Sections 2 & 3: The narrative grades are entered.

Homework:
Sections 2 & 3 have a quiz on Unit 3 vocabulary tomorrow.
Section 1 should finish the unit.  They have their quiz on Thursday.

Today:
All classes reviewed and entered vocabulary homework.  I will enter those grades soon.
All classes were introduced to the next writing piece.  I am thinking it will take about three weeks.
I gave students time to work on reading for the next piece. 


Note on the scoring of the narratives:
As I said when we started this year, I will be using the online grading program from Holt.  To get the grades for the narratives, I first took the data from the program.  It gave an overall score of 6-1.  Then it gave a holistic score of 4-1.  Then it broke the score down into five categories, giving each a score between 4-1.  With some presto chango I converted all the numbers into percentages and ended up with something like this: (They do not line up.)

Mine  CatAvg  AVG      Score      Diff.    Score       Holis     Dev   Focus   Sent   Words  Gram
96        82          91          100         18          6           4             4        2          2           2         1

This was strange!  The machine gave the piece a score of 6/6, yet the categories gave the piece a score of 82.  I don't know how all that works out, but I did notice that, for the most part, the essays could be ranked from best to least best.  I started from the top of the pile down. 

As I finished each, I thought of the rubric we looked at for the 6-1.  You can see that in a previous post.  I looked at the introductions and the conclusions.  I looked for a narrator telling about an account in his or her life.  I looked for good organization and flow, as well as for sensory details. 

I do not have time to make comments.  I do appologize.  Too much is being asked of me this year.  But I will say one thing I will not do next year.  I will NOT allow students to use the prompt that has them imagine they are someone.  Most of those narratives ended up sounding like science fiction stories, not narratives!  I will be pointing this out to the students soon.