GC: Metacognitive Marathon

Against all expectations, I’d like to lead with the positive: Some of the best writing of the year happened in these metacognitive essays.  Here are a few of them:

• Metacognitive Exemplar: 98 (1)
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 98 (2)
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 96 (1)
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 96 (2)
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 92 (1)

To help you reflect with these more efficiently, here are their respective DAMAGES scores (ignoring presentation for a moment):

• Metacognitive Exemplar: 98 (1)—8/8/8/7/7/8/8
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 98 (2)—9/8/8/8/7/6/8
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 96 (1)—9/8/8/6/8/6/7
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 96 (2)—9/7/8/7/8/7/7
• Metacognitive Exemplar: 92 (1)—8/7/7/8/6/5/6

Depending on your own scores, you will want to load these and consider them as part of your required, compendium-based reflection.  They demonstrate the flexibility and creativity possible in responding to this kind of prompt, and each one blends exhaustive data with engaging style and insight; they are exemplary, and these writers should be proud of their work.  I have left them anonymous only to help their authors avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous competition.

Whether you worked hard or procrastinated, when you began this assignment, you were given a series of posts to help prompt you:

1. General Commentary: Practice Exam
2. A Note on Metacognition
3. The Stuff of Growth

Within that first post are all the documents that were distributed in class, and you were asked over many periods to parse that feedback and data and to reflect on the meaning of every bit of it.  It’s the second post there that should briefly interest us, however.  A number of you, perhaps six or seven, wrote in your metacognitive essays that you were unclear about what metacognition is.  A few even complained that the term had never been defined, and that you had been thrown, more or less, to the wolves.  Even in the better responses, there are shadows that imply a lack of certainty or self-efficacy.

This is emblematic of a more general failure to read the commentary provided to you in class and in posts like this one.  It speaks to an inability or unwillingness to consider feedback carefully, a failure to maintain handouts and notes, perhaps a choice not to take notes in the first place. You have studied metacognition since September, and the word is not new.  You have reflected and revised and revisited your work from the beginning, and been asked all year to consider your responsibilities as a student, especially the need, at your ostensible level of academic potential, to use the resources provided to you.

What these metacognitive essays tell me is that you—enough of you, at least, or the collective you, or just that ineluctable group of you— consider those resources poorly, if you read them at all.  You must correct this habit.  This is not just about the looming AP exam; this is a matter of inculcating better habits, ones that might distinguish you and help you in college and beyond.

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GC: Reynolds QORAS

You were given a set of fifteen questions on Ryan Reynold’s “Competitive Eating,” and then you were asked on 3/18 to answer #14, which directs you to “[i]dentify the ironic diction in the first two lines of ¶6” and to “[e]xplain the irony.”  Here is the paragraph with the first two lines (as formatted for you) bolded:

While it may be impossible to understand the mental temerity and physical excellence it takes to master these dazzling sports, we can expect great things in the future from exciting athletes like Don Lerman and Mustafat Osmana. And although oceans and even the most basic human rights may separate these two great peoples, we are ALL bound together by the vibrant spirit of competition and grotesque displays of boundless, unapologetic shitheadery.

First, the diction that is ironic: “mental temerity,” “physical excellence,” “dazzling sports,” “great things,” “exciting athletes.”  Second, the obvious thread: Each ironic phrase is two words, and each one uses an adjective and noun.  You are focused on ironic adjectives and ironic nouns.  You must parse them, looking at the specific meaning of each, and then you must connect that meaning to Reynolds’ overall purpose.

And a quick note on irony: It is about the space in between expectation and reality, the incongruity that comes from the way a reader or listener decodes the articulation of an idea; without a sense of the author’s true purpose, irony doesn’t work.  The language becomes incoherent or misleading.  Ryan Reynolds’ true purpose and perspective is conveyed in the break in his satire, which happens twice, in ¶4 and ¶6; while you understood, for the most part, the argument here, the key wrinkle in that argument is our nation’s attitude toward its gluttony and excess—the “unapologetic” in the last phrase of the essay.

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GC: Practice AP Exam

Because of the breadth and depth of the feedback given to you in class, this post will serve two other purposes:

1. to archive the general commentary given in class on 3/1 and 3/2, and
2. to offer some solace with regard to your grades.

If you need copies of the free response exemplars, or if you would like to meet about the metacognitive narrative, please see me.  Here are the score reports and explanations:

• Itemized score report by student number (P7)
• Itemized score report by student number (P8)
• General feedback: score explanations and reflection overview
• General feedback: adapted doppelganger notes

You can find your student number on any report card or progress report; I can also provide it to you, if need be.

