Well, all my good intentions to use this as a vehicle for keeping track of one semester's actions in teaching English 1A (freshman composition) went bloo-ey! Between the sale of the house, the accreditation at Mountain Empire, moving, and grading tons of essays and quizzes, etc., I just didn't keep up with this.
My classes are down to 25 and 24 now, but there are two of the 25 who haven't shown up in weeks. So in reality, the classes are ending up with 23 and 24 -- better than past semesters, barely! But "better" is better than worse!!
I'm generally pleased with nearly all students' abilities to generate and develop a topic now -- a vast improvement over their abilities in this realm in February! There are still a few who have incredible problems in plain, old, ordinary standard English -- verb uses, plurals not possessives, word choice (especially prepositions) -- but overall, nearly all have come a long way. I can't claim full credit since I know that I can teach until I'm blue, but if a student doesn't work on learning what is taught, nothing happens for that student. This has been a more successful semester overall, I think.
We'll see how the final papers come out!
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