Instructions: There is a 250 word minimum.

After writing your first post, respond to 2 other students' posts by Thursday night. There is a 150 word minimum for each of these 2 responses.

Topic for the posts: Read each of the 5 poems in Chapter One ofExploring Literature,our textbook. In your notes, write a "first response" to three of the poems. The first response is explained on page 4 of our textbook. Place your first responses to the poems in a Notebookor Journalyou keep for this class.

The notebook will not be graded, but you will find it useful as a source for writing topics and especially later when you need paper topics for future assignments. Keep this notebook for the semester.

The next step in the Discussion Board is to select 1 of the 3 first responses written in your notebook as the basis of your first post. Develop your post by reading, reflecting on and expanding your selected first response.

EXAMPLE: If you read "The Raven," a well-known poem by Edgar Allen Poe, you might write this first response: This Poet Guy is crazy. He's losing it because his girlfriend Lenore has died and he is lonely and misses her so bad he has started hallucinating talking birds and he is just going off the deep end. By the end of the poem his madness has taken hold of him completely and he has lost his grip on reality.

In the example of the first response, the writer has offered an interpretation of the narrator's actions and state of mind. To turn the first response into a 250 word post, the student might go in any of several directions.

One would be to reflect on why the interpretation makes sense to the student--or why it came to him or her in the first place.

A second possibility would be to explore the form of madness and try to connect it to love's effects on people.

A third might be to try to go into the associations of the raven itself, the bird. What about a talking bird saying one thing over and over could suggest an unbalanced state of mind?

A fourth interpretation might be to explain the student writer's responses in the order of his or her reading--as in at what point in the poem the idea that the narrator is mad first occurred to the student and how it built throughout his or her reading.

A fifth possibility might be a connection the student might make by comparing a similar personal experience to the narrator's experience in the poem: The student, having lost his girlfriend recently, is forced to write an English essay and experiences a crippling bout of writer's block. He falls asleep and has a strange dream of a bird mocking him in his grief and frustration. As you can see, there are a million and one possibilities.

You may choose your own topic for this post. If you need ideas, or just want to see how other students wrote about the poems, read the CHECKLIST on page 5 and the sample journal entries on pages 6 and 7 in the textbook. A further source of ideas can be found after the poems in the FIRST RESPONSE and MAKING CONNECTIONS sections.

The best topics for your Discussion Board writing, however, are the ones that you find when you read and think about the poems--the ones that are personal in the sense that you thought of them.. The Discussion Board is a laboratory for ideas, a place for you to think and explore your responses to literature.

Note: The way the Discussion Board works is that you can gain access to other students' posts only after you have submitted your initial post.

This Discussion Board is the equivalent of class discussion in an classroom course. It will work or not work only if you use it and post on time. Posting late (after the deadlines) will not allow interaction between students and keep the Discussion Board from working to generate class discussion of your ideas. For this reason you will receive no credit for late posts.

The writing style of your posts should be informal, but clear. The goal is to write so other students understand what you are talking about. One way to be clear is to say what you mean. Another is to make direct references to the poem so the reader knows what you are talking about. Discussion Board writing, then, is partly self-expression, and partly communication.

Note: You may write more than two responses to other students. You may also respond to anyone who responds to you, but try not to tell them they were wrong or missed your point.

Be subtle. We want to keep the interactions between students polite and friendly. If you disagree, just state that you see things differently and explain. In the academic world people disagree all the time; they just do so in a civilized way. Otherwise the Discussion Board would turn into reality TV, and I am not interested in a host role--or a referee.

Finally, every semester as the course goes on I try to encourage students to develop strings of conversation with other students. In other words, respond to those who respond to you--as in a real conversation. If you ignore the responses other students make, it will seem like you are only doing the required work.

Students who get the best grades in this class don't just do the minimum; they explore their own and other students' ideas. Start strong, and in six weeks you may be pleasantly surprised with the results of your efforts.