Today I am probably going to let my students out early, but I have decided to go over the "Five Ways of Interpreting a Text" with them. I liked Peters's questions, and I think my students could benefit from them. So, that's what we are going to do today, unless they all seem like zombies. Then, I may just let them go. They wouldn't take any of it in anyway, right?
I am honestly not sure what problems they are having with this essay because I have not seen it yet. I do know that on our workshopping day many of them did not have 5 pages, but it also was not due, so I figure they will fix that before they turn it in today. (Knock on wood.) They have heard me threaten them enough with lowered grades if they do not meet the page requirement, but who knows if that translated into their brains or if they care.
I know that when we spoke about examples of manipulation from Blink, they had trouble differentiating between the author's manipulations and the characters in the stories being manipulated. We talked about this as well, so I hope nobody is still holding onto that false notion. If they have used this to write their papers, they will be getting comments from me about it and possibly a chance to rewrite.
In grading these papers, I probably won't change much. I felt like I developed a good "groove" for grading the last time. It took me a few papers to find it, but it worked. I felt as if my sense for what was an A, B, or C paper came quite naturally after reading a few of them. I am going to stick with this. I may actually be a little more tough on them because it is their second essay. They should have learned something by now, right? I may be less lenient on the lack of a thesis statement, comma splices, or citations that are inadequately formatted.
My mind may change after I actually spend some of Spring Break grading. I do hope to try to be fair and consistent. Is that possible?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment