February 23, 2007

Homework:
Practice for reading aloud

Today:
We reviewed the answers to the vocab book work. I did not check any vocab this week for a homework grade. I will get more homework grades this coming week.

We took the quiz on units 7-9. I will have that graded early next week. Interims are due by Wednesday.

We continued our readings. Next week, I will try to get all the readings done. It is fun to listen to the different stories. There are some really good readers in my classes. They make their stories interesting to listen to by adding inflection to their words and sentences.

Troubling:
I did find out something about the essays on "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street." I made a submission using three writing prompts, just some random document that I found on my computer. The submission was not even and essay. It was just one page of questions and titles, things you would find on the top of my writing assignment web pages. When I submitted the paper for a score to GoMyAccess, I got a 5 out of 6. I was shocked. How frustrating is it to know that any old stuff scored a 5. We had spent a lot of time trying to improve our scores.

Now, maybe it was my writing style, vocabulary, and good grammar that earned the high score. However, shouldn't the words on the page be somewhat related to the story in order to get a good score? Shouldn't there be an intro and a conclusion that resemble each other as they do in an essay? Shouldn't the writer, the name of the piece, characters in the story, or ideas from the story be present somewhere in the piece in order to get a 5? You would think.

At this point, I am not sure what I will do with the scores from these essays. I doubt their validity, and I do NOT have time to read them. We did have good discussions about the essay and how to improve them, but I feel like the students we robbed of their hard work. Maybe the score is a result of the prompt being a pilot essay, unlike the detailed scores students can receive on a standard prompt from GoMyAccess. I will be letting someone important know about this anomaly.