For Monday,

... there's no new reading.

HOWEVER, please come to class having re-read "Letter to My Son," by Ta-Nehisi Coates--we'll be doing a number of close reading exercises that will require you to have a good working knowledge of the whole of the essay.

(Close reading, as I emphasized yesterday, always involves looking at details within the larger context of the work as a whole.)

Likewise, there's no response paper this week--instead, please concentrate on handing in any work that you owe me. Share it on Google docs no later than noon on Sunday, which is your final deadline.

Any work handed in after noon--anything that has a timestamp after 12:00:59 PM--will not count toward your final grade. I'll still comment on it, because I think that's the right thing to do. But I will not give it a pass.

Your journals and weekly response papers are pass/fail. If you hand them in (and they adequately address the assignment), you pass. If you don't, you fail. Together, they account for 25% of your grade.

If you don't hand in these three papers (and three journals!), you'll be missing out on approximately 6-8% of your final grade. That may not sound like much, but if your attendance is also spotty, and you don't absolutely ace your graded papers, it'll mean the difference between being able to use this your grade in this class in order to satisfy your requirements--and having to take it again.

More importantly, these assignments give me a chance to know you, and your writing, and to help you with comments--all without the stress of letter grades.

Also, a final word of warning:

These papers also help you get to know me, and get a sense of what my expectations are like, for your writing.

If you want to go into your first letter-graded assignment without having some sense of what I will and won't like about your writing, that's your deal.

But it's a terrible, terrible idea.