APLS 121 - Syllabus

APLS 121 ‑ INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS: A NOVEL APPROACH

FALL 2011

led by Bob Botsch

Office: C‑7, HSS Building

Office Hours: MW: 3:45-4:30 pm

TT: 4:20-5 pm

or by appointment

REQUIRED BOOK: The novel below is a paperback and may be purchased at the USCA bookstore or from many different sites online.

Graham Green, The Quiet American

Online Text: Until fall 1999 I required that each student pay a fee of about $20 to get a pre-printed text that I have written for this course. Starting in the fall of 1999 I began using an online text. I asked students to evaluate how well they liked it, and the overwhelming response, with just a few exceptions, was that they liked it very much. So I am keeping the online text--which is FREE! Just go to the text link on either the course homepage or on the schedule page and then click yourself to the chapter you need. You can print it (your own expense) or just read it online.

WHO SHOULD TAKE THE COURSE?

This course is designed to serve the needs of three kinds of students. First, it should serve as an introduction to the field of political science for those who are majoring or plan to major in the field. Because high schools offer no courses in political science, very few of you know anything about what political science is about. Some overlap exists between civics courses and history courses, but much less than you might think. As you will see, political scientists employ tools from a variety of fields all the way from history through mathematics to psychology in order to understand political behavior. This course will give you a taste of the range and of some of the basic concepts of political science.

This focus on the field of political science also serves the needs of a second group of students, those who are undecided as to their major. One of the best ways of deciding upon a major is to try a variety of courses in different fields to see what you enjoy and see what you do well in. Chances are that if you enjoy this course and do well in it, political science is a field you might want to consider as either a major or minor. If not, then at least you have eliminated an area.

This course serves a third group of students as well, those who are taking it as an elective or as a requirement for another major and who may never take another political science course in their lives. This is probably the largest group of students and in some ways the most important, because this is my only opportunity to ever teach you anything. I kept this in mind as I was choosing topics to cover in the class. The question I asked myself was what are the most important and useful things I can teach you in the limited time we will have together. What concepts and theories will help you understand the complex and confusing world of politics that you read and see and hear about in the news. What skills can I teach you that will help you survive in a world that is filled with politics all the way from interpersonal politics with friends and co‑workers to international politics. I want you to come away from this introductory course with at least some skill to understand and cope.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

1. You will learn in a personally meaningful way the importance of government and politics. Most of the written materials and exercises focus on asking you to consider that political nature of the everyday world you live in. We will measure how well you achieve this objective by many of the short papers you write in which you are asked to give and explain examples from your own life that illustrate these points.

2. You will learn how to make politics work for you, i.e. to decide upon goals and realistic strategies for meeting these goals. This is especially true on the level of personal and organizational politics, areas of life that none of us can avoid. You will get practice in the simulations we do in class. The simulations pose no risk here because your performance will not be graded. So the simulations are a safe way to try out new theories and behaviors. You will also be asked to write papers in which you critically analyze your behavior. What you learned about yourself and how you express that self‑knowledge will be graded. Your papers and successes and failures in the simulations will be a measure of how you improve your interpersonal political skills. Hopefully, by the end of the semester you will see a marked improvement in your ability to achieve goals in political situations. The ultimate test of how well you do here will come years after leaving college when you have the challenge to use these skills to be an effective and competent citizen. That is the most important measure and of course the hardest to measure.

3. You will improve your reading, writing, speaking skills, and analytical skills that are necessary to do well in politics as well as in school. You will receive practice in all of these things throughout the course. With the exception of speaking skills, your graded written work and tests will measure improvement. If your later papers and tests are not better than your initial ones, we will have failed in this objective. Your speaking skills will be tested in the interactions in the simulations we have. Analytical skills, by the way, refer to the ability to take things apart and understand all their parts and how they fit together – to understand and apply. Your papers and exercises in class such as the simulations will help here.

4. Finally, we will all have some fun together in a serious way ‑‑ you may even learn again what you likely unlearned in most of your formal education, that learning and discovery is exciting and fun. Indeed, if I didn't enjoy this and think that you will as well, I should most certainly be in another profession! I'll know how well I achieved this by the course evaluations you do at the end of the semester and by how many of you take future courses.

COURSE COMPONENTS:

1. Lectures.

Most of the approximately 1600 hours (that's about 66 twenty‑four hour days) you spend in class in order to get an undergraduate degree will be spent in taking notes on lectures. (If you think about this, you can make some other interesting calculations as well, e.g. pages of notes.) Why? That's the way your professors were taught and were therefore led to believe that they should teach. Your professors' professors and their professors and (you get the idea) were also lectured to. If you are wondering where the lecture tradition got started, it goes back to the time before books could be printed. Teachers simply told students their textbooks and students in effect printed their own texts by hand. Some of us have gotten pretty good at lecturing if we present important material in an interesting and thought stimulating way.

