Grading Standards:

I follow the College of Wooster guidelines for grading.  “A” grades reflect excellent work, “B” grades very good work, “C” grades adequate work, and “D” minimal work.  Grades of “F” are reserved for work that is unsatisfactory in its content, relationship to the assignment, and/or degree of effort.  Plagiarism will always result in a failing grade.

Weekly Assignments:

There are two main assignments that you will need to complete in this course on a weekly basis.

1. Avatar Character blog posts (begins at end of week 2)
   • see below for detail on Avatar “ground rules” and “components”
   • Read here for character development;
   • Read here for posting prompts and how to set up blog and submission access
   • See here for where to submit (will probably look different once you set up your access)
2. Reading and screening response sheets – see below for more detail and here for FAF and here for SRS assignments and submission portals.

They serve a two-fold purpose: the avatar project lets you engage deeply, thoughtfully, but also creatively with the historical and cultural material we are encountering. The response sheets (Film Analysis Forms = FAF) and (Short Response Sheets = SRS) help keep you keep track of what you are reading, hold you accountable for keeping up with the readings, and allow you to take “notes” more formally.

A third additional assignment is your notation of readings in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook in Perusal (through Moodle). You are expected to make notations when you read and instructions are found on the Moodle page (under Weekly Schedule) and here:

• For all Sourcebook readings, use the Perusal link in Moodle.
• For each chapter, add your own annotations to the text. These can include: key words, questions, connections to other texts/films/images, disagreements with text, etc.
• Write at least three annotations per chapter (not per essay within the chapter; for example in “Imagining America,” there are at least 6 or 7 essays).

Avatar Ground Rules:

You are free to create and develop your character as you wish, but you must remain within these ground rules:

1. Your avatar cannot die or become incapacitated to the point from which you can no longer write about them.
2. You must spend the majority of your life in Berlin, Germany. Your character need not always be in the city, but must spend significant time there.
3. Your avatar cannot change history (murder Hitler, for example).
4. Your avatar cannot be based on an actual person’s life.
5. Your avatar cannot know what will happen in the future or act in ways that “miraculously” reflect a knowledge of future events. Your avatar can only have the information that would have been available to him or her in that time and place (using the essays from local newspapers and journals of the time from the Weimar Sourcebook is a great reference, for example).
6. Your avatar is not you. You should not base your character on your own interests, ambitions, and beliefs. Instead, you must base your avatar on the interests, dreams, and understandings that a person of this time and place would have had. If you want to understand particular ideologies or phenomena, such as communism or national socialism (i.e. Nazism), you may consider immersing your character in them.
7. Your avatar’s life must be historically plausible. That is, it must adhere to the wider contexts and historical facts of the periods we are studying.

Avatar Blog Post Components:

Avatar Blog Posts

Each week you will write a blog post from the perspective of your character and you will be given a prompt for the week. The blog prompts will be different and so pay close attention to what is asked for and respond accordingly. All blog entries must have two components:

1) the blog entry

2) the historical foundation and explanation

However, you can also bring in additional information, such as maps, images, pictures, clips, music – as long as it is historically accurate.

Your blog entry should address and answer the prompt; your historical foundation and explanation should explain how and why you chose this experience for your avatar as well as what research you used. That is, you will need to explain: How and Why did you decide what would happen to your avatar and How did you confirm that this was historically possible/plausible? Foundations must be explained in your own words. Footnotes and references will not be enough of an explanation to count.

Your avatar blog posts are due each Friday. This will give you the week to be sure to read the texts assigned and view films/artwork. They should be 800-1000 words in length (this equals roughly 1-1/2 to 2 pages of writing). For some tips on writing a good blog post, see here, but use these guidelines in accordance with the actual assignment here.

Reading and Screening Response Exercises:

Film Analysis Forms and Short Answer Sheets

You will be asked to fill out short response sheets to the films and provide brief responses on aspects of the readings on different days of the week. This will help you to keep track of what you should be reading and viewing and when and to reflect briefly as you do so. You can use these reflections and responses to refer to when you are crafting your avatar blog entry at the end of the week.