Assignment 26 - Grace Payne

I have to say, it's strange to say this is the last blog post I have to write. This year has absolutely flown by.

Anyway, I genuinely believe your teaching style is one of the best. As much as I hated everyone reading my essays out loud (and I really, really did) and as much as I dreaded walking into class knowing that I had to write an essay for forty minutes (and I did), I know that both of these things made me a much better writer.

However, I do have some suggestions for the future! One of my favorite things that we did when we graded essays was when we did it in groups, and I think you should introduce that earlier. After you've graded two or three essays as a class, I really think we started to understand it. Working in groups allows us to get essays done much quicker, and I'd like to believe we were pretty accurate it too. When we do groups, I think we should be in a group with our friends. I know, with a bunch of teenagers that could very easily go off track or slow things down. But, when I was in a group with people that I was comfortable with and have spoken to many times, I felt more comfortable making comments. Even if I was grading the essay of someone I knew, I knew that they wouldn't take my comments personally.

I also have some suggestions for the multiple choice test. I will say, doing more practice tests is definitely the best way to do it, and doing them monthly is a great way of going about it. However, I do think that maybe we should spend a bit more time looking over the questions. At one point in the year, you pulled something up that allowed us to see which questions we did poorly on and which we did really well on. I think it would be worth it to go over the questions that we did really poorly on, because sometimes knowing just one word in the question can mean you get it right, and we need every point we can get on AP day.

Overall, I want to say this has been a great year. I've had my frustrations, but in the end, it's the AP test that matters, and I think that went really well. (I can't say more, as of May 16th College Board hasn't released the questions.) Thanks for a great year, and let's hope for high scores come July!