“In the book of Death of a Salesman by Authir Millar was about a family that lived a typical life. Now with Authur Miller writing this play he wanted to show his point in the book to show how criticism works and the different ethnics. In all the world and years that we the people have been through this was formed to make a point out about how criticism reflects. When you pick up a book and read the first couple of pages you will only buy it if you seem interested in it. The writer wants you to see his/her art of the text. The interesting part of the text is that it’s a game, you have the cards in your hand and the book is the deck. If you play the cards right you can see how the text is written It’s a pick and guess game that would make the book work your mind. If you read over the text you’ll miss all the hints and interpretation of the book. My point is in this, is that in every book has to have text. In ever text there is art formed to explain what the author has benn through or what he/she wants to happen. Everyone has a unique life stye; this could lead to “misreading” or changing how the book is empathized. With everything that is happening in the book, it can effect on how the text is plotted out in the book.”

A real life introduction to a criticism paper for my class. This is by far the worst one I have seen so far. It could get worse. heh (Typos and not ever spelling the author’s name correctly… that’s all her.)

I am finally getting around to grading the big scary criticism essays the kids wrote. (This is the only assignment this year that I have slacked on. The kids are shocked, but actually pretty cool about the fact that I haven’t done it. heh) Each paper is taking about 8 minutes to grade. There are ~100 papers. This means it will take over 13 hours of grading. Holy crudmonkeys Batman. *sigh* I have done 6 papers so far. I started with my cruddy class on purpose (6th period just doesn’t have very many strong students… I don’t know why…) so that things would improve steadily as I go through grading. I have one B-, a couple of C’s and a D so far. Ugh. This is expected, but not cheerful. I’ve been grading for a while this morning. I’m trying to grade 5-10 then take a break, then come back. It doesn’t help that I have massive amounts of house cleaning I want to do and I would much rather be just cleaning. *sigh*

The problem is: I put a lot of comments on each essay. They worked hard on these papers and I belive they deserve to understand what they are doing well and what they are doing poorly. But see, all of my teacher training has told me that a lot of comments are BAD because they freak out the kids and they don’t read them or care anyway. But I still think that they deserve to know how they are doing, Damnit. So I will comment. And I will give them 5 minutes at the end of class to go over the comments and ask questions if they need to.

The last time I did a big hard push on grading I had Erik and Noah help me and we sat around drinking alcohol and making catty comments. That was awesome. 🙂 I wish that these essays could be treated the same way… Maybe we can do that again for the next batch of writers workshop stories. 🙂 Those are less formal and it’s ok for those math/science boys to help grade those ones. I don’t trust them with literary criticism. 😉