Course Syllabus
Modern
Spring 2011
Instructor:
Terrence Monroe
808.941-7140
Experienced as an instructor of in-class courses (since 1974) and online
courses (since 2000) in various disciplines of world history and contemporary
Asian civilizations for colleges and universities throughout the
Diverse professional and personal interests in liberal arts, science, and
business, and a published author of original writing on
Course Overview:
This course
examines those major events and issues in
Learning Outcomes:
·
Gain an understanding of contemporary Chinese
national developments with reference to past traditions; the causes of
·
Refine writing and cognitive skills through weekly
essays and class discussion.
·
Become proficient in functioning in an online
learning environment and in the use of online resources related to modern
Text:
John King
Fairbank and Merle Goldman, editors
ISBN:
0-674-11673-9
Course Requirements:
Successful completion of this course depends upon:
· Completion of three essays assignments.
· Participation in weekly discussion forums.
· Completion of a midterm and final exam as described in the Orientation; the midterm exam will be written on your own and emailed to me, while the final exam will be proctored.
*** Be sure to
refer to the Orientation for further details on how to complete these
assignments.
Schedule and Grade Policy:
Your essays assignment and discussion forum postings are due by the Sunday that ends each week of instruction. I do accept late essays (not discussion postings), but I will assess a 2 percentage-point penalty for every day that your Essays Assignment is late. So, if it is four days late, and your grade is otherwise a 90, your adjusted grade (including the “late fee”) would be an 82. Discussion postings should be posted throughout the week and must be posted before the week closes each Sunday night. Discussion postings may not be made up once the weekly discussions close; if you miss a particular week’s discussion, you may not go back in after the Sunday night deadline for that week and post.
Still, you are expected to complete all assignments on time. Please bear in mind that an Incomplete is generally not an option, since there is no way to make up the group discussion element of your grade once the course is finished (after all, the group will have moved on, and there wouldn’t be anyone to discuss anything with). Please bear in mind also that participation in the discussion forums is what makes an online course work.
Your essays assignment and discussion forum
grades will be posted in the Gradebook within 7 days of
their due dates. Each Essays Assignment grade will have a maximum value of 300
points (for a total of 900 points), each week’s discussion forum participation
will have a maximum value of 50 points (for a total of 500 points). Total
points for this course: 1400.
Grading
Scale:
A: 90 - 100 (1260 - 1400 points)
B: 80 - 89 (1120 - 1259 points)
C: 70 - 79 (980 - 1119 points)
D: 60 - 69 (840 - 979 points)
F: less
than 60 (less than 839 points)
Assignment Schedule:
Week 1 (Apr. 4 –
Apr. 10): Reading: Chapter 1
Participate
in Week 1 discussion forum
Week 2 (Apr.. 11
– Apr. 17): Reading: Chapter 2
Participate
in Week 2 discussion forum
Week 3 (Apr. 18 –
Apr. 24): Reading:
Chapter 3
Submit
essays assignment 1
Participate
in Week 3 discussion forum
Week 4 (Apr. 25 – Apr. 31): Reading:
Chapter 4
Participate in Week 4 discussion forum
Week 5 (May 1 –
May 7): Reading: Chapter 5
Participate
in Week 5 discussion forum
Week 6 (May 8 –
May 14): Reading: Chapter 6
Submit
essays assignment 2
Participate
in Week 6 discussion forum
Week 7 (May 15 – May 21): Reading: Chapter 7
Participate
in Week 7 discussion forum
Week 8 (May 22 –
May 28): Reading:
Epilogue
Participate
in Week 8 discussion forum
Week 9 (May 29 –
Jun. 5): Participate in Week 9 discussion forum
Week 10 (Jun. 6 –
Jun. 11): Submit
essays assignment 3 (your final exam (proctored); date and location to be
announced)
Participate in Week 10 discussion forum
Military Students and DOD Employees:
The proctored final exam can be taken on
campus. In an effort to service our students on the
***If you are a civilian and have a MWR
student pass you can take your exam at the main campus or at Schofield Barracks.
You must already have your pass; the Army will not make civilian passes for
exam purposes only. Civilians are not able to take exams at
To reserve a seat at one of the military
installations, you must have access to the military base you will be attending.
This reservation must be made no
earlier than the 7th week of the course. We do have a maximum seating, so reservations
are first come, first serve. You must email the following information to
one site only (
·
name,
social security number (last 4 digits)
·
contact
phone number and valid email address
·
type
of access (active duty, military family member, DOD)
·
time
slot (one per class) – 13:00 or 15:00
·
course
number, course title, and instructor’s name
You will receive an email confirmation for
the site requested, if you do not receive a confirmation email within 2 days,
please contact the office you emailed or re-send the reservation request. You
must print out your confirmation and bring it with you to the exam (along with
a valid picture ID).
If you do not pre-register for a seat, no
exam will be available for you at either of the sites.
Participation Policy:
One of the reasons
why people take an online course is that other obligations make it difficult or
impossible to attend traditional classes. When you work on your assignment is
entirely up to you, but you should plan to spend at least ten hours a week on
this course--in reading, researching, thinking, writing, and discussion. You
should log in to WebCT at least several times a week,
and when you do so and from where, of course, is up to you. It is best to log
in to WebCT once a day, if just to check for
announcements and to read through the discussions. If you procrastinate and
fail to log in for more than a few days, you will begin to get lost. What’s
more, if most students wait until the end of the week to make their discussion
postings, then there won’t be much until then for others to respond to;
therefore, a good discussion grade depends on the student making consistent
postings from the beginning of each week on through the end of the week;
students who wait until the end of the week to make their discussion postings
will be penalized for their procrastination. Many people who drop out or fail
online courses do so because they have not developed the habit of logging in
regularly to stay in touch with things.
Academic Integrity (DO NOT FAIL TO READ THIS):
It is important
for you to keep in mind that all of your work for this course must be in your
words, however humble. Your essays and exams are not evaluated on compositional
excellence, but on quality of insight. Please understand that after some 35
years of reading student writing—and of reading and researching the corpus of
professionally produced writing on our subject--it is often instantly
recognizable to me when a submission is not a student’s own work.
My policy is to submit anything that arouses suspicion to Turnitin.com, an academic service to which I subscribe that utilizes an algorithm-based methodology to compare the suspect sample to all published material on the Internet. Keep in mind that the Internet these days includes many web-based counterparts of conventionally-published materials (meaning that, if it’s been published anywhere in print—whether in an old encyclopedia, a magazine or newspaper, or in a brand-new bestseller—it’s probably on the Internet somewhere). If Turnitin indicates that there is a significant match between your work and a previously published source, pointed questions will be asked and disciplinary measures enacted if need be.
Consultation:
I’m always available via email, or you may
call and leave a message at any time, day or night. My phone ringer is turned
off, so don’t worry about calling in the middle of the night—it’s okay! For
those of you who are outside Hawaii, calling Hawaii these days is cheap—free on
most cell phone plans, several cents a minute with a prepaid phone card, 10-25
cents/minute with phone company long distance plans. If you just leave a quick
message, you shouldn’t suffer much financially, and I’ll pay for the return
call, of course. I will try to respond to your messages within 24 hours;
however, please do not expect me to respond on weekends or holidays.
Now, don’t forget to read the Orientation!
Orientation
As to course requirements:
The first thing
that makes up your course grade is a series of three Essays Assignments. The concept for each
of these essays assignments is the same, as follows:
In five essays of approximately 200 - 300
words each (1,000 - 1,500 words total), identify topics (you decide which ones,
as long as they have something to do with the material you've studied to date
in this course) and reflect on their implications--in other words, why they
matter, and where those implications lead. This is an exercise in reflection on
the lessons of history, where they come from, and where they lead in terms of
their influence on the development of the enduring characteristics of Japanese
society, and (if you wish) what they mean for things that are happening now.
You should be working on these essays
assignments continuously, and your
work should have the polished feel of being the result of a steady, daily
progression of thought and reflection. You can never tell when insight will strike,
so you should get into the habit (now) of taking notes as we go along of things
like this that occur to you; carry a little notebook and pen around with you
always (except in the shower)--it’s a habit that will serve you very well
indeed for all kinds of purposes. Polish, embellish, and refine your insights
as you go. Don’t even think about trying to sit down to
compose these essays all at once—it’s a daunting, unproductive, and highly
improbable prospect. If
it appears that you have slapped together this assignment at the last minute,
your grade will suffer for it.
Everything you write for these assignments must be entirely in your own words,
however humble. Plagiarism will result in your eviction from this course. Do
not cite or recite anything—I already know what happened in history, so what I
want is your insight as to the implications
of your topics. I want to see evidence that you’re thinking things through in
these matters and wondering about what it all means. Any citation of material
from any other sources will result in a mark-down of your grade.
You must write on five (5) separate topics for each
Essays assignments. Your five essays should be clearly segregated from each
other--do not submit them run together into one big essay.
