Lesson #1: Starting (Connectionism)

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Welcome to Connectionism! I have chosen "Connectionism" as the title of the TRP Lesson #1 since the immediate task is to make sure each student is connected into the network programs so that drills, tests, compositions, comments, and grades can be carried from instructor to student or student to instructor electronically. We have had one week to get started. For most of you, learning through electronics is a new frontier. The designer of MLG writes of frontiers this way:

	Not many years ago, men and women with determination and eagerness, 
	explored and conquered the western frontier. These pioneers not only 
	wanted new lands, but also new experiences. They wanted to expand themselves, 
	to see what they could do with their lives. They searched for the good, for 
	the exciting, and for the sense of personal fulfillment. We sometimes think 
	the frontier is no longer with us, but in many forms, it is forever present. 
	There will always be some frontiers. (Hackworth, 1995, P.3)

As humanity outgrew the industrial revolution, it outgrew the mapping of the western frontier, but now humanity is involved in another revolution--the information revolution. Again humans are engaged in going, as Captain John Kirk put it, "...where no man has gone before" (Rodenbury, 1975, Ep.1). We are now challenged to explore, to discover, and to map new routes to new ways of communicating. Reading and writing skills have become the basics of world wide communication, a world wide web. Students need to prepare carefully for this responsibility. Basic skills need to be mastered for the connecting of information from one discipline to another, from one campus to another, and from one country to another. English 111C (TRP) will push you up the pathway in your quest toward this achievement. Show enthusiasm to develop your academic skills and talents and to become a master of excellence. Becoming a master of excellence requires a knowledge of Connectionism. To what do we need to connect?

The first thing needing a good sound connection is the electronic pathway from your work station to the instructor's work stations. In the Introductory Lesson I asked you to email to both my office and my home. You can do this b putting the Ricks address after To: and the home address after Copy:. Once connections are made, questions and answers can be exchanged easily.

The second connection needs to be to the MLG Grammar Drill program. As explained in the Introduction, this program is on campus or can be installed on your home computer. Please confirm by email when this connection is complete. In review, the MLG installation instructions are in the fourth section of English Online at this web site:

http://www.srv.net/~allenh/writing.html

After installation, the program requires login (set-up) of some information before it will work for you. To know the program is working, take the pretest which records on Report Card. Email me the pretest score.

Connecting with classmates began by emailing your autobiographical sketch. Though it earns electronic dialogue points only, this writing sample will help classmates and me to learn about you. Likewise, you can learn about your classmates from the Student Help choice. You can also become better acquainted with the people who contributed to this online course by chosing the link Course Authors from the Course homepage.

You have also already started making another connectionism. This one involves connecting mentally into reading assignments with a process called the "Annotated Journal". Here is a very detailed review of that process since you were only introduced to it in the last lesson.

You need to Prewrite your thoughts from the topic title before reading, but Postwrite after thorough study. After the Prewrite (but before the Postwrite), use the following Annotated method to record your reader responses. This will help you pay attention to what you are thinking as you read. Wise students learn to be aware of their own opinions as they interact with new information. This increases learning retention tremendously. Here is the annotation method I want you to use for your emails to me.

Mark your text in the first reading. Use: ! for surprise, ? for questions, X for disagreement, and $ for agreement. When reading a 2nd time, convert your original marks (reactions) from the graphic signs (!, ?, X, $) into sentences. Include a few quoted words and the location of the quote with your sentence. An example of a student Annotation can be found under the Assignment Example link on the Course homepage. Prewrite, Reader Responses and Postwrite complete what is called the Annotation. Annotations for each of the six sections in the chapter are required for chapters 1-8. (The The Annotation for the Introduction was only a warm-up and very short compared to a chapter.) Adding sentence explanations to your marks (!,?,X,$) helps fit the new information into your network of prior knowledge. The following story "Pinnacles of Time and People " illustrates how finding connection points helps fit in new information.

