Allen's English 100 at Ashland

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.

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.

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 CookiesOne 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

Business people talk about "hard skills" and "soft skills."
Hard skills can be taught with books of instructions—things such as driving a standard shift, using Microsoft Word, or analyzing a blood sample.

Soft skills are such things as showing up on time for work, giving the boss the proper respect, wearing appropriate clothing for the task, and keeping your work area tidy. Many college students figure that the hard skills are all they need, but the hard skills are relatively easy to teach; if you lack soft skills, you will struggle in college and have a lot of trouble finding and keeping a job.

Somewhere in the middle area between these are the adulting skills. People who lack these skills might be able to pass courses, but their time in college will be very difficult. Here are a few you will need—and now is a good time to begin working on them.

Doing laundry. Surprised that I put it first? The laundry room is a total mystery to most high school kids, but your mother…

Nearly every student has one of these things, and it's impossible to imagine a time without them. (Trust me—there really was a day when you couldn't instantly send Tweets to your friends, look at pictures of kittens, play games, or browse for porn 24/7.)Smart phones cause student trouble in three ways:The phone is not a computerWell OK—literally it is. The modern smart phone can do things that the full desktop computer of fifteen years ago only dreamed of, but that's not what I mean.It's a poor tool for typing a paper. The screen is smaller than your hand, so you cannot see a whole page of typing, and writing a paper with that tiny on-screen keyboard will make you crazy when you do a five-page paper. It's OK for Tweets, but those are only 280 characters.They cannot do Blackboard. Most of our course is on the Blackboard LMS, and yes, there is a way to see Blackboard on a phone, but learning how to do it and fighting the machine is a major challenge. Best advice: Don…

Now that the course is beginning to roll, I have a few reminders about this website.This will continue to be an informal "advice and reminders" site, and it's really part of the course. I will probably post things here every week (and at the start of the course, every day), so you should keep coming back.The website isn't part of the Ashland University internet environment, and it's completely public, so it will keep going even if there's trouble with AU's server. It's also available to anyone with an Internet connection, so go ahead and refer your friends to this site if you like. (In the last 30 days, we've had readers from Belgium, Philippines, and Japan. The reader from Portugal seems especially faithful.)There's more to the site than the seven items you see on the first page.In the black banner at the top, you'll see the words "The rest of the blog." Click that to learn how to see more.If you click the thing that looks like …