Week 6 Round Up

I decided to act on things I learned from the students from the conferences and slow us down quite a bit. I cleared the entire week to focus on writing workshops and adjusted due dates to give the students more time to work on each paper.

Monday:
Several students talked about wanting to write better intros and conclusions in their conferences. So, today was intro and conclusion day.

QW (15 m): What do you know about introductions and conclusions? What questions do you have about them?

We discussed what they wrote and I asked them to brainstorm the uses for and kinds of intros and conclusions. We generated quite a list that I put on the board. Next, we looked at a bunch of intro paragraphs from Ways of Reading (I had us look at some of the more traditional academic essays in it which we haven't read). We then discussed what each intro was doing. We noticed most of them either told a story or set up a context/background and that most did not have a thesis.

Next, we looked at Anzaldua's conclusion and talked about how it functioned.

I gave the students the following worksheet and assigned them to read 3 essays by their classmates that I had posted on BB and to do the worksheet. Finally, my intern did a lesson on plagiarism.

Worksheet:
Please print off and carefully read the three essays by your colleagues in response to Project I.2 (these are on BB under Course Materials). Please answer the following questions about each essay.

1. What is the project? What is at stake?
2. How would you characterize the introduction? What work is it doing? Would you make any recommendations for revising it?

3. How would you characterize the conclusion? What work is it doing? Would you make any recommendations for revising it?

4. Look at the use of quotations. Do they seem well-integrated into the essay? What recommendations would you make regarding the use of quotations in revision?



WEDNESDAY

I taught students how to do a reverse outline out of a complete draft. As a class we did this together on one of the student essays we had read for hw. I put our outline on the board and we talked about revision possibilities. Next, students got in groups of 2-3 and worked with one of the 2 remaining essays to create and outline. The groups reported and I put what they said on the board. This became a great conversation about the strengths of the writers' projects, etc. Ended by talking about using the things we practiced this week in the revisions they have due on the 10th.