Your grades have been finagled as much as possible at this point in the quarter: I’ve entered your exam scores, but halved their weight; I’ve given you 25 points for each day of independent work you’ve pulled off; and I will be constructing a mechanism for enrichment writing through the school newspaper that will give you some control over your final average.  We also have plenty of reading and writing left, including that massive metacognitive narrative, which is detailed in the feedback reports above.

As always, I encourage you to conference with me when the opportunity arises.

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GC: Uncanny Valley Synthesis

As promised, your papers will be returned to you on Tuesday with only a score.  Do not ask why there is no commentary. You have been instructed to use the guides and rubrics available to you in lieu of commentary, and that first link takes you to the full reasoning behind the decision; avail yourself of the resources you have and your developing ability to make connections between them.  You will also receive this crib sheet for reflection and revision and this modified response rubric when you return to school this week.  For these synthesis essays, here is how you should proceed:

1. Read the prompt again.  Note that you had two central tasks: to ask an essential question (the one you generated); and to utilize three or more of the sources given to you (the ones from the Uncanny Valley packet) to develop a response that question.  Many of you failed to use the sources well (or at all).
2. Read your response again.  Jot down your observations in the margins or on a separate sheet.
3. Find your score on the DAMAGES+ rubrics to determine your relative effectiveness and grade.
4. Apply  each rubric (e.g., the modified free response, DAMAGES+) to your response.  (Here is another link to the DAMAGES guide and attachments.)
5. Apply the general commentary in this post to your essential question and thesis.
6. Locate any relevant writing guides and assignments from earlier in the year.  Review especially the approach-centric work and our focuses on arrangement.
7. Be sure to review any and all grammatical rules for which you are responsible, especially the use of semicolons and commas.
8. Read the provided peer examples in this post.  Jot down your observations and compare them to your own work.
9. Reflect in your compendium on your process and performance.
10. Decide if you will revise the essay or not.
11. If you revise, submit the reflection and revision to Turnitin and in class by 1/25.

If you choose to revise the essay, you will be required to adapt and type the reflection from your compendium, adding an explication of what you have altered and/or added and what you anticipate those alterations/additions will do to improve the effectiveness of your paper.  This reflection is the key to the revision, and you may not submit a revision without it.  You may, of course, schedule a writing conference to workshop this essay.

Note that the focus in this general commentary post is the genesis of your paper: the essential question and its answer, written as a thesis statement.  This is to help you avoid the pitfall of most revisions of papers of this magnitude, which is to edit without adjusting content.  Start at the beginning, with what you chose to ask and how you thought to answer it; then let those reflections guide an inside-out revision (if you choose to revise, of course).  Your thesis should dictate your structure, style, and meaning.  Everything should fall under the aegis of that essential question, including your effective use of three or more of the provided sources.

The current due date for all revisions is January 25, 2011—the day you take the final portion of your midterm.  You  may not submit revisions after the 25th.

Onto the general commentary.  The essential questions are accompanied by thesis statements when those thesis statements are particularly effective.

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GC: “Virginia” QORAS

I'll just leave this here.

We tackled these questions on rhetoric and style differently, refining two of your collaborative responses during Thursday’s class.  You were asked to transcribe and extend the conversation, centered as it was around my feedback, in a pair of responses, which I took up and scored holistically out of 50 points.  We focused on QORAS #4 and QORAS #7; the former asks you to identify and analyze Church’s redefinition of “real,” and the latter asks you to evaluate the argument as a whole.  (Here is another link to the text, if you’d like to revisit it before reading this post.)

Overall, speed was the issue.  7-10 minutes is more than enough time to write effectively here, especially after two days of collaboration with your peers, but many of you didn’t focus on the written assignment.  It wasn’t a question of complete sentences, either; you just didn’t keep up with the conversation, nor did you add in the necessary analysis beyond the conversation.  General commentary on your responses is below.

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GC: 2010 Remnants

Make sure that you read this post first.  Once you’ve finished, you can read through this set of general commentary and feedback.  There are five or six assignments to discuss, and they are presented below in chronological order.

First, your rewrites of the timed general argument essay on Native American mascots.  You’ll receive these papers in class; they have, in all but one or two cases, nothing but a score on them.  Your job is outlined in the aforementioned post.  Here to help you is a series of questions to consider in completing the required reflection:

1. Did you use three sources?
2. How organic and necessary is each source, i.e., does each source make sense and seem essential in context?
3. Do you define and explore all key phrases raised by your analysis or insight?
4. Do you have a clear thesis, explicit or implicit?
5. Do you develop your insight into each source, offering more than cursory analysis?
6. Do you make grammatical or typographical errors, including misspellings and dropped words?
7. How did you paragraph your response?  Do you use varied and effective transitions within and between paragraphs?

