English 2850 KMWC
Professor Jennifer Sylvor
Spring 2020
FINAL EXAM
Please compose your response to this exam as a Word document and upload it to turnitin.com. Your exam must be uploaded by Tuesday, May 19th at 5pm. Late submissions will receive no credit.
Read the instructions in their entirety before you begin to work on this final exam. You are welcome to consult your notes from the course and all the texts we’ve read, but you are NOT allowed to do any internet research while completing this project. Use of outside sources will result in a grade of F on the exam.
Plan to spend 2-3 hours on this exam (including thinking time). Be sure to proofread your work carefully before uploading it to turnitin.com. If you have questions about any part of this exam, please email me at jsylvor@gmail.com.
Final Exam: Propose a Mini-Course
Your task is as follows:
Drawing on the list of works we’ve read this semester (available on your syllabus), please design and propose a “Mini-Course”. This mini-course will bring together a selection of readings from our syllabus, but will focus on a particular topic or theme that is of interest to you. Coming up with your theme will be the key step in completing this assignment. You will need to identify some component or issue that you have encountered at several different points in your reading for this course and construct your proposal around this idea. [Your idea might be a particular element you’ve noticed in your reading (i.e. railroad travel) or a persistent question (i.e. what happens when we die?) I have deliberately chosen examples that wouldn’t work for our particular reading list because I don’t want to render any ideas off-limits, but I hope you get the idea!] Your course proposal must contain the following components:
–Course Title: Your course title should be creative and inviting and should let us know what the focus of your course is.
–Course Description: In this one paragraph course description, articulate the subject that your mini-course will explore and lay out the central questions that you will be exploring in the course.
–Annotated Reading List: Select 5 texts from the semester as the reading for your mini-course. Write a short paragraph for each text in which you explain your rationale for including this text, offer a quotation from the text that illustrates how the text is connected to the topic of your mini-course, and provide three discussion questions you might ask about the text in the context of your course. List your texts in the order you think they should be read for your course. You don’t have to follow our chronological organization.
–Wild Card: Add a 6th text of your choosing to your reading list. This text should NOT come from our syllabus. It should be a text that you have encountered elsewhere that you think would work with your theme and be a good addition to your reading list. This text could be a written text or it could be a film, a tv show, a song, a painting, a photograph, a meme…. This is totally up to you. Don’t be afraid to be creative. Compose a paragraph in which you describe your wild card text and explain how it is connected to the subject of your mini-course.
–The Pitch: In the final paragraph of your course proposal, make a “pitch” for your course. What would you say to convince a fellow student to convince him or her take this course?
