These were tough assignments for many of you. Very few people scored in the 3.0 range. Most people were somewhere between 2.0 and 3.0. We had quite a few fatals.
Am I worried for you? Not at all.
These assignments have been traditional stumbling blocks for previous classes. If you don't believe me, look at the February 2011 blog entries under the "robbery" and "drowning" headings. This is what I wrote on Feb. 18, 2011 in the spring semester's class blog:
Every 200 class I've ever taught has had a day where everybody universally bombed. Where there was a concept or concepts that tripped everybody up at the same time. Generally, an ugly day.
For you guys, Wednesday was that day.
Actually, Thursday was, too. Lots of rough grading. Lots of missteps. Half the class had at least one fact fatal. One person had a time fatal. Out of 20 assignments submitted, only two were graded at 3.0 or higher. Brutal.
But I want to reiterate that days like this happen when you're learning something new. In journalism we learn by doing and then reviewing and then applying those lessons going forward.
If there's anything good to come from last week, it's that I have a better sense of what we have to work on to get to where you want to be.
So let's start looking at the carnage in hopes of fixing things ASAP.
In many cases, you're stumbling in the exact same ways previous classes have stumbled. If anything, you're fataling at a lower rate than those previous classes.
(To date, 11 of 21 students in this class have fact-fataled. Last spring as of now it was 14 of 15. Yet a bunch of people got 3.5s and 4.0s as final grades, and I'm not sure anyone who actually completed all their assignments scored worse than a 3.0).
These are normal stumbles for people looking at new ways of organizing and presenting information. Up to now, writing for you has been an artistic exercise, and reading has been an act of gleaning general knowledge.
Now, writing is organizing information in a way that allows what is most interesting, relevant and useful to others to be clear and concise and supported by a structure of facts. (Remember what I said about this not being a writing class, but an information organization class? Does it make a bit more sense now?)
Plus, when you're editing a story, you're not just trying to get the gist of meaning like a casual reader. You are learning to scan a page for inconsistencies and mistakes and affirmations that what you wrote is what you meant to write and has been double-checked for accuracy.
It's a whole new way of doing things -- reading and writing -- you've been doing for just about your entire life. And that new way takes some time to get used to.
To that end, you need a new way of managing your time when writing. When writing for English comp, you just write. If you have an hour to write, you write for 60 minutes. The major goal is to simply write your story.
But in journalism writing is one of three elements; the others being understanding what you are writing about before you're writing, and then reviewing your work to make sure what you wrote is what you intended, and that what you wrote will make sense to some schlub you don't know who's gonna read it.
To that end, you need to budget your time appropriately. If you have an hour, maybe the first 15 minutes go to immersing yourself in your material and gaining a thorough understanding of it; then the next half-hour goes to actual writing; and the last 15 minutes are dedicated to solid fact-checking and editing. You cannot treat the final step as something you'll squeeze in as an add-on; you have to make it as much a priority as the actual writing. And we express prioritization by how much time we give something.
It's not hopeless. Not at all, even if you feel a bit overwhelmed. The thing is, you're just being challenged to do something that's within you but you've never had to bring out. It's like riding a bike. The first few times you did it as a kid, you were probably a bit wobbly and scraped a knee or two. That didn't mean you were hopeless as a bike rider; just that you were new at it.
Consider these early assignments your skinned knee.
To that end, this class is massively back-loaded grade-wise. Even though as of next week we'll be 50 percent of the way through the semester, 80 percent of your final grade has yet to be determined!
That's by design. We use these practice stories -- which are relatively low in weight -- to see what you do well and what you need to improve upon, and then we look at fixing strategies. Each practice story represents maybe 1.5 percent of your final grade.
What we work up to are your out-of-class stories. Each of those represent more than 10 percent of your final grade. And you have the option -- which I strongly suggest you take -- to do an extra out-of-class story, which would create extra credit worth roughly that much.
I understand that fatals and low grades are frustrating. But don't get frustrated. We're still just getting started. And if past semesters have taught me anything, it's that you're about to turn a corner in the coming weeks.
You're much more on track than you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment