Seminar notes are commentaries of at least two double-spaced pages apiece (500+ words) upon The Patient Assassin and Gandhi's Autobiography.  The Patient Assassin will be due in the first half of the semester, while Gandhi's Autobiography will be due at the end of the semeser.  The purpose of these reflective reading responses is to provide you with the opportunity to organize your thoughts after each of those major readings and  to facilitate thoughtful group discussion.  The notes should be analytical in nature and should highlight key themes from the reading.  Your own interpretations must be at the centre of each seminar note.  I want to see you engaging directly with the text rather than paraphrasing someone else's descriptions or review.  Although you should write concisely, it is great if one or more of your seminar notes are considerably longer than the recommended length.  Seminar Notes can be typed or hand-written, though for either format you should take some notes and carefully organize your thoughts before attempting to write your paper.  I encourage you to hand in these rough notes with your completed Seminar Note if you indeed have these.

The excellent seminar note will probe chosen themes in an original, organized, and analytical manner.  The commentary will effectively connect together your larger ideas with the particularities of the reading, using examples and specific text to accentuate your writing.  A good seminar note will show evidence of attentive reading and of engagement with the text.  You will organize your thoughts coherently and demonstrate the ability to explain and to explore key themes that you highlight from the text. The satisfactory seminar note will offer evidence that you have engaged directly with the text and drawn something of larger meaning from it.  Your ideas may not be fully developed or as clearly stated as might be the case, but you do demonstrate that you have taken something away from your encounter with the book.  An unsatisfactory seminar note is one in which you either seem to rely entirely upon secondary sources and thus do not engage with the text, or in which you do not demonstrate any understanding of the text.

Rather than being graded on a letter scale, the seminar notes will be evaluated on a check, check-plus, check-plus+, and check-minus basis:

Check:  A fully satisfactory seminar note (7.3/10, B) --  The seminar note offers evidence that you have engaged directly and substantially with the text and drawn something of larger meaning from it.  Your ideas may not be fully developed or as clearly stated as might be the case, but you do demonstrate that you have taken something away from your encounter with the book.

Check-Plus:  A strong seminar note (8.6/10, A) -- The strong seminar note will offer thoughtful analysis and/or a well-developed commentary upon the text.  It will probe chosen themes in an original, organized, and analytical manner.  The commentary with effectively connect together your larger ideas with the particularities of the reading, using examples and specific text to accentuate your writing.

Check-Plus+:  An outstanding seminar note  (9.5, A+) -- Such a note pushes far beyond the basic expectations for this assignment in terms of both its originality and the extent to which it probes the reading.

Check-Minus:  A weak seminar note (6.1, C)  --  The seminar note includes some material of relevance and evidence of direct engagement with the text.  However, it seems to be based upon limited reading and/or a lack of understanding of the book's core themes.

Check-Minus-Minus:  An unsatisfactory seminar note.  (0, F)  A note in which it is impossible to tell whether there was any direct engagement with the text.  The assignment seems to have relied entirely upon secondary sources and/or to have been completed using Artificial Intelligence tools.

There typically will not be the opportunity to revise Seminar Notes and submit them a second time.

Seminar notes will be evaluated separately from the Journal.  However, they are not meant to be intimidating.  I consider them to be very similar to particularly thoughtful and well-developed Journal entries.

The Illustrated Mahabharata is a book that provides an in-depth introduction to that epic and will serve as the main resource for two of our class sessions.  Although you will need to purchase a copy of this book and will be responsible for reading it, seminar notes are ones required for the two shorter book-length readings.