Allen's English 100 at Ashland

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Signing Up for Spring Courses

You can begin signing up for Spring 2021 courses on Thursday, November 12. Here are some quick guidelines: Sign up as soon as possible. Courses fill up, and you don't want to get shut out of a course you really need. Courses have a maximum size, and most instructors are not very willing to sign for overloads. In fact, most of our supervisors have told us not to do it. Go ahead and sign up for English 101. If you need to repeat 100, we can easily make the change later. Sign up for English 110 as well. It's a one-credit lab, and the time is arranged to fit your schedule. It's a required course for most students who are moving from 100 to 101 Should you attempt to follow the same instructor into the next course? Good question. Those who favor this idea say that it's great to stick with someone whose style matches yours. Those who disagree say that the English Department (like the other departments here) is filled with qualified, interesting people, and it's a

Voting Reminder

If you are using an absentee ballot to vote in the upcoming presidential election, NOW IS THE TIME! If your ballot shows up late, it probably won't be counted, but there's nothing wrong with sending your vote early, so get a move on! LOTS of things will slow the mail down as the election approaches (some of them natural, some political), so don't wait. You don't have to have the ballot in hand to decide who you will vote for. Send off your absentee ballot request NOW. (Note, the deadline for absentee ballot requests is October 31, but you probably shouldn't push it. There's no reason to delay because you aren't committed to anything when you submit that request.) And remember that Ohio absentee ballots need two stamps.

Mask Under Your Nose

This style of mask-wearing seems especially popular among young men. I have to assume one of two things when I see you doing this: You don't know that you breathe through your nose too. You think that the only point of wearing a mask is to keep authorities from yelling at you. So, for your information (because you apparently don't know): The purpose of a face mask is not to hide your teeth. We wear masks to prevent the spread of airborne virus. And if you protest that you are a mouth-breather, I present this Google definition: Mouth-breather: a stupid person

Future Zoom Meetings

When this course began, I didn't schedule any Zoom meetings, and that confused several people. Apparently, they assumed that every course would have Zooms (and maybe someone in orientation told you that). I had my reasons. For one thing, all the technology, etc., for getting the course started was already overwhelming, and for another, some of you don't have wonderful Internet service. (I have also learned—the hard way—that computer software being sold to higher education is the worst in the business. I didn't want to make part of the course depend on something that doesn't work.) Zoom seems to have proven itself, and there's a way to do a Zoom session within Blackboard. (Figuring that one out will take some research on my part.) We will certainly be 100% distance education after Thanksgiving, and there is always the possibility of an earlier shut-down if conditions get bad, so I expect we'll Zoom at some point in our future. I'll let you know.

A friendly note about reading responses

First, yes they are required. One of the key strategies for getting good grades in any class is to submit every assignment, large or small, on time. Second, the questions for our reading responses are quite specific. If you didn't bother to read the article (or the question) and just grab one or two major words from the assignment and run, you aren't likely to get a very good grade. The prompt for this Friday is: Does Niman understand and accept the journalists' confusion about and reaction to what happened to the Columbus statue? How do you know? To do this one, you will need to know: What happened to the statue? What was the journalists' confusion and reaction? What evidence do you see that Niman "got it" (or didn't)? A generic discussion of the value of statues in public places isn't going to answer this question.

Cannot See the Video

Students keep having trouble with the little "talking head" video that begins each week. The problem seems to be with Apple users, so here is an instruction sheet from another college for fixing the problem: Safari, Firefox: Enable Third Party Cookies One of the simplest ways to fix the problem is to download and install Google Chrome browser. Here's the link for that: Download Google Chrome