Week 9

Once students hand in the first draft of their first essays, the real work begins for the teacher. Last week was spent grading and the main focus of this week was seeing each student for a 1:1 tutorial. By the start of this week I had graded practically all of the essays that had been submitted the previous week. When I went to my office on Monday morning I did of course know that there were four or five students who had not yet submitted their essays and so I was expecting to find that that number of essays had been slipped under my door. Unfortunately there was only one and even now – two weeks after the deadline there are still 3 students who have not yet submitted an essay. These same students have also missed their 1:1 tutorials. So, if one can’t get them to so some work or even come and talk about what their difficulties are, what is one supposed to do?

Both lessons this week were spent giving feedback on the essays. Students have now received feedback in 4 different ways – comments have been written on their essays in the form of an error correction code indicating grammatical/stylistic/content problems. They also have a rubric indicating how successfully they have fulfilled basic requirement such as writing a thesis, organizing their essay in a logical way that is clear to their reader etc. This rubric also contains detailed comments on specific points related to their own essay – the kinds of comments that wouldn’t fit in the margins of their essay. As mentioned above, both lessons (ie. 150 minutes) were spent giving feedback based on common problems that most students experienced in the writing of their essays. Finally, each student has received personalized feedback in their tutorials. Based on all this feedback, they have been warned that I am expecting to see quite dramatic improvements in draft 2.

My overall impression of essays was that they were pretty similar to what I receive each semester. In other words, this year’s students are not dramatically different from any others. Again there were quite a few students who appear to have learned nothing on the course. They have continued doing things that they have done in the past. In other words, in high school they may have written lots of essays on literature, giving their personal response to what they have read. Often this response involved copious amounts of quotation. They completely ignored any instructions they had been given but just continued writing in the way they have always written – thereby failing to demonstrate that they have learned something new. They just don’t seem to get the point that there are different types of writing for different purposes. They are now doing a different type of writing with a different purpose but no matter how many times you tell them this, they revert back to what they’ve been doing for years because that’s more comfortable and most of them probably received good grades for what they wrote in the past. It’s a similar problem with students who have spent the last year of their life practicing for the writing assignment for the TOEFL exam. However, as I keep reminding them, a lot of what they wrote would fall far short of the requirements for TOEFL. Some students are still presenting essays without a thesis of with a single body paragraph. This would indicate retrogression rather than progression. I am sometimes described as being “picky” and having standards that are far too high. Surely a thesis or at least three paragraphs in a three page essay isn’t asking for too much!