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underachieving monday
by blacksheep63 @ Monday, Mar. 24, 2008 - 12:22:42

easter monday.. marking essays, just a few left today. 2nd years, none really good so far - even the better students seem to have been defeated by my questions this time around. i tried harder in the summer to make the questions more interesting, more challenging but i end up wondering whether i have just made them awkward and have cost the students marks as a result. sometimes i feel so responsible and (as several of you have pointed out i the past) i need to remember that it is their work and not mine that is being examined. i could have written better answers to all of these essays (with one possible exception) and i would have done more work than nearly all of them in the effort. so here we are, at 11.20, with one 1st, 5 2:1s, 6 2:2s 2 3rds and one fail. just four to go and i doubt there will be any more top top answers..

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thespianthespian pro
2008-03-24 @ 12:57

it doesn't sound as though you should be beating yourself up too much though.
if it's any consolation, i'm struggling to get my head round literary criticism on a second level open university course.
my brain doesn't seem to want to think in an academic, logical way!

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blacksheep63blacksheep63 pro
2008-03-24 @ 13:37

you're right. some of them are just far too casual in their approach, one of them has been referring to an historian throughout by his christian name - like they are mates! I despair :(
it never fails to amaze me that students can read articles and academic texts but not notice the tone in which they are written, or indeed the sources they are drawn from.

i always had a problem with literary criticism at A level. i fundamentally believed that poets and playwrights etc just wrote what they felt. and therefore we couldn't critique it. that said i wrote a brilliant (in my teacher's view) essay about Eliot's 'wasteland' then slagged him off for bringing God into the four quartets and got roundly told off by the same teacher.. i decided to stick to history as a result! good luck with the OU course

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