First Week Sunday

Today I graded the diagnostic essays that students wrote in class on friday. As always, these essays are pretty much fun to read. I found that one of my sections largely chose to write on the original prompt that I gave out while students of the other section chose almost unanimously to write according to the "invisibility vs flying" prompt, discussed in the previous blog posting.

When I comment on these essays, I am pretty easy going. They are not for a grade, but just an introductory sort of experience. So I mark any glaring grammitical mistakes in the margins and I write mostly encouraging comments at the end of each essay. Every essay usually contains comments that go something like this "this is a good in class essay. You have some interesting ideas and your organize them fairly well. Also, your essay was (fun/interesting) to read. Hopefully this class will help you take your skills to an even higher level."

The general trends are more or less the same as last year; an inability to tell when the word "its" is a contraction and when it isn't and the tendency to write as if they were speaking to somebody. If my students can graduate from my class using the correct "its" and eliminate that speaking tone from their writing, I think I will be on to something.

It seems to me that this year's diagnostic essays are more thoughtful than the one's my students produced last year. I don't know if they really are or if they just seem to be. I think that they must be, though. for example, whenever I have students write about flying vs invisibility, they never fail to pick up on the fact that invisibility is the more sinister of the two powers and that it's more easily used for nefarious purposes than is flying. This year, one of my students writing on the subject noted that invisibility is not so much evil but rather it is the power (of the two possibilities) that gives its owner the ability to chose for his or her self whether to be good or evil.

So it occurs to me that I must try and encourage this thoughtfulness in my students. Perhaps my students were just as thoughtful last year but I was not experienced enough to notice it.