The following points outline course policies for our class. You are expected to be familiar with these policies, and to apply them to your behavior in the class.
1. Cheating
In my classes, I follow a strict zero-tolerance policy for cheating. Anyone caught cheating will receive an automatic F in the course and be informed that they should stop attending. For this purpose, the word “cheating” includes the following:
- Plagiarism, i.e. Copy-and-pasting content from someone else’s writing and presenting it as your own writing.
- Use of machine translation services such as Google Translate or PapaGo to automate translation of your writing between languages. (You can use this tool for individual words, but not for translating entire paragraphs of your writing from your first language to English.)
- Use of AI or other software (such as Chat-GPT) to automatically generate content. Your professors know about this, some of them (including me) have experimented extensively with Chat-GPT and can immediately recognize Chat-GPT-type output, and we are not going to let you do submit it as homework, believe me!
2. Classroom Behavior
The classroom is a place where our goal is to learn. People cannot learn if they feel unsafe, threatened, or disrespected. In recent years, more students than ever seem to want to express their “political” opinions in English class.
The problem is that most students don’t have sufficient English to conduct a respectful, thoughtful, and intelligent discussion of “political” issues. Additionally, some students seem to lack proper training in respectfully disagreeing with others. I have seen students say incredibly racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise abusive things in class, and I have also seen students get upset when told to stop.
Please understand that my job as your teacher is not to take care of you individually, but it is my job to maintain a healthy, safe, and comfortable classroom. Whatever your politics are does not matter for English class. If I ask you to stop talking about a topic, please understand that I am doing this because I am trying to keep the classroom as a whole safe, comfortable, and pleasant for everyone.
If you continue to talk about a topic after I’ve asked you to stop, I reserve the right to ask you to leave. It’s nothing personal, it’s me doing my job in maintaining a healthy learning environment. Please don’t make me ask you to leave. There are plenty of things we can talk about in English class that do not insult, belittle, or marginalize other people.
Most of you, if you are making an effort to be polite and thoughtful, should have no trouble following this rule. If you need more explanation for a request from me to stop discussing something, you can ask me in private, after class.
3. Responsibilities of Students
As a student, you have specific responsibilities:
- Completing assigned tasks on time.
- Managing your time so that you can complete unscheduled assigned tasks (like a weekly blog post) on time.
- Communicating with the professor when an issue comes up, prior (or as soon as after) it affects your participation in class.
- Participating actively in class, regardless of your level of English or comfort with the language.
- Conducting yourself in class in an adult and professional manner, cooperating with the professor and classmates, and putting effort into the course.
- Understanding that classes sometimes involve homework and that for every hour you spend writing an assignment, your professor likely spends 3-4 hours grading a pile of assignments. That is: don’t complain about every little homework task.
- When you must contact the professor, include the contact code provided so that the email doesn’t end up in the spam, unread. If you don’t bother to do this, I cannot guarantee I’ll see your email.