This weekend I graded essay I. The prompt for this essay is simply that they have to write a personal narrative of some kind. I decided that, at least for these first drafts, I will give full credit to any essay that is properly formated, at least one page long, and shows a bona fide attempt at being the kind of essay requested (narrative, descriptive, comparison, etc.). Of the 50ish essays I have graded, only one didn't fulfill these meager requirements. This one dissenter was printed in arial. I gave it a 98/100.
The thing that impressed me the most about these essays is their length. The main reason I came up with my revised syllabus was to prevent my students from writing several pages of bullshit because their main concern was to fill what appears to a freshman as "a lot of pages". I do feel that the ability to unpack one's ideas in order to make a paper long enough is an important skill. However, I feel that it is both less important and easier to cultivate than invention and organization.
Anyway, I stressed the fact that these essays only had to be one page long to get full credit. Last year, when i assigned a three page essay, my students complained that "it's too hard to make my ideas stretch out that long". Wasn't I surprised last Friday when several students came up to me with three page essays complaining that "It's too hard to make them any shorter" Is it some kind of reverse psychology?
The essays themselves were all very thoughtful. I can't seem to shake the feeling that this year's students are more thoughtful than last years...strange.
About the time I was 80% done with my grading, I realized that I was writing pretty much the same thing on every essay: some version of "this is a good narrative. For the revision you might consider opening the story at the point where your team went to the big game and then filling the background in later." I think, if that happens again, I will put less comments on each paper and just talk about suggestions for improvment in class.
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1 comment:
This is great Matt. I basically just read your first and last entree because I have tons to do yet tonight. I thought I might do something similar, but not on a daily basis. Now I have some inspiration to actually do so!
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