Chloe’s journal 4/8-4/12

On Monday, Qi and I discussed the final draft of her second paper.  She told me that she’d met with her Econ professor to discuss the logic of her argument and organization of the paper and he confirmed that it flowed logically.  I appreciated this extra effort on her part.  My comments were mostly sentence level issues this time around.  First, we went over her works cited page.  I noticed that her citations were incorrect/inconsistent so I had her correct them using the Hacker handbook.  She also had a few problems with passive construction.  We’ve talked about this in the past, but I wasn’t confident that she’d really understood why she was making corrections to the active voice.  She said that in China she learned that the passive voice was desirable because it’s more formal.  In this class we focused not only on the fact that the active voice is more engaging, but also that the passive voice obscures the subject.  Her paper was a good example to work with because she was discussing whether the government or federal reserve should be blamed for the housing bubble and subsequent crash, so when she wrote that “deregulation was launched,” she needed to be very clear about who enacted that deregulation.  We talked a bit more about transitions (she used “according to this statistic” to begin a sentence misleadingly).  She also introduced the name of an economist into one of her topic sentences so we created more context for this reference and linked it to the rest of the paper.  For next week, I asked Qi to begin research on the Eurozone crisis for her research paper.  She is gathering five sources and writing citations and 3-5 sentences summaries for each (she knows we have a meeting on Sunday, so I reserved the right to add more sources/details to the research portion of her assignment).  I encouraged her to stray from news articles and look at some raw data and studies and interpret them.  We’re working on a time to reschedule next week’s meeting because of marathon Monday.

On Tuesday, Ashley and I went over her first official draft of her second paper about Chapter 6 of Ann Petry’s The Street.  I would say she improved in organization and analysis, but not as much as I had hoped she would.  In some places, she made good inferences, but had actually not included the quote she was drawing from, probably an overcorrection of the first paper, in which she left quotes in the paper without explaining them.  There were no sentences of summary to delete which was an improvement.  In class, I went through my comments verbally from the beginning of the paper, so that I could explain some links between ideas she had throughout the paper and how she could bring them together.  We also looked at the quotes she chose in her argument and I asked some open-ended questions about the images of shadows, silence, newspapers/the radio, mirrors, etc. to prompt analysis.  I had her write concise sentences in class while her thoughts were fresh in her mind.  We also looked up some words in the dictionary and found things that (at least I thought) were interesting so I hope she does this on her own in the future.  Some other problems:  her introduction was missing a summary of the chapter/introduction of the characters, she wrote her paper largely in the past tense, and she was missing a conclusion.  She wrote me a note that she wasn’t sure where to go in her conclusion, and I suggested some larger themes we’ve come across about life in Harlem that apply here as well.  She also still has some sentences that are vague, but when I ask her about them, she means to make a good point, so we tried to put more precise language to these ideas.  She is completing her revisions for homework and starting research for her final paper.  I asked for the citations of four sources to begin, and gave her the option of extending this deadline from Sunday to class time on Tuesday, because I’d really like to see her think deeply and proofread carefully on her final draft of The Street.