(Kept private until 2008.)
I was grading my first essays for this semester this week. That just about killed my week. There is not a lot that is more of a bummer than a college essay with 72 marks against grammar on the first page. That was the first essay. The second essay wasn’t any better. I did finally get some decent papers, towards the end of the bunch. (I saved the ones from students I knew wrote well till later.)
I know some of my students are my age and older. But it is the younger students who seem unable to use their computers to do grammar and spell checking. I have one student who thinks that every time he pauses he needs a semi-colon. That’s going to be a tough habit to break.
The papers were a short story analysis. They had to read three Flannery O’Connor short stories and write on one or all three. They could pick which they wrote on. But they had to have quotes from the story in their paper. They did okay on the quoting part.
I actually had my last semester college kids write a process essay. They did fairly well on that one. Some of the other types were much harder.