Environmental History of the University
of Texas
FS301, 35285, FALL 04, Jerome Bump, SWC
T 4-6. Par 214; office Par 132
Office hours TT 10:45-12:15 and
by appointment
Course Web Site:
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/ FS301/
email: bump@mail.utexas.edu;
Office phone: 471-8747, home: 267-7884
“Larger
universities must find ways to find ways to create a sense of place and to help
students develop small communities within the larger whole.” Carnegie’s Reinventing
Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities (http://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf)
Course
Description. We will develop a
sense of this state, this town, and especially this university, as your
place your
Alma Mater (nurturing mother). Hence, some class time will be outside the classroom,
devoted to writing about nature, buildings, and works of art on campus and in
Austin. Off campus, we will explore the Japanese garden at Zilker Park, the
state Capitol building, and St. Mary’s cathedral downtown (third-hour credit
will be given for these excursions). However, we will begin with these accounts
of undergraduate life at Oxford and compare them to your life here: Carroll’s Alice
in Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass; and selections from Hardy’s Jude
the Obscure and Beerbohm’s Zuleika
Dobson. We will also read selections from
Newman and others on the purpose of university education,
Projects. Multimedia
projects, on the web or on paper, will address undergraduate life and the
question, “How Would My Life Be Different and How Would It Be Similar if
I Attended One of the Universities Whose Seals Appear on the West Wall
of the Main Building?” (They are the oldest universities in the West: Bologna,
Paris, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge, Heidelberg.) Projects will first be
posted on our electronic Discussion Board. Initial comments on the projects
will be made online by the instructor and other students in the class,
with the instructor then focusing on polishing the final drafts for punctuation,
word choice, etc. Rewriting and preparing almost perfect final
drafts will be stressed. Procrastination will be heavily penalized. A basic
principle of this course is reading. The first test of reading throughout the course
will be the ability to read directions and suggestions for assignments, and
especially the ability to search through details and “read the fine print,” as
they say.
Class
participation
includes demonstrating in class that you have read, thought about, and are able
to talk about the assigned reading, and that you are able to concentrate and
listen when others are speaking.
Portfolio.The final portfolio consists of
clean copies of your essays, your third-hour reports, learning record, other
informal writing, and any other relevant materials.
Learning Record. Part of the grades for informal writing and the
portfolio will be based on journals of your learning styles, including an
interview with someone familiar with your intellectual development, a list of
personal goals for the course, and a series of self-observations.
Grades. The final grade (1000 points) will be determined as
follows: 40% by multimedia projects (10% for each draft -- 100 points each),
10% by the final portfolio of all your writing (100 points); 13% by informal writing (130
points); 10 % by fifteen
third-hour activities (15 X 6.7 = 100); and 7% by class participation (14 X 5
= 70). Students will receive exactly the grade recorded
in the online gradebook, even if it is one point short of the next higher
grade. Grades will be reduced for each class day assignments are late.
900 points are required for an A-; 800 for a B-; 700 for a C-; 600 for a D-.
Third-hour
requirements. “Students in seminars meeting two hours per week will be
required to attend twelve hours of ‘third-hour’ events. Also, all students in
the Freshman Seminars Program must attend the following three third-hour
activities: a library workshop scheduled during a class period, a talk given by
a staff member of the Undergraduate Writing Center, and a session on time
management presented by a staff member from the Learning Skills Center.”
Texts: The course anthology, an absolutely essential collection of xeroxed materials to be purchased from Jenn's, 2000 Guadalupe (basement of the “Church
of Scientology” at 22nd, 473-8669); The Annotated
Alice by Lewis
Carroll, ed. Martin Gardner (W. W. Norton); and The Writing Skills Handbook, 5th
edition, by Charles Bazerman
(Houghton Mifflin). (You must buy this
book as my corrections on your essays will be based on its code and you will
not understand them otherwise).
Fees: As much as $12.50 may be
required for the Story of Texas museum.
Computer
literacy required. Students
should be familiar with keyboarding, operating systems, word processing,
electronic mail, and web-browsing. Students will be expected to check their
email frequently (maintaining the correct email address in the U.T. Direct
system) along with the course Discussion Boards and Online Gradebook. Students
are encouraged to download pictures from our class web site and use multimedia
to fulfill all the writing requirements and ultimately collect everything on
one portfolio web site. Even if a traditional essay format is chosen for projects,
pictures must be scanned into the text and text wrapped around them.
HTML. If students are going to do web
projects, they must have or acquire basic HTML skills on their own in the first
month. Website project students should expect to spend a considerable amount of
time outside of class, sitting in front of a computer, and may also find it
useful to attend some of the free classes and workshops on various technical
topics offered by ACITS, TeamWeb, or the General Libraries. See http://www.utexas.edu/computer/classes/
http://www.utexas.edu/cc/training/handouts/tutorials.html#internet
About the Professor: Jerome Bump was awarded the Jeanne Holloway Award for undergraduate teaching, the Dad's Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship for instructing Freshmen, the Rhodes Centennial Teaching Fellowship for directing the Computer Writing and Research Laboratory (devoted primarily to lower division instruction), and chosen as a Mortor Board Preferred Professor. He is the author of Gerard Manley Hopkins and many essays and reviews. At the moment he particularly interested in writing about nature and architecture, especially gargoyles. For more information see http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/