Class 2/27

Tonight in class we started off by doing peer review sessions with tutors from the writing center. We split into groups, working three people to a tutor. We went through each of our group members’ essays, talking about and commenting on each one. I thought that the session was very helpful. It was a good model of how a successful peer review session should go.
After about an hour, we reconvened with the rest of the class for a journal write about the peer review session. We wrote about our participation in the review and whether it was effective. Then we went over the new assignment, which is the peer review with the Robinson high school students. Each student in the class will comment on eight student papers through the medium of an online discussion board. The student essays will be posted Friday, and we will be expected to comment by the next Friday, before Spring break starts.
Then the class split into two groups to discuss the five student essays we were assigned to grade last week. The group was determined by which rubric you used to grade the essays. The two rubrics were different, one using a scale of four possible points in five categories, and one using guidelines to determine letter grades. The groups then compared the individual grades we had assigned to them. There was some disagreement in my group, with grades on one essay ranging from F to A. Group consensus mostly placed the grades in the B-C category. Oddly, both groups agreed on every grade except the parent essay, where the grades differed between C and D. We went through the essays one at a time and discussed them. All of them had some grammatical errors, but this is what we decided were the major issues with the essays.
1. The George W. Bush essay was generally considered the best of the six, although it did go off on a few tangents and gave vague supporting details; it ultimately had the best organization.
2. The parent essay was generally the worst, having very little organization or relevance to topic.
3. The Omar essay was somewhere in the middle. It had some good content in areas, but the middle read like a discography. It needed more focus on the topic of heroes, instead of just random information.
4. The Mr. Arnold essay, we decided, needed more support about why Mr. Arnold is a hero. It does not stay on topic.
5. The Lance Armstrong essay had a strong topic and stays with it, but it lacks details and organization.


--Katrina K.