This morning, I corrected the timed essays from my students from Friday.  I pulled in a couple for my piece a few days ago on student writing, but I found this group was even worse than I’d imagined.

All mentioned Alexander the Great, but there the similarities end.  Out of 17 papers — one used a date, 322 BC.  Two mentioned the sack of Thebes and the economic wealth Alexander derived from that.  Two more — four altogether — mentioned the cost of the soldiers that Alexander hired for his invasion of Persia.   Fewer than half mentioned any country other than Greece or Persia; most only mentioned one of the two.  No one mentioned the conquest of Egypt, or Persia.  The papers were almost completely devoid of information — information we’d covered laboriously all week.

I’m planning on handing back these essays tomorrow in class, and then having them rewrite them, either by handwriting, or typing them, with a word-bank and an outline.

So I made up one this morning:  WordBank

I think this is a better direction to go than the slideshow I put together yesterday, unfortunately.  For one, the slide show is not very good, and it’s too long.  I find that I need slideshows to be about 10 slides, or there’s not enough time to do them in class and provide practice time of the skill I’m trying to teach.

Unfortunately, this sort of wordbank document is EXACTLY what I was trying to avoid creating by building a wiki in the first place.  Hmm.

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