Sunday, April 15, 2007

Attention: Suppression!

Lauren: I thought this was great. It reminded me of when I was in high school and my crazy nutso World History teacher would give us sets of 50-70 identifications to do each night for homework. She wanted us to go through our antiquated history book and define whatever names or terms she had as identifications. I would do them for an hour and then start making stuff up. I remember I described Lloyd George (the Prime Minister of England right after WWI) as being the androgynous lead singer of the 1980's band, Culture Club. I did this with a ton of the identifications, as well as writing hidden messages such as "Tabatsko, I'm going to kill all of your ferns before the semester is out." I received an A on all of my identifications.
Anyway, yeah. this thing that Lauren did reminded me of how some teachers just look at format and the very basic clues as to what makes a good paper (1 inch margin, title, cited sources, topic sentences for each paragraph, etc.). I thought the whole thing really spoke to a teacher's awareness of student writing and maybe their attention focus on individual papers.
I did have a problem with the poorly graded paper. One of the teacher's comments was "Yuck" about a transition. Absolutely, the particular transition the student makes is not a great one, but I would be destroyed if a teacher wrote "Yuck" on my paper. Maybe I'm touchy on this because I have notably terrible transitions. I could just be overly-sensitive in this arena.

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