Next, the revision work you completed using peer paragraphs and my commentary.  As part of letting go of your hands and forcing you to embrace the formative process, these paragraphs were not graded.  Instead, they were checked in, with five points for each paragraph.  (Remarkably, some of you lost a paragraph here or there.)  If you put a lot of effort into these revisions, be glad; it will pay off as soon as you write your next rhetorical analysis essay, or when you are asked to complete questions on rhetoric and style.  If you did not take the assignment seriously, don’t celebrate your free 35 points for long; you are likely part of the group that is building a deficit in understanding and skill, and that will lead to your inevitable and ineluctable failure.

Oh, and one of you didn’t put your name on your work; since there are at least eight of you missing the assignment entirely, you might want to check on that.

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GC+: Approaching Rhetorical Analysis

In this post: notes on the three-paragraph rhetorical analysis essays you wrote, a gradebook gift, and a peer-driven revision writing assignment.  THERE IS A SIGNIFICANT WRITING ASSIGNMENT AT THE END OF THIS POST. (If I could make that sentence blink in bright neon letters, I would.)

Before anything else, a note worth writing down somewhere so that you won’t forget: Beginning Wednesday, you may have a quiz at any moment on the feedback I have been asking you to internalize since the beginning of Q1.  You are responsible for all posts of general commentary, any writing guides distributed online or in class, all commentary reviewed in class, any and all foundational knowledge (e.g., the grammar requirements you were directed to learn over the summer and through that Q1 grammar test), any lecture notes, and so on.  These pieces must be part of your reflection and revision process through the end of the year, but I am unconvinced that you have taken that advice/mandate to heart.  Now these pieces will be the fodder for short quizzes—regurgitation, for the most part, but also some application and synthesis of ideas.  If you have been following directions and studying these elements all year, you can breathe easily; you are already prepared for what I will ask you to do.  If you haven’t yet embraced the process, however…

(As a quick example, that last sentence—the one that trails off—is an example of a rhetorical device defined for you in this general writing guide.  In one of the footnotes on the first page, you get this: “When a sentence is broken off and left unfinished, usually due to some powerful emotion, so that a dash or ellipsis requires the target audience to finish the thought themselves, that is a rhetorical device called aposiopesis.”)

Now to your most recent scored writing assignment, which was a focused rhetorical analysis of three paragraphs, completed in and out of class.  You received two grades, both available through the Student Portal: a balancing score of 50/50, affected only by lateness or incompletion; and a content score of x/50, where x is a measure of the effectiveness of your approach to the essay.  The balancing score curves your average, so that even a failing content score was saved by compliance with deadlines.  Consider the scoring scale we use:

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GC: Meta Stasis

Your adversarial grades are now available through the Student Portal.  There are two score categories: your raw point total, which is scaled against the highest total in the class, and your grade itself, which is out of 100 points.  Here’s how it worked:

From 11/3 to 11/9, you worked collaboratively in class to explore a central text (Schneller’s “Sexism”) and its surrounding concepts, including a day’s digression into Standard Written English.  Through 11/10, you were asked to submit augmentation work on the previous day’s discussion.  We began with an overview of how both pieces—the in-class responses and at-home elaboration—yield a final score.  (You can look at a printed copy of that overview by clicking here, or by visiting the Documents page at the top of this site.)  Over the weekend, I tabulated your scores, converted them, and scaled them against each other.

What that last idea means is that I took the highest point total in the class—in 7th period, 54; in 8th, 81—and set that as an A+, or 100.  The next logical grouping of adversarial point totals corresponds to an A, or 96.  In 7th period,  earning 51, 48, or 45 points over our five day adversarial would yield an A overall; in 8th, the 81 was an outlier, so the remaining scores were scaled down from a 39-42-45 cluster that  yields an A.  Earning zero adversarial points would still have garnered you a C+, or 78.

A few more notes on that gradebook, since you have it open:

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GC: Grammar of Various Kinds

Note: “GC” will be used in post titles to indicate general commentary.  You can also find any general commentary through the Feedback category or the post tag “general commentary.”  This generalized feedback applies to the majority of the class, or it addresses concerns that affect everyone; you must carefully read what is prescribed/proscribed and apply it to your work.  You will be given time and computers in class to read this first entry, but in the future, you will need to find time among your busy schedules outside of school. 

Also: You may need to use the student portal to view your grades from time to time, especially if the assignment is better left unmarked.  (This is the case with the self-evaluations discussed below.)  You will need your student ID number and your six-digit birthdate (your username and password, respectively) to log in.

After the jump, feedback on your grammar test and the metacognitive wheel graphs you completed.

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