Chit chat on our forum for incoming fresh persons:Anonymous moose: I hate the common reading.
Anonymous anteater: I'm not doing the common reading.
Anonymous ostrich: Why don't we all make a virtual book club and each just read part of the common reading?
Anonymous snipe: Great, we'll all just read 50 pages and summarize it.
Anonymous paramecium: Awesome - now I don't have to waste like 4 hours of my summer reading this stupid thing.
Anonymous snipe; Hey, look how many people have answered this! We only have to read like a paragraph each.
Anonymous ostrich: I'm making a Google Doc for everyone to post their paragraph summaries.
Anonymous guppy: You are my hero, Anonymous Ostrich!
Every year, the promise of the new geniuses...
ReplyDeleteOK, I read my assigned paragraph and wrote a summary, which is about a paragraph in length. I contemplated making it shorter but deciced that the quality would suffer.
ReplyDeleteThis exercise will definitely save everybody time.
Undoubtedly.
DeleteIt would also be an interesting experiment to run the google doc through a plagiarism checking service (assuming the common text, or at least summaries of it, are available on line). I'm guessing that the group-generated document may be um, somewhat lacking in original content.
Brilliant! (the post, not the herd's solution; great title, and riff on the google group-editing environment, by the way). Well, at least they've got some skills that probably will serve them well in college, and they will probably learn something from this particular exercise (maybe even including that professors have been known to read stuff they post openly, even if anonymously, on the internet.)
ReplyDeleteAnd 3 people will do the assignment and the other 156 will not and then those three will be mad and it will be a big mess, but hey, anything to avoid reading 200 pages as college students. What, they expect college students to READ? Since when?!!
ReplyDeleteHmm ... if could be a conspiracy between the few actually hard-working incoming students to learn which of their peer can be counted on for group assignments.
DeleteWell, I can hope, can't I?
Combining that with Cassandra's comment above, it seems like a good way to find out which classmates are likely to jeopardize the rest of the group by plagiarizing their contributions.
DeleteHunger-Games-Freshman-Reader Style
DeleteProbably the last time all of them will approach a group assignment with such enthusiasm.
DeleteI only hope the common reading is a novel.
ReplyDelete