At the start of class with Delanie, we went over the final Writer’s Manual assignment and my midterm report. I answered a few questions about the final and she said she agreed with my midterm summary and didn’t have any feedback to add to our plan for the end of the semester, besides saying that she wishes she could take 199 again to keep practicing writing. I was happy to hear that she liked the course but I wished she felt like she had made enough progress to keep up good writing habits on her own. We reviewed the final draft of her second essay. She still had grammar mistakes, and I warned her that she could only have 10 or fewer grammar errors in her portfolio or else she would have to resubmit (I remember reading this from Prof. Viti last semester but I think I will add it to the assignment page in the future). I think the concrete limit will help her spend more time proofreading. She had definitely improved her analysis from the last draft, but her thesis didn’t really reflect the more complex argument, so we spent time editing her thesis together. Her thought letter for a research paper on Orange is the New Black, home, and the prison system is due on Saturday.
I moved class with Estefania from Thursday to Friday because she wasn’t feeling well this week. We also went over her final assignment and I answered the questions she had about it. We looked at Emily Dickinson’s poem “If I can stop one heart from breaking,” and I asked her to respond to the poem in a paragraph, focusing on incorporating the words of the poem into sentences and analyzing the language closely. Like in our past activities, I thought she made great points that weren’t fully worked out in her writing and she needed more textual evidence to back up her claims. We talked about how the skills of close reading would relate to her use of evidence in papers across all disciplines and I gave her some examples of how to fit Dickinson’s language into her writing. Finally, we talked about her last paper, for which she wants to do research about the mayor of San Antonio and his current work. We decided that a detailed outline, instead of a thought letter, would be due on Tuesday because we only have two more classes this semester! I hope to still send her feedback so she can complete an intermediate draft over Thanksgiving even though we won’t meet in person.