First Blog of The Course!

In this first week of taking Writing 60, I read 6 Time articles about animals. I was shocked by many human-like behavior of animals that I never expected from them. For example, the animals have the ability to mourn, make friends, and communicate with each other. But the one thing that interested me the most is that wild animals have a very complete society themself just like humans. They have rankings within their clans. They also have rules and laws to regulate and assign the role of each individual in the community. These rules and laws sometimes play a role outside of their clan, the guest policy is one of them. The visitors may cross their territories as long as they are not taking any resources and staying for too long. This is a very intelligent way to run a community. I used to think the wild animals are selfish and only fighting for their own sake. The truth is that many of them work and live as a community and survive and thrive together.

When you are taking a new course, the very first thing should always be READING THE SYLLABUS. I learned many things about Writing 60 by reading the syllabus. The three major assignments for this course are Scicomm article, the advocacy project, and the portfolio. The grade of any assignment will be lowered by one-third of a letter grade after every day it is late. We are having grade contract to avoid students thinking solely about their grades during writing. We should freely express our idea and be creative while writing, not in a mindset of pleasing the professor or avoiding mistakes. We are using contract grade also because we are not writing for our professor, but for ourselves and to improve our writing and researching skills. I can figure out my grade by counting 9s and 11s in my Canvas Grade book. Three 9s equal to a -1 to the total grade, three 11s equal to a +1 to the total grade. And we are starting at a total grade of 84.