Gateway 100 (Section 21) Syllabus

It's About TIME!

** Piazza Course Discussion Page ** Writing Analytically Resource Page **

** The Writing Center ** ** Grading Criteria **

1. Overview

This introduction to the liberal arts is designed to meet the following objectives:

Students will have the opportunity to practice scholarship, with a special emphasis on the cohesion of arguments and the organization of written work. Each completed, polished formal paper will be revisited, and significant structural recasting will be required.

The course will also explore a variety of perspectives on the nature of TIME.

Students will begin to learn writing styles that are considered appropriate in professional disciplines, by studying articles and writing fully developed papers in these styles.

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

"Auguries of Innocence", William Blake (1757-1827)

- English poet, painter, engraver

2. Introduction

What is the nature of time?

Does time flow freely and of its own accord?
Could time be nonlinear, reversible, or even cyclical?
To what degree can there be answers to such questions?

We often agree that "time is of the essence," but what is the essence of time?

Taught by a physicist, this course deals with perspectives on time from a variety of disciplines, including Philosophy, Anthropology, English and Comparative Literature (as well as Physics). Our readings allow us to analyze not only the concept of time, but also several different writing styles.

3. Course Requirements

A. Attendance

Your attendance is expected at all class meetings. However, we realize that unavoidable conflicts may arise once or twice during the semester. If you will not be present at a scheduled class meeting, you must let me know in advance (x-3004). All absences for athletic reasons must be scheduled in the first three weeks. Absences in excess of three class meetings will affect your grade.

B. Daily Exercises

There will be daily exercises, helping you to become comfortable with many aspects of writing at the college level, and introducing you to each new assignment in order to ensure that you have a good start for each project.

C. Formal Papers

You will write four formal papers. You will be evaluated on the quality of your research, the conveyed depth of understanding, and writing effectiveness.

To help you produce papers of the highest quality, other students in the course are expected to provide you with thoughtful criticism and feedback on a series of preliminary exercises. Exercises subject to peer review typically include an outline, a polished (albeit preliminary) thesis statement, and a draft. You may also wish to make use of the Writing Center on campus. Discussion with your Gateway instructor is also encouraged; however, a paper must be in a complete, polished form before you turn it in for your instructor's assessment. Three copies of your paper are required, along with the original marked-up copies of any earlier versions.

After receiving your first grade on a paper, you are expected to rewrite it. Any feedback you receive from the instructor or your peers is meant only to help "break the ice." It remains your personal responsibility to step back and assess, at all levels, your paper. Generally speaking, sentence-level revision is far from sufficient. Notable structural recasting will be required. In fact, we do not refer to your second version as a "revision," but as a "second vision" -- in the hopes that you will not feel too attached to what you produced the first time around. Moreover, to encourage your willingness to experiment with drastic changes, your grade on the second vision can never be lower than your first grade on a paper.

One paper of your choice will be sealed in a time capsule until the 25th reunion of your graduating class.

D. Commitment Outside of Class

You will need to spend time reading, planning, writing, and working on your papers in order to complete them on schedule.

You should plan to allocate a good deal of time to this course. (Welcome to college! ;-)

Bear in mind that you have to work at a consistently devoted pace in order to complete these projects, and that I'll let you work rather independently, to encourage your self-confidence. The success of a project is determined by how much you learn in trying, and by how much it builds your enthusiasm about the arguments involved. With that in mind, I do encourage you to come up with your own ideas to pursue while working on these projects: even if your idea is somewhat vague, perhaps together we can suggest something reasonable that you might try to get done in the time allocated. Please see me to discuss your ideas.

E. Journal Notebooks

You must keep two journal notebooks which should be used not only for the exercises performed during class meetings, but also for taking notes in the library, etc. A good format is to use the right hand pages for permanent records and the left-hand pages or the back of the book for scratch. Each time you come to class a dated entry should be made in the book. (You will always need two active notebooks so that you can still maintain one while I have the other).

Grading:

Each of your papers will be assessed according to a standard set of grading criteria.

Journals/In-Class Writing Assignments.....................10%
Contribution to In-Class Discussion.........................10%
Completed Paper #1 ........................................... 4%
Second Vision of First Paper.................................10%
Completed Paper #2 ........................................... 6%
Second Vision of Paper #2...................................13%
Completed Paper #3 ............................................9%
Paper #3, Second Vision.....................................13%
Completed Paper #4 ........................................... 9%
Paper #4, Second Vision.....................................15%

Papers will only be accepted if they are complete, polished works.

Late Policy -- Incomplete or late papers will be assessed a penalty of 15% per day.

Part of the process of learning to function at the university level is skill development; for this reason, we will have a series of classes devoted to a few of the most fundamental skills:

Analyzing arguments
Effective use of journals and other library resources
Writing different sorts of papers

College-level writing tends to involve more sophisticated ideas than the sorts of papers you wrote in high school, and requires thoughtful reorganization in order to be successful.

Knowledge must be gained, in large part, through careful reading of handouts and library sources and through discussion with experienced colleagues (i.e., other students).
Algebraic and physical arguments will be presented, discussed, and play a central role during part of this course. Therefore, you must be willing to address these sorts of arguments.
A strong emphasis will be placed upon rewriting and reorganizing your papers on the basis of your own criticism. Although you will, at various stages have the benefit of criticism from your instructor or your peers, revision is, of course, never merely a matter of fixing a few sentences that someone else has remarked on; rather, it is a personal responsibility: to step back and assess, at all levels, your first complete version. Perhaps, the comments from your classmates will help you to begin this process; perhaps the suggestions that I make in grading your first version will start something. In either case, your responsibility extends far beyond addressing those (extremely limited) forms of feedback. Revision is really independent of those comments (you could write your revision without ever looking at the feedback offered by others). It is your task.

Readings & Resources:

The Writing Center here on campus is a significant resource, which you should take advantage of.

There will be a number of handouts prepared by the instructors. In addition, we will guide you to some excellent resources in the library.

Three books that we will use are available in the bookstore:

Writing Analytically, by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen.

Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman. (You will need to bring this to class regularly)

Time: A Traveler's Guide, by Clifford A. Pickover

Special Class Activities:

As part of our discussion of the past, we will have a hypnotist visit the classroom. You will not be hypnotized without your full permission and understanding of what is to transpire. Moreover, the entire class session will be recorded on video for your inspection and reference.

Films:

You are not required to attend "Gabe's Gateway Film Festival" although you can receive small amounts of extra credit for thoughtful commentary regarding any of these films. There will be also be free refreshments available during the optional post-movie discussions. The festival is entitled:

"Fictional(?) Transcendence of (Apparent) Physical Boundaries."

The mysteries of life, space, time, and knowledge all beg for your consideration.

Our first film is "Contact," a recent award-winning movie based on the best-selling novel by the late astronomer Carl Sagan (and starring Jodie Foster). You can enjoy the movie without thinking too much, or you can enjoy the teasing questions percolating beneath its surface (e.g., at the end of the day, is there any difference between "belief" in science and in religion? Is the world what you make of it? Is there anything further to "reality"? What, ultimately, is the nature of the universe? -- And are we alone in it?).

If you've seen "The Truman Show," then you may find it surprising that something similar has been done in real life. The documentary "35 Up" is one in a series chronicling the lives of a group of children who are revisited and interviewed every seven years. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote, "To look at these films, as I have every seven years, is to meditate on the astonishing fact that man is the only animal that knows it lives in time. ...The subjects are good sports. At 7, they didn't volunteer for this project, but they're now stuck with it. The series plays on British television, so their notoriety is renewed on a regular basis.... They accept that they're part of an enterprise larger than themselves: Their films exploit, more fully than any others, the use of cinema as a time machine."

H. G. Wells wrote "The Time Machine" in 1895, which means that it preceded the introduction of spacetime into the scientific cannon. Yet Wells wrote, "To an omniscient observer there would be no forgotten past -- no piece of time as it were that had dropped out of existence -- and no blank future of things yet to be revealed ... present and past and future would be without meaning to such an observer.... He would see, as it were, a Rigid Universe filling space and time.... If 'past' meant anything, it would mean looking in a certain direction, while 'future' meant looking the opposite way." We will have a Saturday Matinee viewing of the 1960 film version, which won an Oscar for special effects.

"12 Monkeys" was based upon a short, stylized French film, "La Jetee," which we will view in class. Our evening film festival will provide us with the opportunity to compare and contrast the original with the Hollywood version directed by Terry Gilliam ("Brazil," "Time Bandits," etc.). Gilliam's version is full of religious symbolism, and replaces the nuclear holocaust of the original film with a scenario wherein experimentation with monkeys is somehow related to the outbreak of a virus that threatens to destroy humanity. In each, the world reaches a point where the present is unbearable, and the future without hope. All that remains is the past. (Heck, and that's just how each film opens!)

James Burke's "Connections" has been a successful television series throughout its several incarnations. We will have the opportunity to watch Burke describe the great interconnectedness of the World of Ideas, and how the ideas of relativity have resonated in unexpected ways throughout time and culture.