Third Class

Now we get to formal writing assignments. Honestly, I am most comfortable here. By comfortable, I mean I am comfortable with assigning the lab report and I know how to grade it and what my rubric will look like and so on... So I don't feel awkward writing and talking about assigning lab reports.

But, still I have many questions and inquiries into how to properly assign/design formal writing assignments. At the beginning of the course, as I said, my big conundrum is that we do 6 labs in 7 weeks and have students write 6 lab reports and only one of these can be re-written! I now know (well I think I already knew) after reading Bean that this is just terrible! There is more to it. There has to be. I can be more creative--so many teachers have already done the work so I don't even have to be creative. I can adapt other's strategies.

So, once again, after reading Bean, I was blown away. So many great strategies were discussed. It almost feels so lame and easy (on the instructor) to just assign lab reports when there are so many other ways to assign formal writing. In particular, I loved the idea of the short write-to-learn assignments that were constructed using 'Dear Abby' scenario. I would like to try this in one of my courses. I think there might be a few concepts (that I see students make very common mistakes on) that this would be a good exercise for. And, I like the added interest or excitement that might be sparked by taking it out of a typical 'answer the following question' format. Student's get to be creative and create a persona to answer the reader with. A also like how, by assigning the student a role to play it may take away any apprehension about 'how' they should write it and they can focus on the actual organization of the concept and the communication and writing of it.