The Foundations of Personality BlackBoard
Discussion and
Your Grade in the Course
Although the main benefit of participating in the course newsgroup should
be the intellectual pleasure of sharing ideas with peers who are doing the
same reading, I think learning from each other’s reactions to the readings
and class sessions is at least as important as an exam. Therefore, 15% of
your grade (enough to change most folks’ grade from “B-” to “B+,” say) will
be based on your use of the Web Forum, using the following point system for
each posting:
- 0 nothing there
- 1 redundant/filler/off-target
(e.g., “I agree with George that Freud didn’t understand women. He
must have had a lot of Oedipal hang-ups.”)
- 2-3 on-target/helpful/engaged
(e.g., "I agree with George that Freud’s biases about gender get
in the way, but I was impressed that Dora dragging her foot could have been from a few
things. First of all, the incident occurred 9 months after the incident
with Herr K, which is the duration of a pregnancy. Freud hypothesized that
she considered the incident at the lake a 'false step', which could have
resulted in pregnancy if she had submitted to his proposition. Also, when
Dora was very young, she fell down a set of stairs, and the same right foot
was sore and swollen, and had to be bandaged. This incident, Freud said,
was the necessary infantile prototype needed to strengthen his claim - with
the same foot she had taken another false step, thinking she was going to
step on a stair. Freud says that this false step idea helps to show Dora's
real passion for Herr K. which she represses because she actually thinks
of him as one with whom she would have sex - one who could give her a child.")
- 4-5 substantive/interesting/new/thought-provoking
(I’ll know it when I see it, and I’ll sometimes send the author an email
about provocative postings)
The maximum points available through posting will be 15 of 100 total, all
of which must be earned before the last day of class (3/7/03), since I want
this discussion to be helpful to everyone. Although my examples above stick
close to the content of the reading, I’m also looking for interesting and
original use of the course concepts to understand issues in our own society,
e.g., the relevance of Freud’s argument in Civilization and Its
Discontents to the fascination of today’s youth with computer games.
Questions/concerns?