A definition-focused worksheet about the musical elements based on vocabulary from the textbook Music: A Social Experience, 2nd ed. by Steven Cornelius and Mary Natvig. This assignment can be easily reworked to match an alternative textbook.

The Music and… Playlist is a semester-long scaffolded writing assignment that I designed to replace a midterm and final exam. (Scaffolding refers to breaking a larger writing assignment into step-by-step, cumulative stages.) This assignment requires students to: choose a social topic (e.g. coming of age, feminism, holidays); write a topic proposal describing how their topic relates to music; choose six pieces of music from different genres; write short playlist entries that discuss the social and musical characteristics of each piece; and create a slide presentation summary. The document below includes handouts for each stage of the assignment.

Peer review pair activity intended for early stage of the writing process. Students ask each other questions about their project and record the answers, allowing them to explore and articulate the ideas that will eventually be included in their paper. After finishing the interviews on pages 1 and 2, students write down helpful suggestions for their partner on page 3. The questions in this activity can easily be changed to fit other writing assignments like a concert report or research paper.

In-class activity for small groups of 3-4 students; intended to review the musical characteristics associated with four genres of sacred music: plainchant; organum; Renaissance mass; chorale. In the first phase, groups are asked to fill out a table with the musical characteristics of each genre while looking over their notes and textbook. In the second phase, groups are given online access to four anonymous musical examples (one for each genre). While listening and discussing at their own pace, groups should identify the genre for each example and give two reasons behind their choice. The format of this activity can be easily repurposed to fit other musical genres, periods, or styles.

Online and in-person. Organized by social topics rather than chronology; incorporates world music and popular music alongside Western art music. Assignments include blogs, online quizzes, and a semester-long scaffolded writing project to replace midterm and final exams. Textbook: Stephen Cornelius and Mary Natvig, Music: A Social Experience, 2nd. ed.

In-person, non-major introduction to music featuring quizzes in combination with a midterm presentation and final project. Assigned textbook: Esther M. Morgan-Ellis’ Resonances: Engaging Music in its Cultural Context.

This text can be used for Math 241 (Introduction to Probability and Mathematical Statistics) at Queens College. Topics include the axioms of probability, counting, conditional probabilities, random variables, and an introduction to statistics.

Intro to contracts lecture notes for Busines and Law Ethics at Guttman Community College

This is a syllabus for a graduate-level introductory course on the Digital Humanities, primarily aimed at LIS students.

LBSCI 730: Archival Appraisal, Arrangement, and Access is the first course in the core sequence for the Advanced Certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. The key principles of this course represent the hierarchy of archival practice: access to archives is dependent on the description of archives, which in turn is dependent on the arrangement of archives.
This OER and companion site is both a course tool and an evergreen hub for resources. Students can return to it at any time to revisit readings, check resources, and develop their own practice.
Course site: https://lbsci730.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

LCD 322 is an undergraduate class that provides an overview of the symptoms, etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of various speech disorders including disorders of phonology/articulation, voice/resonance, fluency, swallowing, and speech impairment associated with neurological impairment. Speech disorders will be considered across the lifespan.

This syllabus is part of a graduate teacher preparation program for English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Students learn about phonetics and discuss methods and approaches for teaching English pronunciation in NYC schools to multilingual learners. They also discuss current issues related to teaching pronunciation in schools, such as accent bias, accepting multiple Englishes, and English language hegemony.

This toolkit is designed to help you teach English 110 students at Queens College how to use library resources to research effectively. It is part of an ongoing, iterative effort, in collaboration with the English 110 coordinators, to create flexible materials that can be adapted to suit the specific needs of a variety of English 110 classes. It continues to be a work in progress. These materials are developed to provide templates for action and activity at various points throughout the library instruction sequence, as outlined below.

COURSE GOALS

Develop an appreciation for literature and its analysis as part of encountering and understanding the world and its regions in a cultural and historical context;
Develop close reading skills to interpret literary texts across different genres;
Develop familiarity with some conventional disciplinary language and its use to think about how texts work (for example, assessing literary works in terms of voice, tone, and structure);
Understand how context works with ideas to produce the meaning of a text;
Use both informal and formal writing as opportunities to discover one’s own ideas in conversation with the ideas of others;
Write a thoughtful, analytical and coherent essay that is firmly grounded in the text and adheres to MLA guidelines.

In this class we will examine a constellation of British “realist” novels that are set in fictional county towns in England. Fictional towns such as Coketown and Mudfog in Dickens’ work (based on Preston in Lancashire), Wessex in Thomas Hardy’s (said to include Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berkshire among others), Raveloe and Middlemarch in George Eliot’s (speculated to be based on Coventry in Warwickshire), Barchester in Trollope’s (said to be based on a combination of Winchester and Exeter).

The course studies the topographical imagination in these realist novels. It asks: What does the decision to rename a place that is adjacent to an actual place do for the symbolic construction of that reality? How do these fictional spaces explore the heterogeneities of the periphery as distinct from (and similar to) the popular metropolitan characterizations of the peripheries? How do they attend to the specific vernacular language-scapes of these regions? How does the chronotope of these regionally-specific novels explore the working conditions and social life in smaller industrial and semi-rural parts of England?

In this course, we will treat fictional spatial geography as an essential part of time, narrative and plot-construction of the realist novel. Studying theories of the novel such as Bakhtin’s “chronotope” and Paul Ricoeur’s “threefold mimesis” we see how the fictional naming of spaces provides the opportunity for salience, symbolism and specificity in realist novels. Realism, therefore, is not an exercise in inventorying reality, but imaginatively constructing it (what Barthes, noting the lack of novelistic cohesion in Flaubert, calls the “reality effect” in his 1989 essay of the same title). The fictionalization of actual spaces allows the reader to avoid easy identifications or preconceptions and instead “come into” the constructed world of realist narrative. It is in this manner that the realist novel inscribes within itself the seemingly opposite paradigm of escapism and representation. Keeping in mind this dialectic between the imagined and the real, we will explore the multiple realisms that emerge from the deliberately selected sample size of Victorian realist novels included in this course, and how their regional and fictional vantage point allows them to respond to the modernizing epoch of the Victorian era and the crises that lie therein.