Class Events 2/20

* Went over who was supposed to present on each day for the upcoming grammar lesson and group-teach lesson. We are considering having a half-hour in class 2/27 to get into our group-teach groups and prepare. The rubric for the grammar lesson is coming by email.

* We devided into groups and went through each of the essays we responded to for class to pick 3 things we thought a teacher must respond to for each essay. Here is what we came up with:

Essay 1 - Bill Clinton - Subject/Verb agreement, refute opposition (stronger argument), more examples/details, it was too conversational, and more research to support claims (in a re-write).

Essay 2 - Football - capitalization (handwriting looked as if words were capitalized at random, decided problem might not occur if the student had been typing), transitions (needed sophistication), sentence structure, and mechanics.

Essay 3 - Idea of Hero - specifics (needs to emphasize that not everyone preforms atrociousities, also back-up his claims), his conclusion needed to conclude, opposition correctly, watch topic, define heroic qualities, and make last sentence his thesis statement for a new paper.

Essay 4 - Baby Alex - needs to narrow focus onto Amy, connect ideas back to thesis, organization, transitions, clean up informal tone, and paragraph structure.

Essay 5 - A Hero of Mine - Thesis (why is it Van Halen?), detail strays from focus, weak conclusion, needs to see messages through, provide more support, and organization.

Essay 6 - My Hero (2 job dad) - unecessary words (excess modifiers), no introduction, connect to heroic qualities, repetitious, and paragraph structure.

Essay 7 - My Hero (3rd wife dad) - connect examples back to thesis, paragraph structuring, finish, clean up cliches.

* We also discussed treating emotion and discussion of issues/opinions in student essays. We decided the best thing is to let students know what we could and could not deal with. For example, telling students not to write on a topic if they are too close to it to accept criticism on it, and letting them know not to write on abortion because you have a strong opinion on it and would not be able to give them a fair grade.

* We received 2 rubrics for the essays from set 2 which we must respond to for 2/27 (with summative comments explaining the grade we assign each paper). We decided to individually pick which rubric to use and we will see in class who gets the best results. If you pick the rubric with numbers in graph format, you need to find a way to assign points so that your students won't all fail the paper (if you do it by percentages, students who get 2s and 1s will fail by getting 50 and 25%).

* We were reminded to post on the blog - 10 posts, only 2 count a week.

* We were returned our first papers and the in-class writing we did.

* Our Essay 2 is due by email Monday, 2/25, by noon. We will be assigned peer review groups and the papers from our group members will be sent to us by email. We are to read these before we come to class 2/27 so that we are prepared.

* We are not to read the Evaluating Student Writing about History reading for 2/27, and we will not be responding to the real student papers.