Wednesday, November 26, 2014

RYS Flashback. A Top Ten All Time Post. 9 Years Ago Today.

Bursting with Love - or Maybe Turkey - Someone from Minnesota Finishes a Set of Essays.

Dear Students,

I've just spent half of yesterday and all of this morning going through your latest essays. They're horrid. Each one of you has disappointed me in some essential way. I hold each early draft and finished draft next to each other, remember the conversations we had about working on the paper, developing it, and then I read the final draft and see NONE of those changes, none of those revisions. It's as if I gave 2 conference days to you for no reason other than to give myself a chance to make my cold worse. Why do you think I offer suggestions? Why do I ask questions about your work? Why do I care more for your essays than you do?

The Rest.

6 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thanks. Fucking Cal. I know he's not teaching today. Probably filed his link from the golf course. I did fix it for him; do you think I'll get a thanks?

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    2. Ah, the fink synced his link whilst sinking at the links.

      Delete
  2. This is why the revisions resulting from my recent conferences are due *after* Thanksgiving. I'd like to be in a thankful mood for the holiday. (Actually, the revisions I saw in follow-up conferences yesterday were pretty good. But those, of course, were done by the students who cared enough -- or were scared enough -- to schedule follow-up conferences. May whatever got to them be catching.)

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  3. I'm wondering if the rubric should include a 'revision effectiveness' category. Students lose points for each suggestion that goes unheeded. Points off for not correcting each instance of a mistake, even if only the first one or two is red-inked. The competencies being reinforced are:

    1) I can accept and act on expert advice;
    2) I can recognize that if I made a mistake once, I could have made it many times;
    3) finding and correcting all mistakes is ultimately my responsibility.

    The flipside is there will be outcry against the instructor's forcing conformity upon the spayshull geniouses. The flipside to that is, kid, better get used to delivering what somebody else has decided is correct, as you're not likely to be 'the decider' for some time to come.

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  4. OPH, I will be stealing your idea. Levels in that row of the rubric:

    - Showed up for review of draft.
    - Revised all marked problems.
    - Revised all marked problems correctly, without adding new problems or making the existing ones worse.
    - Revised all marked problems correctly; looked for and corrected all similar problems elsewhere in essay.
    -

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