Grade distribution to date: the end in sight!

Startlingly few points remain this summer:

Remaining points to be distributed in ILS 121 as of 21 July

(Of course, this graph focuses on the work you have yet to complete and doesn’t take into account the work I have yet to grade.)

Grade distribution to date: through Wednesday 15 July

Here’s the pie chart up through tomorrow’s Comedy of Errors quiz. This includes the midterm and Essay 2, but not vocab quiz 3 and Essay 3, both on Friday.

ILS 121 points remaining after the Shakespeare quiz on 7/15

Points remaining: the grade distribution chart after week 2

The grade distribution after week 2

Just over 28% of your course grade has been determined after the second week of ILS 121.

Grading your sonnet imitation and recitation

As I calculate in an earlier post, your sonnet imitation and sonnet recitation are individually 1.8% of your course grade—3.6% in total. They are certainly an important part of your class grade, but be careful about letting either assignment eat up your time over the next week: Essay 1 alone is 6.1% of your final grade and Vocab quizzes 1 (Monday) and 2 (Friday) add up to 8.3%.

Sonnet recitations

You are welcome to recite any of the sonnets, including those we have talked about in lecture or discussion. You will get three chances to recite the sonnet.

For the full 15 points, you must recite the sonnet without error and at least in a speaking voice. Theatrical recitations are more than welcome, and I reserve the right to give 1 or 2 bonus points for artistically impressive recitations.

You will lose 1 point per error in your recitation—missing a word, most commonly, but also things like switching the order of words. You will lose 1 point if your recitation is a little bit too robotic.

I have definitely had the same experience Larry has had with these recitations: about half of them are absolutely perfect on the first go and the other half never make it above the 10-point mark. If you start memorizing your sonnet early—today or tomorrow—and if you spend 15 minutes on it every day between now and July 3rd it is unlikely that you will get fewer than 14 points.

Sonnet imitations

These are trickier. Here are my grading criteria:

• 4 points: appropriate subject
• 4 points: exact iambic pentameter
• 4 points: exact ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyming
• 3 points: wordplay, double meanings, puns, etc.

In the past, students have lost the most points replicating exact iambic pentameter. If this is something you are concerned about, draft your sonnet right away and show me a draft. I will be more than happy to talk to you about issues of meter.

If you are interested in a little bit of inspiration for your modern sonnets, here are some links to sonnets by Marilyn Hacker, my favorite living sonneteer.

Unveiling… the grade sheet!

Seriously, this counts as exciting for me—just think what an improvement this is on those horrid spiral-bound grade books that clutter academics’ supply closets.

You’ll receive a sheet like this when I return your essays and major assignments, and you are always welcome to ask for an updated copy.

An example of what student grade sheets will look like

I tried to design the sheet so that it was self-explanatory, but it’s probably a good idea to zoom in on the box in the lower left-hand corner:

Points Remaining box on the grade sheet

This does the math for you, so you’ll know what grades are still in range for you. In this example, there are only 358 points left in the summer and the student would need more than 358 points to earn an A, so that is out of his or her reach. An AB is still mathematically possible, though it will be a challenge to get 344 of the 358 points left.

Crunching numbers: understanding the grading system for ILS 121

Larry has put together a wonderfully straightforward grading system for our class, which you can find on the last page of the lecture syllabus. However, the volume of numbers on that page can lead you to overlook the relative significance of the 18 graded components of your course grade. To break things down a little bit, here’s a chart:

The great majority of your grade can be broken into five major assignments: your essays (of which there are 5), the vocabulary quizzes (4), the midterm and final exams, and your participation in discussion section. The other quizzes and assignments are important, but their effect on your grade is somewhat less immediately drastic.

What this chart should show you is that if you concentrate on writing the best damned essays you’ve ever written, and if you use your time smartly when it comes to memorizing the vocabulary, you will build up a nice buffer in the early part of the semester that will give you more flexibility when it comes to the midterm and final exams.

(Note also that both exams have essay and vocabulary components, so putting the time into those assignments at the beginning of the semester will give you a leg up on the exams.)

