On the Monday before Thanksgiving, Delanie and I had a meeting that wasn’t originally scheduled, to catch up from her decision to change final paper topics. She wrote a thought letter about women in Norman Rockwell paintings and brought the books she used for research. I shared a simple document about art analysis to help her brainstorm as she examined each painting and she did some free writing for one of the paintings in class. I think some of the reason for her awkward phrasing in past essays came from the fact that she was writing about documentaries (it’s difficult to describe everything going on in a scene between director, actors, viewer) and I was happy to see strong descriptions of the painting in her writing.
We had class this Monday (12/2), where we reviewed her first draft of this Rockwell paper. Some sentences were still wordy and/or passive, and I made a list of a few words that were repeated too much throughout the paper. We also talked about organization, because she analyzed the paintings thematically but out of chronological order. We mapped out the intersections of each’s paintings themes and she decidedly to keep her current organization but be more explicit in justifying the connections between paintings to her reader in topic and concluding sentences. Relatedly, she hadn’t fully synthesized her analysis of the paintings individually into a specific thesis statement about the relationship between the women and American society. She’ll turn in her final draft for our last class on Monday!
Estefania’s roommate issues have continued on this side of break. I emailed her early in the week asking if she would like to do a textual analysis or response to an article instead of doing research for her last paper, because she’s already completed the requirement of a research paper, but she wanted to go ahead with the paper analyzing Mayor Julian Castro as a presidential candidate. We met today (Thursday) and she had found a book to use as a reference for the qualities of a good president and had organized these traits into an outline, but her research about Castro was still underway. We decided that she would send me her first draft by Saturday and then we would have a class session on Sunday. I plan on giving her feedback on the final draft via email and then she can incorporate last changes into her Writer’s Manual assignment. She’s going home when reading period starts so I do think she’ll have a chance to catch up on assignments then and give this last paper and her final a good effort.