing summaries helps us grasp the essential dynamic of
a novel, as the best summaries strike a balance between presenting the
novel’s general arc and taking note of the novel’s most essential details.
3. Produce five follow-up reading questions: These questions should NOT
be of the “what happened in chapter three?” or “What is the
protagonist’s name?” variety; these questions reduce a novel to trivia
and, more importantly, don’t compel us to think more deeply about the
narrative.
Here are some examples of questions that I’ve provided in the past to
get the ball rolling. You’ll see that they’re a mix of the rather
specific and the rather general; the trick is to produce a mix of
questions that strikes a balance between the TOO narrow and the TOO
broad. For instance:
“What, in your opinion, is the real reason D-503 could not let go of his
life behind the green wall and join the rebellion for freedom?”
“In her introduction to the novel, Olga Gardner Galvin claims that
ultimately, D-503 is used manipulated and discarded by both sides. Do
you think this is true? Why or why not?”
“What does “We” teach us about religion?”
“In the introduction Gardner refers to being assaulted from all sides by
never ending demands on our time. In this excerpt where does the
relevance lie?”
Okay, those are four pretty solid sample questions. Of course, I
recognize that, since we haven’t read the novel yet, the questions
themselves aren’t fully meaningful. But they WILL be after you read the
novel, and they serve as good examples of the kinds of questions we’re
after here.
Each of your five questions must be accompanied by:
a. A brief answer to your own question (it needn’t have the detail that
a more fully developed answer might have…just nail down the essentials
for now).
b. A brief explanation of WHY your question is important: in other
words, how does your question drive us to a better grasp of the novel?
DUE DATE: Tuesday, 8-29-06. I will respond to your ideas on Wednesday,
8-30-06. At the risk of stating the obvious: do not postpone beginning
this assignment. Get rolling NOW, or you’ll perhaps fall behind very
quickly.
INTRODUCTION TO THIS CLASS:
Hello English 102 students!
Below you'll find a rather detailed introduction to the course. It
should answer most of the questions you have at the outset. Read the
information carefully; to pass this course, all students must meet the
terms and conditions as stated below.
This course, like my classroom 102 course, is based upon the following
assignments and projects:
A. The close reading of literature: short fiction, drama, and poetry. In
the first three weeks of the course, we will read, discuss, and write
about short fiction. For roughly the next three weeks, we will read
drama, and near the end of the course we will study poetry.
Typically, students will read the assigned pieces and then respond to
questions that I post on our English 102 homework page. Frequently, I
will post follow-up questions to the student responses. As you will see,
the course will at times get very text-heavy: lots of reading, writing,
and responses to both my questions and the comments of other students.
B. The completion of the following essays:
1. A literary analysis of short fiction. I will describe
the essay in great detail as the assignment approaches. Briefly, the
essay MUST contain a minimum of 1,200 words and a maximum of 1,250.
2. A psychological analysis of drama. Again, I will describe the essay
in detail as the assignment approaches. Like the essay about short
fiction, the required length shall be 1,200 to 1,250 words. In this
essay, however, you will use psychological approaches
(Freudian or Jungian) to the play you write about. I will, of course,
provide fundamental information about the psychological approaches as
preparation for writing the essays.
3. A research-based persuasive essay. You perhaps wrote a persuasive
essay in English 101. Your research essay in this course is also
persuasive. You will gather evidence (much of it gathered from the
Internet) to support your arguments. The essay will be based upon our
reading and discussion of the novel “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The
minimum length of the research-based persuasive essay shall be 2,000
words. Note that the 2,000 words does not include the required Works
Cited page. This essay will use the Modern Language Association (MLA)
method of gathering and organizing your research. I will provide clear,
detailed information about the MLA style at the appropriate time.
Your formal essays are graded according to the following criteria:
1. Fulfillment of the essay's major purpose. In some cases, I will
provide background material that is essential for writing the essay; in
other cases, I will assign research resources that are available via the
Internet.
2. Development of detail in support of the essay's thesis. Typically,
your major claims (in other words, the points you're trying to make)
must be supported with fully developed evidence. Claims left unsupported
are of almost no value in this course (even if I happen to agree with
your claims).
