Essays, Essays

I spent the day scoring essays. These were a mixed bag in all ways. The students picked something from a list for winter break reading and then picked the prompt from another list of ten ideas. The winter reading includes more contemporary works than the standard class list, though few are less than forty years old. Still they can pick from  works as varied as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Color Purple or indulge their inner French existentialist by reading The Stranger. I suppose the very fact that they get to pick rather than have an assigned book is as free as free reading gets in a structured class such as AP English literature. The prompts were taken from the forty plus years of prompts that are online and included ideas such as how does the author use literary techniques to advocate societal change and how does a parent-child conflict drive meaning in a work.

Out of 75 or so essays perhaps a dozen got passing scores. While I admit to having tough standards for scoring, reading plot summary after plot summary put a dent in my good mood. There are only three months left before the exam and I doubt many of these students will pass let alone achieve that desired "5" score. Time was there were grade and experience standards that had to be met before students were allowed to enroll in the class but nowadays anyone who wants to can sign up. I am fine with encouraging students who may never have thought about literature before but to pretend that this is college level reading or writing does a disservice to real college level reading and writing.

As for quilting, I have 70 small Winding Ways squares sewn and probably will start sewing those squares together to check the size of the projected 10 x 10 (or 10 x 7 or whatever).