This past week I had conferences. Since Elisa had conferences last week, I was able to steal her grading strategy of grading the papers in the order that the students had their appointments. In Monday's batch, I had a nice range of writers. Wednesday's group will filled with a bunch of strong writers, which left me feeling confident and proud about my prompt. Yes, my prompt was a success and my students were running with it just as I had hoped. On Thursday night, however, the final batch of papers deflated my puffed out chest. All but two of the papers did not follow the prompt. As a result, the papers got less-than-stellar grades. The conferences yesterday were not as rough as I had anticipated them to be. I put on my "keepin' it real" attitude and the students seemed to respond well to that. I noticed that the conferences where the papers were average, I asked the students how THEY thought they did. We talked about the paper before I gave them their graded copy. When our talk was over, I would give the student back his or her paper and I would sit in silence while the student looked over my comments. All but one of my conferences were productive and positive. The one that wasn't involved a student who is a good writer, but she skirted around the prompt. She came into the conference very excited, most likely anticipating an A. Additionally, the student was peeved that I had docked her 1 point on all of her journal entries for not following MLA citation and heading format. Other than those slight snags, my conferences went well thanks to my grading rubric and dedicated students! Let's see how excited I feel when the final revisions are submitted on Wednesday.
My question to my readers: Would you dock a student 1 point (out of a 25 point journal) due to lack of proper MLA-style heading and/or citation?
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This is an interesting question. I don't get hung up on this stuff, but 1 point is pretty minimal damage.
ReplyDeleteI guess it is interesting to ask ourselves: Why do we think proper MLA style is important? What is the work we are doing by making this an expectation?
I told my students that I want to see that they know the rules, that way I can give them free reign to break those same rules. I was told this once and loved the idea.
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