My students and I have been having post conferences on their researchSounds like you're doing pretty well!
papers. During our conference, I have been pulling up your students
comments and grades. I thought that your students would want to know that
they are scoring the papers very closely to my scores. This isn't true 100%
of the time, but most are very close. That is great!!
In an earlier email, she mentioned that her students have really been paying attention to your comments and talking about what you have said about their writing. There have been a few bumps. A couple students felt their SIU reader was being mean by pointing out that they didn't seem to be taking the assignment seriously. Mrs. Oxford and I discussed how students sometimes DO need to be told the truth. She also said it's important to realize that sometimes you will have students that want to only hear sugar-coated fluff even when they do work far below their capabilities. They don't deal well with the truth, but many times these students realize months or even years later how you've pushed them and how your high expectations actually forced them out of their comfort zone in a good way. The only other concern of the students was that they were marked down on some things in their final draft when those things weren't mentioned in their first drafts. Mrs. O said this is something she still has to work on, but there are times when some problems seem to be at the forefront on a rough draft and then other things draw more attention as the first things are fixed.
Overall, very nice work, folks! You should be proud of yourselves.
1 comment:
It is hard to take less than "sugar-coated fluffiness" critiques on a piece of writing even academic writing. Though I have overcome this I still have things that I write that I would consider myself protective of and would go on the defensive if they did not receive good criticism. Yet it is necessary for the students [myself included] to be able to bare the "truth" and "weight" of constructive criticism. To many times I have seen the younger generations that are raised in a protective reality and the real reality hits them like a lead weight. Perhaps it is the way they are taking the wording when they find SIUC students' comments on their papers too harsh. I am sure, myself included, that such comments were not said to be mean but to bring to light some thing that we noticed about the assignment that they may have missed.
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