	Gary is a faithful church attender. Many times my curiosity
	about men's church lessons led me to inquire about them of Gary. In
      	response, Gary would always pause for a minute and then tell me what
      	comment he interjected into the lesson. We then went from his comment, to
      	how the comment connected to the lesson, and finally I learned the topic
      	of the lesson. The procedure was always the same--his comment first, how
      	his comment connected next, and then--finally--what he was connecting
      	into. For many years, I secretly thought Gary was just an egotistical man
      	who felt his comments were more important than those of the teacher or the
      	content of the lesson. It was only after pursuing in-depth brain study
      	that I discovered research showing that all information is received and
      	retrieved from pathway "strings". (Marion Gazette, 1975, A3)

The brain cannot locate unconnected pieces of information easily, and overrides unconnected pieces for "strings" of information. If a "string" can be connected to prior knowledge, the new information becomes relevant and critical thinking occurs. Connectionism is based on the fairly recent knowledge that the brain has neurons with dendrites growing out from them in hairlike structures. These dendrites form pathways by which electrical and chemical flow move thought through the brain, much like the networks will be moving our assignments through Email. Needing to be connected electronically for our message to be received resembles needing to connect the new information to the old information in order to think with it. All people have archives of experiences stored in strings in their brains. Sensory experiences of smell and sound make wonderful details in essays because the reader has strings of such experience stored into which connections can be made easily. Prior knowledge strings influence emotional reactions. Consider this story from the lecture of an Idaho State University Professor:

	Jay was walking down the middle of an airplane seeking the
      	row of his assigned window seat. Tom who was assigned to the same row's
      	aisle seat had already comfortably seated himself. Upon discovering the
      	proper row, Jay rudely forced his way over Tom, stepping on Tom's foot,
      	and pushing heavily on Tom's legs as he collapsed into his window seat.
      	Tom was furious and about to attack Jay for his awkwardness when he noted
      	Jay was carrying a white cane. Tom's feelings subsided immediately, and he
      	greeted the awkward man warmly. There was no further reference in thought,
      	or word, to Jay's rude entrance to the seat. Tom's prior knowledge about
      	white canes provided him a concept of acceptance which otherwise would
      	have been lacking (Pehrsson,1993).

According to Professor Pehrsson's lecture, connecting into "... prior knowledge broadened Tom's attitude and changed his response" (1993). In the same way, connecting into prior knowledge before you read often broadens your attitudes and stimulates new responses as you read. This is the value of Prewrite. Reacting with the markings (!, ?, X, or $) with Reader Responses makes a permanent record of your reactions which can be converted into opinions and responses of learning. Postwrite forces evaluation of what you have connected. Learning to connect pathways to broaden your use of responses and opinions is called critical thinking. This "Interactive" reading builds pathways to valuable writing. I want you to follow this technique with each chapter of Aims and Options. Follow the Prewrite-Response-Postwrite steps for each section of Chapters 1-8. The sections are:

First Professional Reading
Second Professional Reading
Prewriting
Drafting
Rewriting
Editing.

Restated:

1) Put your Prewrite on the email screen

2) Place at least two or more of each of the four marks !,?,X,$ in your textbook in a first reading.

       != Surprised by comment in book
       ?= Not understand comment in book
       X= Disagree with comment in book
       $= agree with comment in book

3) Expand the annotated mark to a sentence in the second reading. Be sure to include some keywords from the quote and the quote's location (the number of the Page/Paragraph/Line).

4) Postwrite your response about this reading.

5) Email your responses to your instructor.

Mastering this technique will make you an "Interactive" reader. Interactive readers have to break several habits to be successful.

The TV Habit - It is impossible to record your thoughts when outside (TV) thoughts interrupt yours.
The High-light Habit - Some students think highlighting is adequate, but it is not because there is no verbal interactions with drawing a yellow line.
The High School Text Habit - High School often charge a penalty fee books have marks in them when they are returned, so an interactive reader needs to get over the fear of marking in the text.

