Evaluations

I had my Comp 9 class write short evaluations in which they offered me advice as well as future Comp 9 students some advice.

One thing that I love about these is seeing the students write how much they loved the class and how much I taught them. Of course, their spelling is atrocious and there sentences are all run-ons. So much for really teaching them anything!

Some examples of what they liked about class:

“Looking back on the past quarter I had lots of fun.” LOTS of fun. Oh, man.

“I’ve learned more in this class than I have in any other class all year except, heath, but only because there’s more material to cover.” HEATH? When did we offer a class in that? What are we in England?

One of my favorites –

“I have learned alot in this class, considering that when I started this class I had no idea what double space was……so that’s one thing i’ve learned. Also I have grasped the idea of showing not telling a little bit more,but still need to work on that. And I have had a fun time too, it was a good experience, and I have definitely become a better writer. It’s honestly going to suck having this class replaced with gym, unless the gym teacher plays Metallica, and makes fun of country! And now I have the toulmin method of persuasion to milk my parents for practically anything I want!
Knowing how much you love it when people use texting talk in their writing, idk if there is n.e. thing that I would change bout this class it was saweet! You made us ROFL it was great!”

Apparently Metallica is the key to successful writing. Maybe we should pump it out over the intercom system while students are taking the BST this April.

While typing that, I realized how we need to scrap Appleworks (which is the word processing system in our lab) in place of Word. I’m using Word now and I had to retype half of those errors because Word automatically corrected them. That wouldn’t help them on their BSTs, but it would make it look like I at least taught the kids something important.

Their advice for me was much more helpful.

Use the book more. Since I wasn’t that familiar with it, I didn’t use it as much as I wanted. It is great for the six traits, but it seems like it is almost doing the teaching for you. I wasn’t quite comfortable with that. Plus, I didn’t know the text as well as I should have.

Another good suggestion was to offer more examples of the types of essays. I tend to do a lot of this right away, but then I get away from it. Part of it is intentional – I don’t want the students to really follow anyone else’s format or style, but it merits some thought. I also don’t want them to just get stuck in using the same format or style over and over. I need to find a variety of different formats and styles for our essays.

They were split on time given writing. Some said we didn’t have a lot of work (and that’s true. We reduced the total from 9 to 4, though I got a fifth one in. However, we did a lot of prompts and drafts for each essay), yet they also said that we wrote too much. Ha. I don’t know what they expect from a composition class!

The advice for next year’s Comp 9 class was futile.