​I'm just going to put it out there now that while your class was definitely not my favorite, you were one of my favorite teachers because you did not take anybody's crap. It sucked for me as a student, but you were one of my most straight-up teachers this year. To answer your question that you always ask "Why are you here, Corrin? I am so mean to you but you never leave." That's why. This is becoming a yearbook message. ​

Rhetorical analysis, as you know, is the type of essay that really brings out my penchant for writer's block. The green sheet that you gave us I used it twice until I realized that it basically was "WHAT is the device, HOW does the device work for the author's purpose, and WHY is the author using it." The WHAT, HOW, and WHY is what I asked myself whenever I wrote a rhetorical analysis. I think the reason I always kept my essays short and sweet were because I was scared that if I got into the habit of writing long, super in depth essays that typically took me around 2 hours to pop out, I wouldn't be able to meet your 20-minute time frame that you told us was going to happen in the beginning of the year. I really liked the in-class essays because I was able to start to think more in-depth and how you made us say our own sentences. (Insert obligatory John Locke and Ramino comment here.) It really allowed me to see the big picture and how exactly we were supposed to write them. I wish you would have started sectioning the pieces off into the AEC charts sooner because I think we wasted a couple weeks of time struggling with writing them. I also liked how you started with the hardest essay so we would have all year to perfect it. Even though I never did. ​

I did not like the group workshop-things that we did with "The Chase". I don't think that as a class, we were ready for it. Maybe next year you could pick out who is ready for that and work with the rest of the class as the class essays. The writing workshops we did were a little improvement but still not all that effective for me and I did not get much out of them. The Rhetorical Device Notebook was likewise not as effective for me because I never had to annotate "fallacy" in a text. I would recommend figuring out the most-used and having half the notebook for just those, and the other half for words because we both know I have a 6th grader's vocabulary.
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For DQR, I liked the ROS Chart and even though I hardly ever drew them out, I compartmentalized my examples in my head to see what I had. I think a list of the major works we were supposed to know well prior to the DQR unit would have helped us because I don't think we really knew what you wanted from us. ​

Synthesis was pretty easy and straightforward to me. I didn't have much trouble understanding what you meant by wanting our sources to talk to each other after you showed us an examples from the previous year. I wish we could have practiced a few more, but the one on the AP Exam was easy, so that's alright.​

One thing I really didn't understand the point of/understand what we were supposed to be doing was "thinking about our thinking". I did the lesson but honestly did not understand what you meant and thought it was just a label for what we were already doing. I really enjoyed the pass-the-notebook because it made me see other people's writing and how much development they were doing and I had to continue that level of emphasis instead of my two-sentence commentary. The peer reviews were good as well as the other students were simultaneously more and less critical than you were when they were critiquing my work.

 

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