In any case, despite the fact that I will lecture in other classes and a little in this class, most of the time we will not use a lecture format. The readings began as printed lectures and have grown into a full online text. So you already have notes! Of course I will answer questions about them, but most of the time we will do things to reinforce your understandings of the lectures/text and learning to apply the ideas that I want you to understand.

That means that in our roughly 40 hours of class time we have together I am going to expect you to do more of the work as I test and challenge you in as many ways as I can. Some astute observer once said that if someone from another planet visited a typical classroom on earth, they would conclude that school was a place where the younger members of the species came to watch an older member of the species work. In this classroom, hopefully that is not what the ET would see!

2. Reading Assignments and Blackboard Reading Mastery Questions.

You will have a moderate amount of reading to do in the course, but it should also be enjoyable reading. Attached to the course Homepage is the Schedule page that lists what reading should be done when and what assignments need to be done. You'll average about 50 pages for each class, and a little more when we are doing the novels, one of which is very short.

In the past I (and all other teachers) have had problems in motivating you to do the readings BEFORE class--much less thinking about them. That means that most students cannot ask any intelligent questions about them. That makes intelligent participation impossible. Here's how I am going to try and motivate you to do and think about the readings.

Each chapter in the text has some Reading Mastery Questions on Blackboard. They have to be done BEFORE class to get credit. You do not have to do all the questions in one sitting. You can save them and come back. But unless you meet the deadline, you will get no credit. So pay close attention to the schedule! You will be answering these questions for part of your grade--more on that later.

3. Writing Assignments.

I have good news and bad news here for you. The good news first. This course requires no term paper. If I have time, I'll tell you some of the reasons why I don't think term papers are very good educational exercises in lower level courses, although at certain times in your academic career they can be excellent.

Now for the bad news. You will have a considerable amount of writing to do in terms of short papers. Most will be very short, 1‑2 pages each. (From my point of view this is also bad news in that I will have a considerable amount of reading to do‑‑some of it, quite frankly, will be very boring. But hopefully it will get better. If it doesn't, you and I both will have failed.) In all, there will be about 6 writing assignments for a total of about 16 pages of writing. Moreover, you WILL be graded on GRAMMAR and STYLE as well as CONTENT. If you don't say it well and say it clearly, whatever you tried to say will get lost. This is how you will be judged when you leave here as a professional (and how this school and I will be indirectly judged), so you might as well start getting used to it. Some of our class time will be spent discussing your writing, again, both in terms of style and content. On the day an assignment is due, you can plan to spend the class sharing your ideas with each other. When the paper is returned (hopefully within a week), we may well spend some time in class talking about how you can improve your writing.

I will use some short-hand notations in marking your papers to save me time. Here is a list of them.

SF -- sentence fragment

ROS -- run-on sentence

? or UC -- unclear wording, confusing, makes little sense

P -- needs a new paragraph here

ME -- more explanation needed

check mark -- good point!

SP or word circled – spelling

Circle something – this means it has a problem and I wanted you to figure it out!

4. Simulations

I am a firm believer in learning by experiencing. This kind of knowledge often is called experiential knowledge, phenomenological knowledge, or I/thou knowledge. At four or five points in the semester we will pause from our normal classroom activities and engage in simulations.

Simulations are basically games that are designed to represent in a simplified form some of the dynamics of political life. Ideally, they simplify things enough so that we can understand and comprehend what is going on, but don't oversimplify to the point of being totally unrealistic. For example, one simulation I have used in the past involves a student revolt over the university's grading system and invites you to think about how we judge and reward people in our society. Another involves building the laws of society from scratch. We won't get much beyond the first scratch, but you will see how complex it can become. A third one allows you to participate in a potential arms race and illustrates some of the problems of international negotiations and well as how political scientists use an area of mathematics known as game theory to analyze such situations.

The tentative dates and titles of our exercises are noted on the course schedule. We will usually spend a class following each simulation discussing what went on and trying to explain why some of these things happened as well as what is illustrated. Several of your writing assignments ask you to analyze what happened and why and what it illustrates out of our readings.

5. Small Group exercises

More and more in the real world of work people have to work in teams to accomplish important projects and tasks. This involves sharing, critiquing, evaluation, brainstorming, compromising, learning to be sensitive to the ideas and flaws of others—a wide range of communications and interpersonal political skills. Why do I say political? Because it involves power, if nothing else then the power of your ideas or the force of your personality. So what I plan to do here is to sometimes assign you a task to complete during the class that is related to the material for the day. Typically you will have about 20-25 minutes to complete the task and then give a report to the class. This will often replace going over the review questions almost every class, something that I often find boring. We may even try to write some short papers this way. We'll see. At the end of the semester I will want your feedback on how well this works.

