My students this semester have so far seemed bright and engaged--quite easy to teach and get along with. And, after my agonizing first assignment last semester, I deliberately kept my instructions short and simple, not even giving length or format requirements. Still, the average student has failed to follow the paper assignment directions on 3 separate counts.

And does it work? I've been griping to colleagues over the last several months about my failures to inspire good class discussions, and some have simply said, "up the participation percent." Folks, does this work for you? If so, what was the magic number?

Ever since Peg Syverson first introduced me to the Learning Record, I have anxiously awaited the semester when I'd get to use it to evaluate my students. I probably have the same criticisms of traditional grading systems that most of you do--even those who continue using them despite their limitations--and hoped the LRO would be a productive way out. Actually, I think I saw it as a potentially perfect grading system.... And then the disillusionment set in...:

My class this semester has been sequestered by a First-Year Interest Group, or FIG, a group of students with similar interests or majors who take several classes together. According to the FIG office, the purpose of these groups is:

* to help students connect with each other, advisors, faculty and ultimately, to help them feel connected to the institution
* to help students make the transition from being a high school learner to a university learner

I prefer to grade essays in a random order, so that people with last names near the end of the alphabet don't necessarily get graded last. I also like my list to be truly random, and I hate doing it with dice. So I wrote a neat little list randomizer using random numbers generated by random.org. The randomness comes from a computer in Dublin which records static from a radio tuned to an unused frequency and extrapolates an unpredictable stream of binary from that.

The upshot is I've made a web page where you can type in a list of names (or anything really) and have it rearranged into a random order. Here it is. I hope you find it useful. If anyone is interested, I can provide source code.

This list of ways to be good at giving bad news translates well to the task of giving bad grades.

One thing I always do in my undergraduate writing classes is to encourage them to argue their way to a better grade -- and lay down the ground rules for what constitutes a good argument. It gives students an option that doesn't involve telling me how hard they worked or assuming that I am just punitive. And occasionally these arguments are convincing and I'll budge on the grade.

A recent article on Kairos caught my attention: http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.2/binder2.html?coverweb/sorapure/index.html

In my own experience, multimedia assignments are notoriously difficult to grade. It isn't so much that I can't easily see the time and energy put into these projects; rather, it is hard to provide a transparent grading model to students. In other words, classes taught in computer classrooms (and esp here at the CWRL) should find ways to utilize all the available technology we have; yet, at the same time, our grading models are constrained to written texts. Should we give grades to visual or film texts that are unique to the media? Or, should we find ways to translate the grading of written texts into the visual? Does visual text count as 'writing' in an institutional sense (SWC) or not?

On another blog, I recently saw the following:

"Quote"
...is a verb.

"Quotation" is a noun.

The author's point was that students need to be reminded of this. My question: do they?

Now of course, the dictionary and a study of etymology would tell us this is true, but as we all know, this is only "true" because some (uptight?) people once began to document the way people actually talk. Eventually, some (seriously uptight!!) people began to think of this documentation as rules. So if people now say--and they do quite often--that they're trying to find a quote or "that's a beautiful quote," they aren't wrong (because the "standard" is descriptive, not prescriptive) even if they "violate the rules."

So I finally hit the paper wall this week and I think I need help. I'm really interested in generating feedback / discussion on EFFECTIVE paper commenting with first drafts.

For some reason, this was a particularly stressful grading period for me - no papers under 5-6 pages and each one generated significant comments on my part. Usually, I comment in the margins, each time trying to use complete sentences to avoid line editing. Then, at the end of the paper, like we all know we should do, I write a significant end note. Now, this week, I felt like my end note simply repeated everything I had said in the margins. I found myself really compelled to write ending comments that said something like "Joe, see page 2 comments on structure, closely examine issues of audience mentioned on page 3 and 4, and continue paying close attention to issues of passive voice, subject verb agreement, and inappropriate tone." Now something told me that writing comments like this were not "right" so I ended up spending about 45 minutes per draft.