The blog went dark over the last month, and I plan on rebuilding its momentum. For over a year I had at least an entry a week, but I have not posted since late October. It is not that I haven’t been writing, but somehow I slipped out of the routine of posting. I wrote […]
An Essay Grading Criteria for High School
[Around 1998, as part of an effort to make the evaluation of Senior Demonstration essays more consistent at Asheville School, I wrote a grading criteria that over the years evolved into the document that follows. When we took the step of creating a Humanities Department out of the faculties of both the History and English […]
Another Essay Prompt Headed to Retirement (Part 2)
[This post and the one preceding it contain high school essay prompts ready to be retired for awhile from my teaching. While they were a good fit for my seniors, they seem less appropriate for my ninth graders.] Pathos is an element in art or literature that evokes feelings of compassion in the viewer or reader. Great […]
Another Essay Prompt Headed to Retirement
[This post and the one to follow contain high school essay prompts ready to be retired for awhile from my teaching. While they were a good fit for my seniors, they seem less appropriate for my ninth graders. The first is a poetry prompt from a final exam.] Poetry Essay. Respond […]
Police Beat « Bionic Teaching
Police Beat « Bionic Teaching. An intriguing writing assignment…
Making Academic Writing Meaningful: Preparing an Exam Prompt
Today I am thinking about how to create a meaningful writing challenge for my students within the borders of an essentially artificial exercise–the semester exam. For one of the sections of the exam I plan on including a slightly unusual task for a fairly traditional goal–to ask students to demonstrate their understanding of A Raisin […]