Carnegie Notes from Oct. 17^th through Oct. 21^st

This week in class we examined strong examples from their last paper, worked more on spelling, and wrote the midterm (Paper #4).

As I noted in the last set of notes, I could cut the spelling down, I think. I don’t know whether all the class-time practice is necessary given that they will immerse themselves in the drill with the numerous quizzes on Web CT. I do find that being able to project their papers onto the screen to reveal the strengths of the better papers to the students is helpful. They can see clear organization and effective details all put together in the stronger papers as a model. I need to take advantage of posting the student essays so that they can respond to their classmates with high-level work, but I’m so behind as it is (viewing all the quizzes that don’t get graded) that I can’t possibly add one more thing to my to-do list for these classes. I was pleased with their midterms, as a whole, though there were numerous run-ons on the papers (but again, we hadn’t started those at the time).

In 191, now that we’ve started run-ons, I have had problems with students complaining about wrong answers on some of the quizzes. I need to take the time to look at them all and fix those.