Basic course review of web site Document

Staying alert and mentally alive

The following web pages are designed to convey essential and complementary material for my courses and classes.

My classes are all about writing and that expression is evaluated based on your critical reading of the assigned texts. These are the focus of our discussions of significant matters concerning human health and the environment.

These linked pages exhibit basic information for you to know and comprehend if you are to pass any of my courses:

Vocabulary

words I use

advanced terminology

glossary

antonyms

Basic concepts

Visual information

Learning

Dialectical thinking

Methodology

Advanced comprehension

Critical thinking is the measure of how you understand, explain, present arguments, and organize material so that people can understand what you have learned. It means to examine assumptions based on what you are reading and hearing in class.

Thoughtful criticism, or an effective critique requires a step by step approach to defining, examining, arguing and refining material facts or data into an interpreted body of knowledge called information.

My goal is to promote your practice and increased facility for, if not a finer mastery of, critical thinking.

Course organization

CORE

C is for Clarify
O is for Organize
R is for Reflection
E is for Examine

The diagram suggests that each of these steps is a sort of constructive process in building an edifice of information that you can use to explain who, what when, where and how specific concepts have become and remain decisive in describing the core ideas and peripheral information that make up the body of knowledge that comprise my courses.

Any assigned readings are often presented verbally to the class for further interpretations.

Homework is expected, you are an adult, so I do not grade the work I suggest in class that you complete at home, but it is compulsory if you are to do well.

Read the assigned texts and make notes on that reading before coming to class. You may bring your notes to regular meetings with me for advice. I can suggest a pass or a fail with respect to your class and home assignments because they are related to your essays and presentations.

book Reading is essential, like air, so keep notes on what you are reading and review.

Use the web site for finding notes from your texts, commentaries on assignments, key concepts explored, or articles by me about concepts you will encounter in discussions with me in class, the field, or in e-mails.

Oral Presentations are important for you to master in order to succeed in class. Verbal summaries, readings, or reports are based either on the texts, or the papers that you are assigned to write. They should always inform people about what you did, how you discovered information, when you realized the importance of your discoveries and what you learned.

Writing is the primary means of your demonstrating, more than a mere familiarity with, but instead, a real knowledge of the readings. A complex understanding of the lectures, your reflection on the class discussions, and critical thinking about the body of knowledge which forms the basis of this class as an inquiry is expected in your written assignments.

Informal -
formal -
research -

Writing is so fundamental to creating knowledge that you will want to write every day or every other day.

Note taking is an essential means of being effective in any context where listening to information requires your attention to and later recall of the details.

You will fail to orderly and coherently remember important data if you do not review your notes.

Bring your notes to class, review them every session and have them for any office visit that pertains to your course assignments.

Speaking in class is a primary means of demonstrating your comprehension.

attendance if you do not attend class you can't learn about what I am saying is significant.

Grading is a difficult and often subjective process, but my criteria consists of both what is counted with respect to your assignments and how those writings, presentations, projects or service are evaluated with respect to other assignments and students in your class.

All assignments are graded with these criteria .

clarity of expression and logic
length of development of your arguments
informative value of the content
frequency of references to authors, texts and class
substance as conveyed in a thesis, introduction, body, summaries and conclusion.

The grade scale:

My grading scale is found here: so press the chess board.````>

But do review the class syllabus for the precise values and percentage of each assigned task.

To keep track of your standing in class, or if you ever have questions, write to me:

Developing expertise, an ecological viewpoint.

This is the logo for my site: Siry's Ecology Forum. The logo is found at the top of most pages and takes you back to the start of the web site.

The organizing principle for the way I conceptualize reality is ecology. Ecological thinking is a layered conceiving of the way the world works. The horizontal bars in the yellow frame represent from top to bottom: energy, landscape, wildlife, vegetation and water. I think of these as the five ingredients in a naturally functioning world. Such a well conditioned world functions, also to sustain our material and spiritual needs.

Much of this site is devoted to advanced and expert information about three types of knowledge:

numerate, the capacity to quantify and count.
literate, the ability to read and express the correct grammar and syntax to represent impressions.
ecolate, the imaginative proficiency to see connections among the seen an unseen aspects of reality.

These are the basic mental constructs that form the foundations of many other bodies of knowledge. For the purposes of my classes, solving problems is a major way to demonstrate your acquisition of knowledge from the texts. Especially ecological problem solving is a skill you will want to practice in order to see how the development of an ecological imagination is a most valuable way to envision the world.

In a very short-hand manner, energy, landscape, wildlife, vegetation and water form a pyramid of relations that Aldo Leopold called an imaginary mountain, and Terry Tempest Williams called an "Echo system" to describe the very responsiveness of the world in which you and I --swimmers in the abyss-- are embedded.

wildlife
vegetation
landscape
water
energy

Some examples of some other bodies of knowledge on this site are:

The hardest of all ideas to examine is reviewed here in material relating to genetics and Lynn Margulis' works, the "Origins of the Eukaryotic Cell", "Early Life", and especially Symbiotic Planet.

Last Updated on: 1/8/06, 12/21/08 .

By Joseph Siry

Contents of the site listed alphabetically

Writing | Interviews | Free Writing