Carla Nappi's



For Avoidance of Viral Outbreaks.NAPPI’SPHARMA-VIRA-COPOEIADrugs in Global History, History 1706 Episode 2:The Zombie Apocalypse Edition___________Wash your hands!___________Made from the freshest readings, most delicious discussions, and a healthy dose of stimulating lectures, except somehow all of it is suddenly online, and we will rock this because we are faaaaaabulous.Recommended forINABILITY-TO-MEET-IN-PERSON-NESS. INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET 254002540Prof. Carla Nappi & Co.Established March-April 2020With expert (non-zombie) teaching associate …Barry Bookheimer, Esq. 165681424919Braaaaains!0Braaaaains!bookheimer@pitt.edu 1457960679704000Dr. Carla Nappi (also not a zombie)241307062470Skype: csnappi Easily reached by email at nappi@pitt.edu!Available for Office Hours Monday-Friday 12-2 pm & by appointment (via Skype, details below)Here we go again… INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET 3188970000What…the heck is going onDear ones, welcome to the Zombie Apocalypse Edition of our course! For the next four weeks, we’re going to do our very best to finish out our experience together as best we can, and learn something, and support each other along the way. You will know by now, having been through 9 weeks of classes with me, that I am going to be straight with you, always. And here’s the reality of the situation, friends: we’re living, together, through a wild situation that is unprecedented for all of us. I know that you are dealing with a million things right now, beyond finishing your classwork: global pandemic, groceries, possibly suddenly relocating and settling into a different living situation, health and community concerns. Given all of that, I’m not going to ask you to pretend that this is business as usual, only…online. At the same time, I want our classwork together to be a refuge and a balm as much as it can be. So, with that in mind, I’ve tried to design an experience for all of us that preserves at least the spirit of the major elements of our class together, while respecting the limitations on all of our time and technology. We won’t be able to replicate every aspect of the course, and all of the components that were meaningful to everyone. But we’ll do our best with the time we have. In times of crisis, we learn, we grow, and we make art. And that is what we will be doing in for the remainder of our term together, in The Zombie Apocalypse Edition of History 1706.Where/When…are we going to be doing this thing?The final four weeks of the course will be accessible to you online. Since you all have dispersed – perhaps into different time zones, perhaps into different living situations that aren’t as amenable to personal scheduling or scheduled private, quiet time – we have decided that it’s not reasonable to ask everyone to continue to be available at the same time each week for synchronous course sessions. Instead, the main components of the course will all be available to you at your convenience each week. Since we can’t have synchronous discussions for the rest of the term, we’re going to find ways to share our thoughts and experiences with each other diachronically: our discussions will simply extend to the rest of the semester. The only exceptions to this are office hours: Carla and Barry will each hold extra, online office hours each week via Skype and/or FaceTime (or whatever medium the young people prefer to use these days). Details and sign-up link below.Our course objective remains largely the same: In this last month of the course, you will continue to learn something about drugs in global history, and about yourselves, while prioritizing the importance of trying to stay relatively sane and balanced to the extent possible during Zombie Apocalypse conditions.Assignments and Expectations…are somewhat modified in these final four weeks together: Each week, please do your best to do the following four things to the extent that you’re able to and that it helps maintain a sense of stability in these otherwise unstable times. The key here is just do your best, whatever that looks like at the moment, and understanding that will change over the next four weeks: that’s good enough, I promise. Your main priority right now is to take care of yourself. Beyond that, just do what you can.READRead the Weekly Guide. Weekly Guides will be posted to our Blackboard folder: [Course Documents Weekly Guides]. I will send you emails each week to let you know when they’re available! I will aim to post on Sundays.Read the weekly readings. Course readings will continue to be freely available for download from the course Blackboard site: [Course Documents Weekly Readings]. Be extra kind and gentle with yourselves, read at your leisure, and get through what you can. LISTEN Listen to The Coronavirus Diaries (Professor Edition) Instead of lectures, our course is turning into a podcast! (Fun fact: I podcasted for years before this year, hosting a book-interview channel.) I’ll be posting podcasts each week to my Soundcloud channel, which is linked here, with occasional videos thrown in as an added bonus when I can manage it. I will post links in our Blackboard folder, aiming to post new content every day by 10 am on Mon-Fri starting Monday March 23: [Course Documents Podcast/Video Links (for Zombie Apocalypse Edition of the Course Weeks 10-13]. You can listen to these whenever you’d like. Each week I’ll do my very best to relate the course readings and materials to what’s happening in this rapidly-transforming situation that we find ourselves in. (Indeed, we’ve been doing a version of that all semester!) I’ll post any important names/dates each week to Blackboard, as I’ve been doing all term.MAKEEach week, by Sunday at 5 pm post your own version of The Coronavirus Diaries (Student Edition)! For the rest of the term, your writing assignments will be in the form of The Coronavirus Diaries. You will keep a record of your responses to the readings, course materials, and themes and post them to the course Blackboard site at the end of each week, by Sunday at 5 pm. What this looks like is completely up to you: whatever you can manage is fine. Just please check in by Sunday of each week to let us know how you’re doing with the class, the materials, the universe. To post writing, just do what you’ve been doing all term. To post an audio or video recording or an image, simply explain what it is in your post and attach the file as a link. This is your space to reflect on any aspect of the week’s materials in light of what you’re experiencing that week. Feel free to use your diary to engage or reflect on another student’s posts, if you like: if you do that, you might want to alert that student to the fact that you’ve done it by mentioning them in your post. We’re not going to pretend that any of us will be able to hermetically isolate our academic work from what’s going on with the rest of our lives for the rest of the term: that has always been true for us, but circumstances have thrown it into special relief.While I will be reading/listening to/observing/watching your diaries each week (truly! all of them!) I will wait to write each of you about your diaries at the end of the term, when I can experience them synthetically. With that said, Barry and I are still happy to offer regular feedback each week in the meantime if you’d like it! If you want immediate (weekly) feedback on some aspect of your work for the week, please *email Carla that week* and say so. For example: “This week I tried to work on close reading, and I would appreciate feedback on that aspect of my writing!” or “This week I made an argument in an audio recording: can you listen and let me know if it makes sense?” If we don’t hear from you by email to Carla each week when you post, we will assume that you would like to wait until the end of the term for synthetic feedback from Carla. (We’re also making this option available because we understand that some weeks might be more difficult than others, in these circumstances, to produce something substantive that you want feedback on – some weeks, you might only manage to check in. That’s ok: this structure takes that that into account.)**For Week 10, if you have already posted a thinkpiece that’s fine, you can start with the diaries, if you like, in Week 11.**TALKFind ways to talk about the material with other humans! Discussion sections for the course are regrettably concluded. We the teaching staff have been exploring remote-discussion options (on Blackboard, on Zoom, etc.) and you need to trust me on this: with 84 of us and only 4 weeks to go, it’s really not worth spending the valuable time we have together trying to navigate this tech synchronously, in real time. You have already done the bulk of the work for the course. You have a zillion other things to worry about right now. (See: Zombie Apocalypse.) In virtual office hours, you will all have an opportunity to talk about this material with me and Barry. In our compromised state, treat this as an opportunity to boost yourself in the course. Get creative! Among the various kinds of participation you can give yourself credit for:Talk to Carla and/or Barry in office hours! You can sign up for online office hours at this link, or make an appointment for a time that's not listed on the sheet via email. In the Google Sheet linked above, we’ll post the available times for each week on the evening of the Friday before. You can use these office hours to just check in: it doesn’t have to be course-material-related.Post to the open class discussion board on Blackboard! Respond to someone else’s post!Talk with others about the course topics and materials! (These can be people inside or outside the course! Talk with your family/friends if you’re stuck inside with them because of the Zombie Apocalypse! Chat online with whomever! If you’d like to contact each other, let us know and we can help you to arrange that: we’re not doing that as a default because we want to respect your privacy.)And then, at the end of the term, please:SELF-REFLECT (AND GRADE YO’SELF)Self-Reflection 3: The Coronavirus Edition Due Wednesday April 22 at 5 pm, emailed to nappi@pitt.edu. How to arrive at your final grade:Start with the grade that you gave yourself in the second self-reflection. This represents 2/3 of your grade.The final 1/3 of your grade should be based on making a good-faith effort to stay on track and work on the components of the course that you wanted to work on, given our limited circumstances. Be kind to yourselves. Whatever you can manage in these difficult times is good enough. Just do your best to keep up, each week, with the components described above: reading, listening, making, and talking. What to include on your final self-assessment:What your midterm grade wasHow you did in the final Zombie Apocalypse 1/3 of the course, in all of the categories described above (reading, listening, making, and talking)What your final grade is, given the progress from a) to b)IMPORTANT NOTES:**It is crucial to send your final self-reflection on time** or else I cannot submit your final grade on time!!!Please remember the importance of honesty and integrity in all course-related things, including in your self-assessment.In all cases, a self-assessment of A+ level work should be reserved for truly extraordinary work and should be justified and explained as so in your self-reflection.In order to maximize the amount of content we can cover together, there will be no final meetings necessary, but I’m available to consult, if you’d like, during exam week. I’ll have extra (extra extra!) office hours available all week and I’m happy to talk remotely with all of you.Snapshot of Due Dates for The Rest of The Term:AssignmentDueCoronavirus Diaries Week 10 posted to BlackboardSunday March 29 at 5 pmCoronavirus Diaries Week 11 posted to BlackboardSunday April 5 at 5 pmCoronavirus Diaries Week 12 posted to BlackboardSunday April 12 at 5 pmCoronavirus Diaries Week 13 posted to BlackboardSunday April 19 at 5 pmFinal self-reflection and grade emailed directly to Carla nappi@pitt.edu Wednesday April 22 at 5 pm11811001778023501355080020942302343152188915-34749487680-30099042037064135951595-188143474720-596903293035-93334Weekly ScheduleThis is a revised plan for the term, altered (as promised in the original course syllabus!) in order to try to maximize general awesomeness. The reading and writing assignments will (still) be made available on our course website on Blackboard at least one week before we discuss them, and will be described on the Weekly Guide that I will (still) post on Blackboard each week. See? We are changing things up for peak fabulosity, because that is how we roll, in our class. Week 10 Anxiety and Wellbeing Monday, Mar. 23 – Friday, Mar. 27Lithium & ProzacWeek 11 Empire, RevisitedMonday, Mar. 30 – Friday, April 03Global Drug Trials & VaccinesWeek 12 Sex and GenderMonday, April 06 – Friday, April 10Birth Control & ViagraWeek 13 Concluding Amid A Zombie ApocalypseMonday, April 13 – Friday, April 17Placebos, Screens, & Conclusions ................
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