Assigment 26- Kristin

For the AP test, I liked how whenever we wrote an essay, we would read example scored essays before scoring each others' essays, but I think that the time for doing so could have been shrunk down a bit so we could have gotten to do a few more activities or done a bit more practice for the AP test as well as the other standardized tests.  We could have read all nine benchmarks for the first of each style of essay written (synthesis, argument, analysis), but after the first one, we kind of already had an idea of how they would be scored, so for the rest of the essays in that particular style, we could have read a few (maybe the three, five, seven, and nine or something like that).  We also could have spent less time on grading.  Grading every single person's paper seemed kind of excessive for every single essay (plus it used a lot of paper), but I did enjoy separating into small groups and grading a few, like we did for our last essay, so maybe we could have graded that way more often and used two days on grading essays rather than five.

I wish we could have had a couple more Socratic seminars, because I saw those as really helpful to learn how to hold intellectual conversations.  We become so used to addressing surface-level issues, and our everyday discussions can be relatively shallow.  But, when we're forced to dig deeper and think harder about our topic, we end up uncovering interesting revelations and having interesting, engaging discussions.

I would have liked to spend some more time on learning and perfecting grammar rules.  After a year of writing and grading essays, I noticed many more grammatical errors than you would expect from an advanced junior class, and I wish that we had spent time learning how to form sentences and express ideals in the best and most correct way.  I know you told us that AP graders don't put as much stress on grammar, but crafting words is a skill regularly used and needed in daily life, and I would like to improve my abilities of that.

Thank you for readying us for the AP exam throughout the year because ultimately, I think we were prepared to the best of our abilities.