Throwing in the Towel....

I'm throwing in the towel to this crazy weather and hoping for Sledfest #3 tomorrow with rounds of hot chocolate afterwards. IF the weather comes our way, and IF we don't have school at Willow Springs High School, I think it will be Snow Day 12...which is really quite difficult to plan around. But, what can you do? I love snow days, no matter how many I get, and will probably be aching in the spring for a day off, but at least after school in the spring there's plenty of daylight to enjoy the late afternoon. :) So bring on the snow!

On to the point of the post:

My students have their second drafts of their papers finished and you will be getting some to assess. Each student wrote a cover letter and I wrote these three questions on the board for them to address:

1. What changes have you made from your first draft(s) to your official 2nd draft?
2. What is the strength of your paper?
3. What area still needs developed, or what would you like a reader to read your paper for? And what would you like your reader to understand and know about your topic after reading?

Please read the cover letter and paper assigned to you. This assessment, the second time around, should go a little quicker than the last. Although the student possibly asked you for help in one area, please assess all seven areas on the scoring guide, circling the bulleted items within each category. When finished, please score the paper 1-6...your overall assessment/average based from the circled items on the scoring guide. On the back of the scoring guide, please make comments about the paper, (and it's here you can write the overall score if you'd like,) and offer the appropriate feedback based on the students questions or comments from their cover letter.

Hopefully you still have the Bless, Address, and Press cards. Bless means a student really doesn't want to hear the "bad things" about his or her paper...only comment on the good. Address means the student has asked you specific questions and wants you to comment on those only. Press, comment as you wish, helping the student press out the wrinkles to move them toward their third and final published draft. Many students at this stage probably want you to press their paper.

If you have questions, please feel free to e-mail me or comment on this post. I hope you enjoy the papers this time around. Some have worked hard, and some haven't. :) With the snow days, I haven't had much time to work on a lot of mini-lessons that I wanted. Last week students worked on titles, and that's always a fun mini-lesson. We work on titles several times throughout the year, but the senior project paper is such a significant part of their senior year, most students really want a good title. First we read short excerpts and play a guessing game about titles from the book Why not Catch 21, by Dexter. Which I think Keri highlighted in a recent post (that I have not read yet.) Next, we read a short excerpt in Ideas and Details: A College Guide to Writing textbook by Bauman (which is personally one of my favorite writing texts for high school students (parts of it, at least...I use many different texts.) After this, I put a list of bland topics on the projector and we, as a class, come up with titles for each...so a topic about Poisonous Gases could end up being something like "Death Stalks Your Home" and "Whose Gas Is It Anyway?" Once we play around with titles, we write three of our own for our paper, and then hand it over to a peer, who has to evaluate the titles, choose the one they think shows the most promise, and explain why they like it. So...all that to say this: you might find some quirky titles. :) Enjoy.

Also, I did not get a chance to collect first drafts, but possibly later in the semester, after 3rd drafts come in, you will have an opportunity to place the students drafts together and see all the changes made.

I would love to hear your general thoughts and comments about the student work.