Following this interactive technique develops critical thinking skills and will prepare you to become a critical writer. The terms critical writing, professional writing, and college writing are synonymous. Instructors and texts often use these terms interchangeably. By taking this course, you are preparing to write professionally. What do you think of that?

Now you need to connect into the concept that "writing knowledge" is married to "generation of text". Writing knowledge consists of mastering grammatical rules and eliminating mechanical errors. MLG gives grammatical support. Generating text involves capturing ideas in an organized word flow and personal style that is coherent and appealing to a designated audience. Your text Aims and Options gives a different writing challenge in every chapter for text generations practice. Skillful writing--our goal, results from a marriage of "writing knowledge" and text "generation". E111C (TRP) has carefully balanced computer grammar drills and generation of text. Friday's computer drills and quizzes will strengthen your "writing knowledge" while Monday's text readings offer much practice "generating" text for Wednesday's Emailed instructor (or peer) review and random return-comment when helpful.

Since spoken vocabulary is much more informal than written text, great care must follow to recognize and rewrite weak sentences with grammatical expertise. The best compositions are a thoughtful process of checkpoints and rewrite, not merely a product--as compositions may have been previously. While Fridays will be devoted to drills that will help improve your compositions, they will not take the place of recognizing errors in your own writing. Writing, the same as with any skill, is a process. One can learn about football, swimming, or playing the piano by reading, talking, or watching it--but, skill comes only by connecting the practice with the knowledge. You learn to write by writing. Just as learning to read notes helps singers stretch into more intricate renditions, managing your own editing skills gives writers more professionalism. A mechanical error in a piece of professional writing was described this way by a student discussion in a previous E111C class.

Pretend you are going on the most wonderful date you have ever had. You are clean, perfumed, and wearing the most attractive dress/tux you have ever seen. Your dream of a lifetime joins you for dinner at the most elegant restaurant in the city. The plates are china, the glasses are stemware, and the napkins are of real linen. Lights are low, music and smells are wrapping softly around you when your date picks the nose and wipes it on the table in full view. This small, but powerful, spot on the tablecloth displayed throughout the meal somehow ruins the dignity of the occasion and the grandeur of the evening. Even the classics make reference to the power of one small unforgettable mark: "...Out! Out damn spot!" (French, 1908, P.153). It becomes imperative that skillful writers diligently master grammar skills to work out the offensive spots in their compositions. MLG measures improvement, so drills may be repeated to improve the scores, but remember--just making a basket can be different from making one in the ball game.
Rewrite!

Again, welcome to Connectionism! Once connected as instructor and student through the miracle of electronics, once you learn to make connections into your own experience with what you read to enrich and expand your ideas for writing, and once you learn to connect your thoughtfully organized text with technical error edit, you are well on your way to becoming a successful author in a demanding world wide web of information explosion. I am happy to be your guide through this experience. Work as hard as you can. If you believe that writing happens only when you are inspired so you cannot start because you are not in the right mood, you may wait forever. Natural talent may enhance your powers as a writer, but all students can improve skill. Be as faithful with the writing as you are with the drills. Composition is a combined skill. Faithful practice must occur to improve.

	To learn any skill, a student must get on task, that is, practice 
	appropriately . . . . Suppose that in a guitar class, I give the 
	most exciting lectures, show the most instructive films, provide 
	engaging demonstration, and carry out provocative class discussion. 
	I do this during every class of the semester. You are fascinated, 
	pleased, entertained, and you gain some knowledge. But would you 
	be able to play the guitar at the end of the semester? Not at all. 
	This skill, like writing, requires regular, sustained, appropriate 
	practice. (Hackworth, 1992, P. 7)