Here are a couple of essays as examples:
Social organization: Asian societies and
economies (especially Japan) are the most relationship-driven in the world, with
virtually everything proceeding on the basis of who knows whom—making it very
difficult for outsiders like Americans to break in. Japan places straightjacket
constraints on maintaining the harmony of its society and places the interests
of the group—from the emperor on down--far ahead of the interests of the
individual. And since China's most abundant resource is people, it has of
course made sense to make excellent use of it. China places little stock in
such things as contracts and statutes, wisely preferring to invest their trust
in relationships. Unfortunately, none of that has changed under communism--it's
still very much the old-boy game. The state provides little security such as we
know it in the form of entitlements here in the West, and the Chinese continue
to look to each other for their support. With marriage, love is not even a
consideration; marriages are regarded as alliances between families for their
mutual benefit. The Chinese are nothing is not practical! All that harks back
to Confucius, whose entire philosophy was based in ordering the relationships
among men so that China’s most dreaded condition—social chaos—might be kept at
bay. As
one might expect from such heavily populated conditions, Asian societies place
a great deal more emphasis on social interaction and relationships than does
the individual-minded United States.Family in Japan:
The fact that Japan is possibly the most relationship-driven society on earth
derives from the concept of the individual as part of both the biological and
national family headed by the emperor, with the traditional Confucian ethos
ordering the whole business from top to bottom. Everything is conceived in
terms of the group, and in a nation as crowded as Japan, there just isn’t any
room for the individual.
Japan's loss of traditional arts: I think
many if not most Westerners would be greatly surprised--and perhaps
appalled--by the reality of what passes for cultural forms in Japan today: a
dreary and depressing cemented-over landscape of pointless monuments and
brutalized nature. Whatever happened to the sense of harmony with nature that
once graced Japan's artistic tradition, and transformed it into something ugly
beyond words? The traditional aesthetic began to disappear after the Second
World War, and has since been replaced with a consuming passion for post-modern
industrial squalor and gigantism that seems to renounce the classic aesthetic.
If it can be said that art reflects the popular mood, then something has
happened in modern Japan to make the Japanese feel very badly about themselves.
Is it the futility of wealth that endows the Japanese with hitherto unimaginable
creature comforts, yet denies them the opportunity for self-expression and
individual value fulfillment? Are the Japanese lost in a twilight zone, without
an identity that fits either the Western or traditional Asian model? Why do
they make themselves so ugly if they do not believe themselves to be ugly?
Do you see from these examples that what
I'm getting at it is not what
happened, but what it means? Don't
worry about drawing the wrong conclusions about your topics--I will never
penalize anyone for drawing the wrong conclusions. This is your chance to wonder about things, and that's what I'm
trying to accomplish in this course: to get students into the habit of
wondering about things that happened in history, and to draw upon their lessons
to help understand comparable things that are happening now.
I will provide you the following grade
report on your essays assignments:
Quality of
insight (50 percentage points): How well did you interpret the significance of
your topic? How well did you consider the implications, in terms of how your
topics reflect on comparable developments in the present, past, or even the
future? How creative is your thinking in terms of drawing conclusions are where
things come from and where they lead and why they're of special significance?
To what extent does your writing reflect consistent, in-depth reflection,
rather than a last-minute effort?
Familiarity with
the facts (35 percentage points). You may be forgiven for wondering how you are
going to demonstrate familiarity with the facts without reciting history. Let
me put it this way: I am concerned that your essays do not reflect a complete
ignorance of your subject matter. You need to acquaint yourself (using all
kinds of sources, including your text, websites, books, articles, videos, your
grandpa, whatever) with what you write about, so that your conclusions as to
their significance are not completely at odds with the reality of the
historical record. You may make whatever mention of those facts from the
historical record that are needed (and only
what is needed) to support your conclusions.
Quality of
expression (15 percentage points): How clearly and articulately is your insight
expressed? (I don't like sloppy composition, confused syntax, and bad spelling.
Show pride in your facility with the English language—this, more than anything,
is your key to earning both respect from others and a prosperous future.)
Total percentage
X total number of points possible = your grade.
Things that can
work against you:
Five topics for
each essays assignment are required; for each topic fewer than five submitted,
there will be a reduction in your grade. A total of 1,000-1,500 words is recommended--if
your effort is appreciably less or more (more is not necessarily better) than
this, there may be a proportionate reduction in your grade.
Do not recite
history for the sake of reciting history, in any sort of narrative form (as,
for example, your textbook does)--I already know (more or less) what happened
in history. Above all, are your essays entirely
in your own words? Any whiff of plagiarism will result in your essay being
submitted to Turnitin.com--and if plagiarism is indicated, your continued
participation in this course would be at risk.
If your essays
are not clearly segregated, there will be a reduction in your grade (in other
words, do not submit your five essays as one big rambling essay); this is meant
to be an exercise in thinking and writing succinctly.
The second thing
that makes up your course grade is your participation in each week’s discussion
forums.
For this purpose, you’ll need to identify two (2) topics that relate to any of
the assigned reading for that particular week, and to present your thoughts on
them along the same lines as you would write your essays. In other words, what
are the implications, and where do they lead? Your verbal presentation on each
topic should last 5-10 minutes.
If you would
like to discuss your assignments or any other aspect of your participation in
this course, I ask that you either speak with me before or after class, or call
me anytime (941-7140). I am prepared to
provide you with as much personalized consultation as we feel you need.