Evaluating Evaluation, Entertaining my Daily Fears of Impending Burn-Out, and a pretty, pretty song.

Dornan offers more sensible options for teachers in chapter seven. The importance in finding distinctions between response, assessment, evaluation, and grading I must say I was ignorant to before reading through this. My perspective has always come from my experiences as a writing tutor in undergrad. I would sit for hours in the writing lab, and students would come in with their disorganized, poorly edited, and either verbose or horribly inarticulate papers, expecting a twenty-minute fix. Although I did have repeat customers with whom I could work on specific issues, largely I would just grind through their essay, mark the Abercrombie right out of their paper's Fitch and send them on their way reminding them to 'read it out loud' to find errors. Although this strategy proved effective for me as an editor, I doubt it will work well with students. I'll probably have WAY too many papers to either provide responses for, assess, evaluate, or grade, and not enough time to help them all individually.

That being said, I like the idea of teaching self-evaluation as a skill, and focusing my reponses on High Order Concerns (HOCs in TLA-land), and using mini-lessons to address Low Order Concerns (LOCs) which, if I may field a guess, will occur throughout the classes writings with some frequency.

Anyways, I just got done with a three hour discussion of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks and my brain is mush. It's amazing the rhetorical and discursive acrobatics you need to be able to summon at will to not sound like a sparklingly lowbrow, ham-fisted primate in theory classes.

Right now, I'm on at least my fifth listening of Beirut's "Elephant Gun" today.

Why not listen to it again right now?