[English] RE: english Digest, Vol 33, Issue 8

[McClenaghan, Douglas J]

Hi Simon

I reckon that the Richard essays would be better because of the cohort and that could well be enhanced by good topics. We did Generals and only one of the topics was accessible. In the heated environment of the exam if a topic seems intractable many kids will fret, but if the topic is comfortable they're more likely to relax and feel confident. My memory tells me that I read fewer of those essays where a kid is just putting stuff down in the hope that some of it hits the mark, when I was reading the Look Both Ways and Lake essays. Even the mediocre ones had a sense of what the topic was asking, even if they just ended up being descriptive. Other topics had kids struggling to work out what the hell the topic was about.

Cheers
Douglas


-----Original Message-----
From: english-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Ross, Simon D
Sent: Wed 2/18/2009 3:28 PM
To: english at edulists.com.au
Subject: RE: english Digest, Vol 33, Issue 8
 
Dear Douglas,
Do you think, with 26.3% of all students writing on 'Look Both Ways' that it is a wise choice of text? I've often wondered whether texts like 'Proof', 'My Left Foot', 'The Wife of Martin Guerre' or 'Night' suffer because of 'marker fatigue' and whether it is not better to choose a text that falls outside Group '0'? Only 94 students wrote on 'Into Thin Air'. 
 
The best essays I marked were 'Richard III' but I really don't know if it was the cohort, the questions or the text? Maybe a combination of the three. The most abysmal responses were on 'Maestro'. My strong inclination is that it was the questions on that particular text that contributed directly to the poor responses.
Simon Ross 


Good points Gail. I assessed English papers for the first time this 
year and found the look Both Ways question did in fact work well. It 
was one of the few topics that I marked where I read a good spread of 
work - and the best essays were very very good. The other topic which 
worked well was the one on Lake in the Woods which also focused on how 
our reading of the text is shaped by its structure. I envied the 
teachers who'd taught these texts because the topics were both 
manageable and offered real possibilities for exploration by good 
students. Other topics produced reams of Lego essays that were dull 
and superficial. My beef with the exam is this appalling inequality of 
the text topics - some were quite dismally boring. The woman who spoke 
at the assessors' meeting about setting the exam needs a reality check 
- the comparability among the text topics is dreadful and becomes a 
lottery for kids.

Douglas McClenaghan






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