Writing essays

Things here have settled down, Wednesday the students were requested to stay home, in line with govt. directives on keeping the populous safe from the mobs. Teachers it seems are immune from any wickedness that mobs might deliver and school went on as normal for us, minus the students...
We had a morning of presentations .. enough said... and an afternoon to catch up on marking etc.

I got my World History class to do an essay not so long ago on the 12 tables and what they revealed about Roman society.

We talked about it in class and identified some potential topics for paragraphs. It seems they have done little essay writing in the past and I thought it might help with structure.

It was the most excruicating marking that I can remember.... and I let them know that (nicely) when I handed it back.

I asked them if they could guess why....

Them - ' Our English is too bad' -
me - 'no your English is quite fine and mostly perfectly understandable'
Them - 'our hand writing is too bad'
Me - 'no, most of you typed and even though some of you don't have beautiful hand writing, I had no difficulty reading it'
Them - 'our spelling is too bad'
Me - 'no your spelling is fine, and I actually tend not to pay much attention to spelling mistakes'

They went through a few other options - grammar, etc

I told them I would give them a hint - that there were a lot of students whose marks clustered around 16-17 / 25 and that I had great difficulty differentiating between them.

There was a guilty darting of eyes and a quiet voice - 'because we copied'.

'Yes!!! you are exactly right! Just because you change a couple of words it's still copying!'

One precocious but very good natured student - Y - piped up 'but teacher... student x copied from me'

I had to laugh.
'No student Y, student x handed hers in several days before you but I know that she copied hers too!'.... They both looked rather sheepish.

I pointed out that they will be going to English speaking universities where essay writing will be an assumed, and I want them to go to uni, confident they can write, because they won't be taught there.

They get it in theory that copying is not good for them, and I have learned a lesson too. With their essay on Hannibal this week, I will get them to do an essay plan overnight, hand written (minimizing the chance that they email one person's essay plan around the class) and get them to hand in the final copy 2 days later.

Lets see if the next one is better!