Sunday, November 19, 2006
Glad Someone's Paying Attention...
My 12th-grade English class is working on presentations for their research papers. We did our first batch last week and one of the students discussed his in-depth findings on Malcolm X and why he is a heroic figure.
On my scoresheet, the student got a 22/25, losing points on his visual, which was a sloppily thrown together PowerPoint slideshow. The rubric I gave them (the same one given all the 12th-graders for this assignment) only allowed criticism of the visual, their vocal volume, enthusiasm, eye contact and the length of the speech. So imagine my discontentment with my poorly planned grading scheme when the student proceeded to use the phrase "Know what I'm sayin'?" about 150 times (or so it seemed) during his presentation. Nowhere to go to subtract points, and, outside of his adventurous verbal forays, his "jank" was pretty squared away.
If students weren't involved in a presentation, they were to put together grading sheets on the students who WERE. So, I also have a stack of grading sheets with students' grades of students' presentations. One observant lad, who gave the Malcolm X the full 25 points, noted that he also used "Know what I'm sayin'?" 25 times in a 5-minute presentation. The moral: If you're going to do something, "go hard."
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I hate when you're bound by your own rubric. I just finished grading essays and I can't tell you how many times I put an A or B on the top of a paper that actually sucked. What the hell?