Well, you are almost finished reading TRP Lesson #1. Once the lesson is finished, you can begin to annotate A&O Chapter #1 to email by midnight Monday. As you read the pages about Narration, you can plan your first graded writing assignment, the Narration composition. You have tremendous flexibility in topic choice. Start you writing the same as with the reading--find your connecting point to the new information. Some non-stop writing should find this for you. Brainstorming, looping, clustering, and list making may be ways you have already tried without realizing they are the prewriting stage of your composition. New methods, such as cubing will be taught to you in later chapters. The Chapter theme is work, but work can be anything. Even and ant works. You could even write about ants. Compositions about your own personal work experience or your ideas toward work usually make good compositions. Some students have even compared work expectations of grandparents to their own work expectations. Although I have modeled some quoted sources and documentation in this lesson, documentation will not be required of you until a later lesson which will be explained in detail later. Check your syllabus for length requirement. Follow the ideas in each section of the your text chapter to move0 your paper through the writing process. Keep an aim in mind. Label your composition with your name, the text option, and your aim. Email under the email name on the outline by midnight Wednesday.

Friday you will be doing the MLG drills. The editing section of Aims and Options is about Subjects and Verbs; thus, your MLG drills will be about subjects and verbs which reinforces the text. In addition you will be asked to review affixes in Friday's drills. An affix sheet is included after this lesson in case you need to review. I am anxious to help you in any way that I can to become skillful. Email questions if you have them. Let's keep our connections polished.

References

French, C.W. (Ed.). (1908). Shakespeare's Collections. New York: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.

Hackworth, A. (1992), Mastery Learning Composition, Rexburg, ID: Ricks College Print Shop.

Pinnacles of time and people. (1975, July 25), Marion Gazette, P.A3.

Pehrsson, B.(1993, June 27) Lecture broadcast from Idaho State University Library.

Rodenbury, G. (Syndicated Producer). (1975) Star Trek [Television Series-Ep.1] California: The Cinema Guild, Inc.

FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions)

These are questions that were answered in TRP or Aims and Options Lessons #1. They may appear in quizzes or exams.

How do you become and active reader? What habits need to be broken?
Where should the author begin when planning a piece of writing.
What are the strategies of brainstorming, looping, clustering, cubing, and listing?
What should be in a label submitted for this class?

