This week Sophie and Cheryl started in on their second essays, although Cheryl is a week behind Sophie.
They both had a lot of say in selecting the topics for their second essay; during our meeting we looked through their reading list and talked through things they were interested in doing and what seemed feasible, and then created topics from their. Sophie turned in an outline this week with her thesis statement and planned arguments. Her thesis needed a lot of work — she said she wasn’t sure how to write it, and just highlighted the sentence that happened to be at the end of her intro paragraph — so we spent some time reviewing what she wanted to argue and how best to summarize it in one sentence. Although Sophie is usually happy to work on writing and rewriting, she seems to really dislike dealing with thesis statements, so I’m going to look into finding or creating some fun thesis-writing exercises.
During my meeting with Cheryl we worked on how she was planning on approaching her essay. I also had her write a brief letter on how she thought her writing improved while working on her first essay and what she thought some major strengths and weaknesses of her first essay were. I was surprised to see that she had difficulty identifying strengths in her essay, which I think indicates that I should be giving more positive feedback. I made sure to give her a thorough rundown on all the things I thought she’d done well throughout the draft writing process. We were also able to reschedule her missed meeting from last week, so we’ll have lots of time together in the upcoming week.