Another way to think about grading is that you can lose 98 points and still have an AB, which would be an excellent grade for this class. You can lose 139 points and still walk away with a B, which would be a strong showing for a class this difficult.

Here is how your grade breaks down by percentages:

Summer 2009 ILS 121 grading breakdown by assignment

The vocab quiz scores are estimates based on the 118 points set aside for them and the 470 words they will test you on. The numbers are likely to change slightly as Larry puts the quizzes together.

A quick note on the Jane Eyre quiz

(These notes apply also to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass quiz on 7/28.)

Monday’s quiz will ask you to identify details from Jane Eyre that you would not be able to learn from reading a summary of the novel. The questions will not be tricky in the least—e.g. What is Mr. Brocklehurst’s profession? Who is Jane’s particular friend at Lowood?

Read attentively and note interesting characters and events and you should be well prepared for Monday’s quiz.

Two short remarks on Essay 1, Draft 2

Here are two of the argumentative and analytical weaknesses that appeared in a number of the first essays I graded today:

Arguing causation and not correlation

A number of essays argued that the rhetorical tools Brooks observes in Bush’s speeches shaped public opinion:

• “By using this technique, Bush persuades people to stop thinking and just act on the negative emotion.”
• “Bush’s followers believe the same thing, and soon many people believe that immigrants are the only cause of America’s problems.”
• “George W. Bush would reword his speech in such a way as to trick us into giving up our power.”

This is Brooks’s argument, but we have no way of proving that Bush’s rhetoric has led to Bush’s (partial) success in swaying the opinions of his constituents. Keep a watchful eye on your prose: never claim more than you can prove in the essay. It is no shame to write “Brooks argues that technique X appears in both Bush’s rhetoric and in the speech patterns of abusive communicators; we can only correlate X with public response Y, though Brooks’s theory would seem to predict a cause-and-effect relationship.”

Not answering the “So what?” question

I wrote TWE? (To What End?) after about 70% of the first paragraphs I have read. In essence this means “So what? Why is it important to study how Bush uses these techniques?”

The So what? question is critical: your thesis should argue what new information your reader will gain for having read your essay. It’s not quite enough to argue that learning X is useful, or that theory Y seems to be accurate; you need to point to some new work that you are doing.

Here are the sorts of questions you might answer in your introduction (and at greater length in your conclusion) to satisfy the So what? question:

• What new theory do you offer your reader? ←This one will be particularly useful in your second essays, in which you do most of the hard lifting yourselves
• How does your analysis help change an old theory? (And why does that old theory need to be changed?)
• How do you apply an old theory to a new data set, and what does this give us?

How I will grade the sonnets you write

Here is the imitation sonnet grading chart I’ll be using when you come in to see me next week. The chart divides the 15 points as follows:

• 3 points: appropriate subject (something about which you feel a strong emotion)
• 4 points: rhyme (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, exact rhymes only)
• 4 points: meter (10 syllables per line; unstressed then stressed x5)
• 4 points: flair (an introductory paradox, wordplay, etc.)

Points tend to be lost on meter.

If you haven’t studied meter before, it can be difficult to hear the subtle differences in emphasis in a line of poem. Consider the first line of Sonnet 43:

When most I wink then do my eyes best see

The words in bold are the words that Shakespeare expects readers to emphasize when they are reading the poem out loud, but how does he know that we won’t enunciate it differently? Consider this enunciation:

When most I wink, then do my eyes best see

(I’ve added a comma to lend credence to this pattern of emphasis.)

Is there anyone near you right now? Doesn’t matter—most people on this campus are already crazy. Read those two versions of the line out loud in your usual speaking voice. What do you notice?

You should notice that you have to go out of your way to read the second line: you have to invent a special reason to emphasize “I” and “then” and “best.” The first line, though, should come pretty close to the way you would say those words if, for some reason, they came up in casual conversation.

Fight the urge to read poetry with a special poetry voice; instead, work to read a poem as though it were something you’d say when you ran into a friend in the hallway: “Hey, man. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”