English 1550 (Tuesday, Sept. 20)

At the beginning of Tuesday’s class, Karen reviewed the day’s agenda (which she had conveniently written on the board). I’ve always found this helpful since it keeps both the teacher and students on track. Another bit of “housekeeping” that Karen did was showing students some of the new content that she added to Blackboard. She briefly discussed “ Evaluating Essays in English 1550” (which is, in some respects, similar to the U.S. Academic Style checklist in the Easy Writer handbook) and what constitutes “A,” “B,” “C,” and “No Credit” essays (with the expectation that no paper will be perfect). After this, Karen explained how she would grade the first major assignment. It will be worth 100 points, with 80 possible points for content and 20 possible points for correctness. I like that Karen provides her students with a rubric that clearly states what she is looking for in every assignment. I’ll probably use a similar rubric for my class since it includes a fairly straightforward evaluation of major points/sections and also has a spot for teacher’s comments. Karen said she would use this space to list some goals for her students, or what she’d like to see them address in future writing. This seems like an efficient and effective way of evaluating student work. After discussing this (and fielding some student questions), Karen pulled up the document of student writing concerns (which I compiled from the students’ diagnostic essays) that is available on Blackboard. One of the most commonly repeated concerns was, as I’ve mentioned before, a misunderstanding of semicolon and colon use. In an attempt to address this, I created two PowerPoint presentations and explained them in class. The first, which was about semicolons, was drawn from an online comic by The Oatmeal. Through this, I was able to present the necessary information about semicolons in a humorous, perhaps entertaining way. The second presentation about colons was drawn from information in the Easy Writer. It’s kind of hard to determine the effectiveness of my presentations at this point, though. Karen spent the rest of the class discussing the day’s readings, “How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words” and “Boring From Within: The Art of the Freshman Essay.” I liked that the first selection was addressed to students, while the other was directed toward English instructors. This provided two differing points of view, which I thought might be interesting to students. Finally, Karen spent some time discussing the importance of writing for a specific audience and also how to make writing more clear and concise (while adding content).

COMMENTS:

* Guy Shebat: Sounds like a full session! You are right that providing a rubric that outlines the assessment criteria for a particular assignment (and, perhaps, for your overall general A,B,C, NC criteria) makes good sense. Not only does it serve the students' needs, but it also makes grading and evaluating easier for you (takes some of the guess-work out of it -- though the assessment of writing always retains elements of subjectivity).