3. Clarity of prose. In other words, your sentences should be easy to
read. Readability of prose is actually a complex subject, but in this
course I'm simply interested in teaching you how to improve the
readability of your prose. For many students, clarity of prose will be
one of this course's major challenges.
4. Correctness of punctuation, spelling, and standard English
grammatical conventions. In short, your essays must be very thoroughly
proofed. Misspellings are unacceptable, as all word processors feature
spell-check functions.
5. Submission of completed essays by their due date. You will have
sufficient time to work on your essays. Therefore, the major essays must
be submitted by their deadline (I will announce the due date of each
essay well in advance). If technical difficulties prevent you from
submitting your work, contact me immediately by e-mail or phone. Your
essays will be sent to me via course e-mail in the form of file attachments.
The essays will receive a letter grade of "A", "B", "C", "D", or "F".
Any essay that contains more than four fundamental editing/punctuation
errors (such as misspellings, grammatical errors, comma splices,
fragments, and/or run-on sentences) will receive an "F". Beyond all
else, you must write CLEARLY, and poor editing quickly destroys an
essay's clarity.
C. Thorough responses to questions and writing prompts posted online in
the Discussion area of the course. I will post frequent discussion
topics, problems, and questions on our homework page. Each student will
respond to these topics, problems, and questions; some responses will be
quite brief--a few paragraphs, for example. Other prompts require
considerably more detail. The responses, whether brief or relatively
lengthy, are an important part of this course because we don't meet in a
classroom--rather, our thoughts "meet" in the Discussion area. Your
answers to these homework questions, while not graded as formal essays,
must be competently written. Questions with more than a very small
number of editing errors (misspellings, weak sentence clarity, etc.)
will not be credited.
Also, all students enrolled in this course MUST satisfactorily complete
eighty percent (80%) of the posted assignments. These assignments, which
I post on our Discussion board, typically contain questions about
assigned readings, about writing assignments, and so on. Students who
fail to satisfactorily complete 80% of the posted assignments will
receive an "F" in the course, no matter what other grades have been earned.
Your final grade is the average of your formal essays. As noted above,
however, failure to satisfactorily complete 80% of the posted
assignments will result in a final grade of "F," no matter what other
grades have been earned.
Textbooks: We have two books for the course. One of them is a literature
anthology, daringly entitled "Literature." It is edited by X. J.
Kennedy, and it’s the “compact” edition of the book. It's available in
the South Suburban College bookstore. Make SURE you buy the CORRECT
text…there are plenty of textbooks down there. It’s a PAPERBACK…again,
make sure you get the right book. Many students carelessly pick up the
wrong book and find themselves immediately behind in the course. Don’t
let this happen to you.
The second book is the novel “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It too is
available in the SSC bookstore.
This course is ideal for students who can work independently. I will
provide much of the course's structure--the assignments, the writing
prompts, exams, responses to your writing assignments, etc.--but a
student's success depends very much upon an ability to work
independently, outside the traditional classroom. Most fundamentally,
this course will work well for students who wish to improve their
reading, writing, and thinking abilities, and are willing to expend the
labor necessary to do so. I look forward to working with you.
Final Grade: Your final grade is simply the average of your essay
grades. Students often ask, “How am I doing?” by which they mean, “What
is my grade at this point in the course?” You can always calculate your
grade at any given point by simply averaging the grades you’ve received
on your essays. Remember, however, that to pass the course, you must
satisfactorily complete eighty percent of the homework questions that I
post in the Discussions area.
Questions? ALWAYS ask any questions you have about any point raised in
class! Use our course e-mail to send me your questions, and I will
answer them in detail. You may of course call me at my office
(708-596-2000, extension 2323) but I recommend that you simply get in
the habit of using the course e-mail. DO NOT send questions about the
course to ANY OTHER e-mail address I might have at the college. I do not
look for questions about coursework ANYWHERE but in the course e-mail.
If you ever send me a question via e-mail, make sure you write the word
“HELP!” in the subject heading.