Homework+Feedback

Below please provide a few sentences on how your students responded to the homework.

Michael - Both Lucy and Louis were eager to turn in their homework this week. They both expressed that it took a "long time" even with parents help. Lucy mentioned that our use of the "timeline" does not make much sense in terms of a traditional timeline, she suggested changing it to a "time graph" because of all the extra information included that is not usually in a timeline. They also said some of the wording is confusing, we may need to think more about age and what scaling concepts to different ages means.

Jordan- Patrick also expressed many concerns with trying to finished the homework. He was close, but not able to do everything due to timing constraint and other activities and responsibilities. Another thing was that even though we are trying to help teach them about search terms, Patrick unintentionally researched about counties with the same name but not in the New York. One surprising thing also was that he, nor his Mom checked the emails I had been sending, so maybe bringing up some expectation when they will be getting emails might be helpful.

Noelle - I agree that some of the wording in the instructions should be changed; maybe I'm incredibly dense, but I still do not know what a "running memo" is, and Russell and his parents were confused by the due date on it. As for the quantity of work, Russell couldn't finish several chunks of it, and seemed rather down about his industry writing assignment, telling me that he wasn't able to write it as well as he wanted.

Diana- Both my girls were somewhat frustrated with how long it takes to do it. Eesha is busy every day of the week, so it's hard for her to squeeze everything in. Maizie's father e-mailed me with concerns that it was taking them usually about 4-5 hours to do everything and he found that he was doing a lot of the work for her because she just couldn't grasp it all. Maizie didn't really do any of the writing for week 3 because it was so difficult and time consuming. Both girls also were confused with some of the wording, especially on the timeline part. And as Patrick did, one of my girls researched a county with the same name but in a different state.

Karin - I'm mentoring Samantha and I've spoken with both her and her mom about the time it takes to complete the assignments. For each memo they spend at least an hour completing it. After class on Thursday I encouraged Samantha's mother to not spend so much time on completely every answer, especially when the information is not forthcoming. And like other students mentioned in class, sometimes the website link doesn't actually work (perhaps it's too long to type accurately.) Also, there is some confusion whether or not to use Wikipedia, but after Thursday's class, I think it's clear that Wikipedia should be used as a supplemental site to gather basic information. Concerning the timeline memo, it does seem like there was a lot of confusion about this on Samantha's part but that her mother did a lot to help her complete that memo. In regards to the writing feedback, I think that went very well. Samantha was responsive to the document (linked below) I gave her and we focused not just on concepts and organization but grammar and spelling also, which was fun.