Thursday, March 5, 2015

Irony.


13 comments:

  1. That does happen. And I love when it happens. But Jesus, let's just be smug about it for a while. I'd rather hear complaints about other students than this self-congratulatory crap.

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    1. ...but the student is the idea-owner of the reaction to the primary text source, surely?

      (c) Jazzy Stubble, 2015

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  2. I'm glad Stommel retweeted someone's comment who actually grades.

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    1. which he probably found while googling himself....(Tom Jesse / Jesse sTOMel).

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    2. The overlap between the two names had me suspecting more sock puppetry. I tested the google hypothesis, but didn't find an instance of Tom Jesse in the first 70+ hits of searching on Jesse Stommel. That may be simple "failure to find" on my part, which is not evidence of absence; alternatively, our hero is willing to dig deeper than I. When I searched on Jesse Tom, I did however discover that Jesse Stone is a character played by Tom Selleck.

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  3. Replies
    1. Fuck it. What else do I have to do? I mean I have to spoof some IP addresses in a few minutes, and them I'm going to ban some people from the page. But the rest of the day is wide open!

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  4. I actually like that thing too. But I'm somewhat confused about how that would mean you stop grading. I think that's just called an "A" paper.

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  5. I'm with Chiltepin and Archie. Of course I like it, but/and I eventually also "grade" the paper, which means I provide both feedback on the paper's strengths and weaknesses/areas for possible improvement, and, yes, assign a letter grade, which may well be an A (those are, indeed, the ones you can truly get absorbed in). Just as often, the student whose argument is well above the usual quality for the course is struggling with structure (on the macro and/or micro level), or some other issue of expression/organization (because cognitive leaps have a way of causing disintegration of other writing skills), and there's good advice to be given about possible revision. This is one of the places where a rubric (as a vehicle for, or in addition to, written comments) can come in handy, both for determining a fair grade for an uneven paper, and for communicating the reasons for that grade to the student.

    I'd be happy to work somewhere where letter grades weren't part of this process (though I think that would have to be a pretty privileged place, or at least one that could put all its students, temporarily, in the privileged position of being able to concentrate the great majority of their attention and energy on school work). In the meantime, I assign letter grades, because that's part of my job at the place where I work (which does a pretty good job of providing students, many of them in less-than-ideal circumstances, with a real education).

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