AFFIX LIST
  1. life			bio		biology
  2. self			auto		automobile
  3. one			mono		monochrome
  4. able to, can do		able		capable
  5. full of			ous		joyous 
  6. study of			ology		psychology 
  7. before, in front of	pre		previous
  8. against, opposite		anti		antipathy
  9. one who does		er		supporter
 10. ruler, chief, first	arch		monarch	
 11. fear of			phobia		acrophobia
 12. in favor of, for		pro		provide	
 13. wrong, bad			mis		mistake
 14. lacking or without		less		defenseless
 15. state of			ment		management
 16. make (not fac)		fy		modify
 17. not			un		unable
 18. water			hydro		hydroplane
 19. backward (not re)		retro		retrogress
 20. somthing written		graph		autograph
 21. hundred 			cent		century
 22. across, over		trans		transmit
 23. distance			tele		telephone
 24. half (not demi)		hemi		hemisphere
 25. light (not lum)		photo		photograph
 26. teeth			dent 		denture
 27. see (not ocul)		vis		vision
 28. earth (not agri)		geo		geology
 29. measure			meter		kilometer
 30. time			chron		chronicle
 31. sound (not audi)		phon		phonograph
 32. year			annu		annual
 33. sure			cert 		certain
 34. with			con		chili con carne
 35. say, declare, shout	dict		diction
 36. heat			therm		thermostat
 37. color			chrom		monochrome
 38. two, double (not bi) 	di		digress
 39. cut			cise		incisor
 40. wheel, circle		cycl		bicycle
 41. many			poly		polygamy
 42. bend			flex		flexible
 43. feel along with		sym		sympathy
 44. death			mort		mortal
 45. solid			stereo		stereophonic
 46. heat			card		cardiologist
 47. mother			matri		matriarch
 48. to conquer			vinc		invincible
 49. father			patri		patriarch
 50. name			nym		synonym
 51. kill			cide		homicide
 52. believe			cred		credible
 53. lum (not photo)		light		luminous
 54. between (not epi)		inter		interview		
 55. sleep			dorm		dormant
 56. send			mit		transmit
 57. around (not peri)		ambi		ambidextrous
 58. carry			port		porter
 59. two			bi		bicycle	
 60. very small			micro		micrometer
 61. suffering, disease		path		pathologist
 62. pend			hang		pending
 63. wisdom			soph		sophomore
 64. good			bene		beneficial
 65. marriage			gamy		polygamy
 66. blood			hemo		hemorrhage
 67. place			loc		location
 68. develop (not culti)	volv		evolve
 69. around (not ambi)		peri		perimeter
 70. smoke			fum		fumigate
 71. people			demo		democracy
 72. after, following		post		postscript
 73. anim			life		animate
 74. foot or child		ped		pedestrian
 75. law			leg		legation
 76. body			corp		corporation
 77. turn			vert		convert
 78. rule, power		crat		democrat
 79. pleasing (not bene)	grat		gratitude		
 80. eye (not vis)		ocul		ocular
 81. two			bi		bicycle
 82. three			tri		tricycle
 83. fac, fy			make		facilitate
 84. four (not tetra)		quar		quarter
 85. contra			against		contradict
 86. quint			five		quintet	
 87. manu			hand		manual
 88. six			sex		sextet
 89. city			urb		urban
 90. skin			derm		dermatologist
 91. to hold			ten		tenure
 92. break			rupt		rupture
 93. eight			oct		octopus
 94. hear			aud		audio	
 95. new (not nov)		neo		Neoclassical
 96. know, knowledge		sci		science	
 97. ten			deca 		decade
 98. hidden			crypt		cryptologist
 99. one thousand		mil		millennium
100. deny			nega		negative
101. outside, beyond		extra		extraordinary
102. iso			equal		equator
103. man			anthro		anthropology
104. change, move		migra		migration
105. over, beyond,		hyper		hyperventilate
106. new (not neo)		nov		novelty
107. bone			oss		ossification
108. to touch			tact		tactile
109. teach, opinion		doc		doctrine
110. high			alt		altitude
111. straight, right		ortho		orthodontist
112. poison			toxi		toxic
113. word			log		logogram
114. end limit			termin		terminate
115. love (not amor)		phil		philharmonic
116. back (not re)		retro		retrogress
117. upon, among, inter		epi		epidemic
118. psych			mind		psychology
119. treatment			therapy		psychotherapy
120. leaf			foli		foliage
121. bio			life		biography	
122. contest			athle		athletic
123. the act of			ion		decision
124. flowing			flu		fluent
125. weapons			arma		armaments
126. ship (not nav)		naut		nautical
127. very small			cule		molecule
128. to look (not scope)	spec		spectator
129. lead			duc		induct
130. book			biblio		bibliography
131. breath			pneumon		pneumonia
132. observe, look,		scope		misroscope
133. gather, collect		greg		congregate
134. kind of, race		gen		genocide
135. burn			caust		caustic
136. to think, to feel		sent		resent
137. flesh, meat		carn		carnal
138. empty			vac		vacuum
139. to follow			seque		sequel
140. to ask			rog		interrogate		
141. drive, push, throw		puls		compulsion	
142. alike, equal		iso		isometric
143. devour, eat		vor		carnivor
144. true, genuine		veri		verify
145. build			struct		construct
146. soil (not earth)		agri		agriculture
147. work (not viable)		oper		operation
148. to laugh			rid		ridicule
149. doctrine, system		ism		Mormonism
150. chiro			hand		chiropractor
151. flee			fug		fugitive
152. not, take away		dis		displace	
153. relating to		al		denial
154. marriage			gamy		polygamy
155. trim or calculate		put		amputate
156. prey			preda		predatory
157. all			omni		omniscient
158. to place after		pon		postpone
159. to seek			pet		petition
160. ship (not naut)		nav		navigate

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