In this class, you will not receive individual grades on your assignments. Instead, each assignment that you complete will come with a set of minimum requirements. I will let you know whether or not your assignments have met requirements and will keep track of this for you in your personal Slack channel. If it doesn’t, you are allowed to revise and resubmit the assignment as many times as you’d like before the end-of-unit due date. There is no penalty for revising things.
While I don’t give individual grades, I do give lots of feedback. To get feedback, you’ll annotate each piece that you write with questions that you have about your draft. We’ll talk about this in class several times before you actually have to do it. If you annotate your work and turn it in on time, I’ll respond to your questions and give you additional feedback.
If your work is late or you don’t annotate it, you can still receive credit if it has met requirements and comes in before the end-of-unit due date, but unless we’ve discussed an alternative due date, late work or work that you have not annotated will not receive feedback.
You can be confident that if you turn everything in on time and it meets requirements (or you revise it until it does), and you come to class or make it up when you’re absent, you’ll make an A. My hope is that this system allows you to concentrate on improving your writing without thinking very much about your grade or without punishing you for not getting something right the first time. It also allows me to give you feedback on what you actually want to know.
If you don’t turn stuff in, you miss requirements and never revise on time, or you miss class and never complete your exit tickets, your grade will be lower. However, the only way that you can fail this class is if you aren’t doing your work, revising work that needs revision, or showing up, or if you don’t turn in one of the three major assignments. The best thing to do when you start to fall behind is to come talk to me ASAP so we can make a plan together for how to get you back on track.
My dream scenario is that everyone just does their work and comes to class and we never really have to use this. But life happens. This chart can help you to estimate your grade if you fall behind and don’t catch up: