Still, if for some reason you get into trouble serious enough to want to drop the course, such as getting so far behind you can't catch up, don't just stop coming to class and think that will be the end of it. Florida Tech will not let me award extra credit for supplemental projects. Florida Tech also will not allow me to post grades, not even with names removed for privacy, nor to release grades over the phone. If you want to know your grade, please consult the PAWS Web page. Otherwise, you'll just have to wait until the grade reports are mailed to you.
Writing is a key skill for everyone, especially for scientists.
No scientific investigation is complete until it becomes known to the world, and scientists do this by writing papers and publishing them. There have been too many important scientific discoveries that were ignored for years because the scientists who first did the work had not done a good job of writing up the results in a way that people could understand. Since I take this so seriously, and since they were so good last semester in SPS 1010, I will personally read and grade every one. Having something to say in your paper is important, of course, and how you write it is important, too. Good content is so much easier to understand if it's written in a way that's easy to understand.