Monday, November 8, 2010

Midterms

My kids had three pretty simple essays to write for their midterms. They had over two weeks to write these essays, which is plenty of time to go through the entire necessary writing process. Nearly all of them failed to do so. Let's just say that it was a pretty interesting fall break grading some of these essays. Now the kids are complaining about how much work they have this week since they are editing, rewriting, analyzing, etc. their essays. My one response is "well, maybe if you had spent more time on your essays, we wouldn't have to do all this catch-up work". They are not happy. But I was even unhappier as I was grading these. Danielle and Ricky can concur.


I compiled for the kids a list of at least one quote from each essay that had some clear issues. I have tried several times to post all of these for you to see but the formatting was all wonky (someone you may have gotten an email with this poor format- ignore). So I picked my favorites and put them in here for you. I promise that I did not make any of these up, nor did I add or take away anything from these. Please enjoy. And think of me sitting on a plane, reading these, and trying not to cry.

-For example, your hart is sprinting during the day- it's going 100%. In some people, though, their hart never gets a rest and their blood pressure never goes down. This is caws damage to their hart and kidney, do to the non-stop pressure.

-Some people may think that sleep is not very important and that it can be replaced by certain products that can keep us awake however some studies have been performed to show how sleep is important in our lives and what effects may happen when we don't get a good night's rest.

-For example, you might want to use something like this: Orange=World History, Green=Math, Red=Biology... etc. T His is just an example; you might have different colors in mind to use to help you remember.

-The challenges that Sampson would have to face in college were challenging to say the least.

- His parents are dentist and psychologist.

-You spend about one third of our lives sleeping.

- I really like the part about how many people may feel that they only need six hours of sleep but in reality they are just trying to be cool.

-All the political defeats women, African-Americans, homosexuals and all the others accomplished is amazing.

-First and foremost this method was created (or more likely re-written and fine tuned) by Dr. Bob Kizlik in 1997, funny name I know, and the site I found it on is adprima.com, I don't know if you have ever heard of Dr. Kizlik or the website but it seems to be legit to me.

-A person needs a minimum of at least eight hours. Yes, eight hours!

-This is not to say that some interruptions don't need to be dealt with immediately, some do and that's OK.

Also, an additional reward of grading midterms: Megan and Youval both helped me investigate a student who had plagiarized his paper. And not just failed to cite sources but blatant copy and paste from a website. So that's fun.

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