Letter of Welcome: English 103 ONLINE

Greenfield Community College Instructor: Aileen Jones

First of all, welcome. Welcome to GCC if this is your first term, and for all of you,
welcome to this class. It is a class I enjoy teaching, and I look forward to a productive
and enjoyable semester with all of you.

Some thoughts about our course as we prepare to roll up our sleeves:

 It will be your ideas that will be most important in this class.

 No one will dictate essay content to you. There isn’t one correct way to write or
think well, just as there isn’t one correct political stance, or one correct dialect, or
one correct morality. (That said, we will be mining the tomes of academia for
various approaches to essay writing).

 I know writing to be both challenging and thrilling. It can come easily or it can be
a shifty, hard-to-corner thing. It might be hilarious, or surprising, or deeply
personal. And what it most certainly is, is a powerful tool. To write well is to
communicate well. Written work can be the first impression someone has of us—
and that impression should be confident, and clear, and it should stand out; it
should stand above.

 I teach writing because I like it. Greenfield Community College is a place I like to
be. I meet interesting people, I discuss and wrangle with what I am most
interested in: writing and ideas. And I am challenged by teaching—each group is
unique, and that means I really can’t make any assumptions about who anybody
is. What works for one student may not work for another. So please know this:
What I want is for you to meet your individual needs, and I want to help make this
class successful and enjoyable for you. Don’t hesitate to assert yourself. I might
not have been aware of your needs. Expect me to help you out, expect me (and the
other members of the class) to take you seriously. Expect your writing and your
needs to be respected.

 As we begin the semester I want to emphasize that college is not a realm in which
to be passive. This course is not a realm in which to be passive. College is a
meeting of the minds, a place to assert ideas and listen, with a shrewd ear, to the
ideas of others. It is a place to disagree, to change our minds, to accommodate
other modes of thinking, perhaps to throw up our hands and go back in for a
second look. Thinking evolves: our assumptions can be proven to be false, or
incomplete, or simply, too easy. And then when we put our ideas out there, others
may adjust their thinking. I suspect this type of discourse and exchange is what
college is for. Because nobody comes to college to be told what to think, we come
to get all the information we can so we may arrive at our own conclusions.

I look forward to reading your work.