1.07 - Assignment Review and Revision

At the beginning of class today, everyone wrote in their writer's journal what they had chosen to draw for a badge (representing something they have achieved so far this year) and an image representing a goal they have set for themselves to improve their performance in the class.

Those who did not finish these drawings yesterday had the opportunity to do so. People who finished this response early were able to identify ways in which they could begin to measure their progress towards their identified goal.

In light of yesterday's discussion in which people said they wished we had more class discussions as part of our work, we looked at what makes a good discussion question (I presented students with two questions) and then had an opportunity to write discussion questions for Anthem. We determined that good discussion questions achieve the following:

1 - Are focused on topics people will be interested in discussing.
2 - Don't have a simple right or wrong answer.
3 - Encourage people to think more about what we have been covering in class.

We focused our discussion through the following slide:

In discussing the question about the Pink Floyd quote above, we referenced a poster I have hanging in the room in which this quote is written as graffiti on the Berlin Wall. I explained how the Berlin Wall connects with Soviet Russia which we have already talked about extensively with Animal Farm and Anthem since the bad governments in these books were modeled on the Soviet government.

We will use the questions people wrote tomorrow in class.

Next, we reviewed class performance on the Poetry and Language and Poetry Out Loud recitations.

As we reviewed these assignments I returned each assignment to students. I discussed student performance on the Poetry and Language sheet. We looked at the recitation grades and students used the data from grades and their own experiences with the work to identify areas of strength and areas for change. These graphs are available below.

 

(click image to enlarge)

 (click image to enlarge) 

Everyone had the remaining time in the period to work on revisions (taking into account the information of what worked well and what generally needed to be improved with these assignments).

Homework: 

If you have not done so already, finish the reading assignments for chapters 3-7 and chapters 8-12 in Anthem.

Continue to revise and complete assignments as necessary.