Saturday, November 29, 2008

Great Expections, the eduWonk edition.

I ran across this assignment today:
Expectations: 7th Grade High Level Writing Assignment
Essay on Anne Frank
Your essay will consist of an opening paragraph which introduced the title, author and general background of the novel.
Your thesis will state specifically what Anne's overall personality is, and what general psychological and intellectual changes she exhibits over the course of the book
You might organize your essay by grouping psychological and intellectual changes OR you might choose 3 or 4 characteristics (like friendliness, patience, optimism, self doubt) and show how she changes in this area.

I'm no English teacher, but if this is for a 7th grade class, how much are we realistically expecting? I'll repost my comment ...

At first, I thought they were making fun of the grammatical errors in the first slide. Then I read the rest of the blog entry and realized they were praising this as the better of the two. Having thought about it, I'm not sure that I don't find the first to be one of those over-written and quite pretentious lesson plans that pretend to high expectations while grading everything easily and accepting anything.

I am always suspicious when obvious mistakes are made in a piece that is released to the public in this fashion - did no one check or notice?

High expectations need to be followed by high standards in grading. That is where I would focus in this situation. What was received and how was it measured?

Anyone can copy a good assignment from the internet and butcher the execution.

The second page is just silly, but maybe it was meant to be? I could see this on the first day of a new block class, second semester. At least it gets the subjunctive mood.

No comments:

Post a Comment