FORMAL REQUIREMENTS ‑‑ "Getting a Grade"

1. Writing Assignments (25%)

The papers I discussed above (called "WRITING ASSIGNMENT" in the daily schedule) will be awarded letter grades based on what you said and how well you said it. I will allow you to drop one grade here (very possibly the first one, so you can see what I expect without hurting you). You will have about six grades here. I reserve the right to add or subtract papers from the schedule as we see how the semester goes.

You will be very severely penalized for PLAGIARISM. That means passing off someone else's work for your own. That covers everything from copying another student's paper to copying significant phrases from a book without using quotation marks and/or citing the source. Purposeful deception can lead to an F in the course or even expulsion for the school. Sadly, this has happened in my classes. Lesser violations will result in downgrading on the assignment, usually a zero. Out in the "real" world you can end up in court over these matters facing heavy fines and loss of professional status. So it's much better to learn about this now. If you aren't sure in a particular situation or don't understand, ask me‑‑that's part of what you're paying me for (and you do pay about three fourths of the actual cost of running this institution). Your share goes up a bit each year. That's a political story itself.

2. Blackboard Reading Mastery Questions (25%)

On dates noted in the course schedule you will see the phrase "Reading Mastery Questions." This means that at the beginning of class that day you should have completed these questions on Blackboard.

These questions will be graded on the basis of the percentage of all possible questions that you get correct, though I reserve the right to make some adjustments at the end that may improve your grade.

You will have several WRITTEN HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENTS during the semester. Each of these will be worth 10 correctly answered Blackboard questions that will be added in when I compute your grade for this part of the course. So if you answered 180 of 200 Blackboard questions correctly on the actual Blackboard questions and did all four of these written homework assignments completely, I will compute your grade for this part of the course by adding in 40 more correct questions. So your grade will be 220/240 = 92% rather than 180/200 = 90%.

3. Tests (50%)

You will have four one hour exams (12.5% each) that use a mixed format of objective questions (multiple guess and true/false), identifications, and essays. The format will change from test to test. I'll be more specific later on after I've made out each test. The tests will be given on the dates as indicated on the course schedule. Make‑up tests are only allowed under the most extreme of circumstances. They will either be an all-essay test or an oral exam, at my discretion.

4. Attendance

Very early in the semester I'll make out a seating chart, so pick a seat you like and stick to it. This will help me learn your names more quickly (I am terrible at this and am trying hard to improve). It will also help me see who is absent on any given day. The university allows each professor design her/his own attendance policy, subject to the approval of supervisors. In the perfect world, the best policy would be no policy—you would come to class only if you want to come. I tried that a while back—and it was a dismal failure. Students simply missed too many classes and this totally disrupted the flow of the class. (Why total freedom of choice did not work is an interesting question worthy of some research--perhaps it was too much unlike the real world where people do suffer real penalties when they do not show up for work for no good reason?) Then I tried a "carrot policy" and had much better attendance. So I'm going to continue that policy, but save one big stick for those who miss too much Here's how it works.

I will take roll each day by noting who is missing on my seating chart. Attendance earns you bonus points on the exams. For each exam you can earn up to five bonus points on attendance. Counting begins the day after the preceding test and continues through the next test.

perfect attendance ---- 5 bonus points

1 absence ---- 3 bonus points

2 or more ---- no bonus points

As you can see from the chart above, perfect attendance is worth half a letter grade on each test! And perhaps you may learn something while you are there that will improve your grade further--another extra added bonus!

For the purpose of bonus points, I do not distinguish between excused and unexcused absences--all absences count. If your absence is excused (with written evidence that you could not attend for reasons beyond your control--things like seeing your advisor or a routine doctor's exam do not count because you can reschedule those), you have the right to make up assignments. But you do not qualify for any bonus points. This may seem unfair to you--should you lose a bonus if you get sick through no fault of your own or because you are away on an official school function? That is certainly most unfortunate, but it is no more unfair than happening to be born into a poor family that cannot provide a good educational or social or economic boost.

The great political philosopher Machiavelli spoke of losing opportunities through misfortune or gaining them through good fortune--he called this "fortuna." We will consider fortuna and many of Machiavelli's other important observations about the political world. You should be aware that "fortuna" plays a role in our grading scheme—albeit a small one that you can overcome by applying other Machiavellian principles—more on that later.

Here is one more rule that fits into the stick part of the carrot and the stick. You MUST attend at least 75% of all the classes to pass the course. So with 28 classes, that means that you must attend at least 21 of them, or put the other way, you can miss no more than 7 classes – the 8^th miss means an F for the course. Again, as with bonus points, all absences count whether excused or unexcused – excused just means that you have the opportunity to make up work missed that day.

USCA HONOR CODE

On all written work in this course you will be expected to sign a pledge that you have abided by the USCA honor code. This means that you have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid in the work. Plagiarism, which we discussed earlier, falls under the honor code. Failure to sign the pledge means that the work cannot be accepted.