Welcome to English 102

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We will be together in Ashland’s English 102 this Fall, so I put together this blog site to make that as smooth and pleasant as possible.

“Nuts and Bolts”

(You will soon learn that “Nuts and Bolts” is one of my favorite terms.)

  • I am Curtis Allen, your instructor. I was assigned to this section on June 17, so it’s quite possible that when you registered, there was no name (or perhaps someone else’s) on the course. I’ve been around Ashland University since 2003 and teaching Freshman English since 1995.
  • University schedules are very fluid during the summer, so we might gain or lose people before the course starts. That is why I will be sending out invitation emails several times over the next few weeks. Please don’t get annoyed.
  • This is not an official Ashland University site, so everything here is strictly my own personal opinion. One positive thing about this is that you can share the address with friends in other courses, and if you change to another section of 102 (or even another college), you can keep reading. You don’t need any password to get in.
  • At the bottom of each entry, you will see a link to Post a Comment. Please use it. This should not be a one-way communication only. I have set the comments to be moderated, which means I will read them before they go live. (You would not believe the strange things that sometimes appear.) When you post something, it will not appear instantly, especially if I am out of town, but I will read everything.
  • One of the odd characteristics of the blog software is that the newest items are always at the top. This means that if you have been away for a while, you might find it easier to read these things from the bottom to the top. When there are more than seven items, they will roll over to a new page, but they are still there.

Why?

Two or three reasons.

The first is that I see our relationship being richer than me merely telling you how to do MLA documentation and you producing a paper. There’s a lot more going on in both of our lives, and as your teacher, I really do buy into the Ashland University philosophy, “Accent on the Individual” and the slogan “Teaching students how to think, not what to think.” That will take more than three weekly 50-minute sessions starting in late August.

A second is that, like a professional athlete, you really do need to do things during the off-season. Babe Ruth famously spent his off-season eating huge meals and relaxing, but he was rare; most major league baseball players put a lot of off-season effort into sharpening their game. We should too.

A third is that keeping your mind active should be fun. As an example (which I might write up in the blog), my Facebook feed recently began showing items from an A.I. generated “boy” who talks about the experience of being a “person” with no past and no body. That got me thinking: Does such a “person” have legal rights and responsibilities? And that led me to read an article from the Yale Law Journal, “The Ethics and Challenges of Legal Personhood for AI”—and that led me to a discussion with friends concerning Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics from his 1942 short story “Runaround.” Important and fun stuff.

Bottom line

I’m looking forward to our time together, and I hope you are too.

Curtis Allen

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