about annotations

I got an email from one of my sophomores asking about her annotations grade. She said that she did not think I had been fair in my assessment, that she had done better than the "√-" I had given her, and that she had heard that others had done half the assignment and gotten better scores. Maybe I had really not read these carefully enough? So I wrote this back, and I thought I'd share it, since some of you might also have similar concerns:

The grades were based on the annotations that you actually did, so if someone did fabulous annotations for three chapters I gave them a score based on the quality of those annotations while noting that they had only done those three chapters. They still--obviously--have to do the rest over break or the score will adjust downward to reflect the fact that it was only partly completed.

As to yours, I admit that I read them quickly--I read ALL of them more quickly than I had planned in order to get them back a day earlier than I had initially planned--but I do seem to recall that you needed more specificity and a lot more notation about Steinbeck's style (his use of varying structures, repeated phrases and words, etc.), the kinds of descriptions he gives to characters, symbolic elements, etc.

None of this is bad. It just means that I want you all to focus more, and I do tend to give lower scores on those first annotations (which of course can be changed completely anyway) so that you will see what I am looking for. Still I do acknowledge that I could be wrong about yours: you have it in front of you and I do not. And everything last Thursday was an enormous rush, as you might imagine when I thought I had two days to do something and found myself condensing it into one. (And thank goodness that I did so.) I apologize if I underscored yours. But don't worry too much: it isn't going into the gradebook until I see the "final" version.

If you are a junior, just substitute things about Joyce for things about Steinbeck in those paragraphs. And all of you look at the previous post for the vacation assignments as well as at last Friday's post for specifics on annotation.

Happy Holidays! Hope you're sufficiently bundled!

--kt