{"id":201,"date":"2008-02-11T19:49:33","date_gmt":"2008-02-12T02:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2008\/02\/11\/whats-376-for\/"},"modified":"2008-02-11T19:49:33","modified_gmt":"2008-02-12T02:49:33","slug":"whats-376-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2008\/02\/11\/whats-376-for\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s 376 for?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since my recent blogging spree is <a href=\"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2008\/01\/15\/the-task-at-hand\/\">for CMPT 376<\/a> (Technical Writing, etc, etc), I have been thinking about the course.  It seems to me that a lot of people probably don&#8217;t actually know why we suddenly have a writing course in CMPT.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of years ago, the University introduced requirements for <em>all<\/em> SFU students (that started after a certain time).  Now, if you want to get a degree from SFU, you have to have taken:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Two writing (W) courses.  One of these has to be in the upper division (300 or 400) and probably in your own discipline.<\/li>\n<li>Two quantitative (Q) courses.  These are math-like courses, but don&#8217;t have to be MATH.<\/li>\n<li>Eight breadth (B) courses: 2 humanities, 2 social science, 2 science, 2 others.  These are courses outside of your discipline.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That sounds like a lot, but you can double-count all you like.  So, a philosophy course could count as both W and B-Hum.  These courses can also count towards degree requirements: a CMPT student that takes MATH 151 fulfills a degree requirement, and gets Q credit.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, back to CMPT 376.  Since CMPT are good members of the University community, we introduced this as a &#8220;discipline specific&#8221; writing course.  That will let our students fulfill the University&#8217;s upper-division writing requirement in a way that&#8217;s (presumably) relevant to them.<\/p>\n<p>There was talk of making CMPT 320 (social issues) a W course.  That course has a lot of problems of its own.  We ended up deciding to go for a dedicated, functional writing course, rather than a disfunctional course that did two things badly.  Plus, a lot of our students could use a full three credits dedicated to improving their writing.<\/p>\n<p>Because Ted&#8217;s a good person, he agreed to design and (initially) teach the brand-shiny-new writing course.  So far it has been quite interesting.  Ted is a very different kind of instructor than I am.  Usually when I say that about somebody, it&#8217;s not meant to be complementary, but in Ted&#8217;s case, though, I&#8217;m really enjoying the course.<\/p>\n<p>I keep oscillating on whether or not I would want to teach the course.  Some days, I&#8217;m excited to give it a try.  Some days, the very idea terrifies me: what the hell makes me think I know anything about writing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since my recent blogging spree is for CMPT 376 (Technical Writing, etc, etc), I have been thinking about the course. It seems to me that a lot of people probably don&#8217;t actually know why we suddenly have a writing course in CMPT. A couple of years ago, the University introduced requirements for all SFU students [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}