Meeting Tuesday:

I want to take some time to look back at what we've done in English, connect it to what we're doing now, clarify some things about marks, and plan for the second term. So I'm scheduling a meeting for English on Tuesday at 2:30.

In preparation for that meeting, you should read carefully the edited excerpts from Aunt Sadie letters that I've put on the English Web site, and you should make sure, if you have not done so, to complete the assignment from Prompt #12 about looking at statement of goals for English 1006 and reflecting on what we have done and what seems to you important that we should do. Those reflections should be saved in your public_html directory as goals.htm -- and, if yours are, they'll be available from the link on the main English page. Before Tuesday, you should read through the ones available.

Some thoughts on evaluation, assessment, and marks

I've discussed this before, at some length, but I want to emphasize something now, when you've had enough experience of the way Truth in Society, and English 1006T, work, to see it a bit differently. The letters I invited people to write to Aunt Sadie were, as I said then, not part of anybody's mark, but, rather, a way for me to assess how well the course is actually working, so that I can have a stronger impression of what I might legitimately expect in the way of a learning reflection. Think of it this way: if the work I asked you to do and the help with idea I offered actually made no sense to people, then I'd want to think rather differently about what I could expect; similarly, if what I was trying to help people learn was so obvious to them that it was essentially a waste of everybody's time, then I should be pretty worried about basing a learning reflection on it.

What I found, in fact, was that the letters to Aunt Sadie suggested that (a) the ideas weren't for the most part just old hat; (b) that some people gave a pretty persuasive statement of what they'd learned, which suggested to me that it's possible to learn something significant from what we were doing; and (c) that lots of people hadn't found a way to write convincingly about learning, so that I really can't get a clear idea of what they now understand or believe that they didn't at the beginning of September.

So here's what I propose. I've pulled some particularly convincing passages out of the Aunt Sadie letters -- things I think would, if I were her, have some potential to convince me that something important was going on. I've also added some suggestions about some kinds of things that nobody said much about, and which I think she'd have been interested in as well. I'm going to invite you to read those and think about what has been going on, especially during the six weeks we met as an English seminar, but also in the rest of the term when issues important to English -- the way we've been defining it -- have been involved. Then, when you've thought about this for a bit, write a document designed to convince any passerby (and, of course, Aunt Sadie if she comes across it) that you've come to understand some things through your work in English so far this term. It shouldn't be more than a few hundred words long, and should rely on examples as much as you possibly can make it.

When you've written it, save it to your public_html folder as englearn.htm. Do this by the end of next week.