More about response papers and their context.

[Tullia]

My son discovered these in college. We had several discussions during and after that semester about response papers because ds liked them and wished we’d used them during high school. With the exception of his second-semester required English course in which the assignments consisted of a series of different essays, all the classes he's taken which required writing used some combination of response papers, in-class or take home essay exams, and a term paper. I believe the first semester English course also required a series of essays, but ds placed into second semester English so my impression of first semester writing requirements is hazy.

 

When I posted about this topic several years ago several people responded and said they use response papers with their high school students. Since I didn’t use them myself during high school, I’ll just describe my son’s experience in the hope it is something that might be adapted and used by someone else. The class was a seminar; enrollment was limited and by invitation. Discussion was a third of the grade, the response papers were another third, and the term paper made up the balance.

• The questions were handed out prior to beginning the reading assignment listed on the syllabus. My son says having the questions in hand helped him save time during the reading phase.
  
• There were typically 4-6 questions on each response paper (that's my best guess--I haven't found the file ds kept for that course). They were turned in at the end of the class session in which the reading assignment was discussed so that students had notes during discussion.
  
• The papers were graded on content, but egregious errors of usage/syntax would be flagged with a red ??? marked next to the offending passage. They were returned promptly with feedback such as: Good example; can you cite more? Are your sure about this? Had you considered ____?
  
• The response papers were also used to generate copia for the required term paper. About three quarters of the way through the semester students, were expected to choose a topic from one of the books read for the course. The term paper was in lieu of an in-class final and due by the end of the time scheduled for the final.
  

I’ve listed some examples of questions in a follow-up post in another thread. And, don’t get me wrong—we used questions from Spielvogel, TWEM and other sources but, in retrospect, I think it was a mistake to use them primarily as discussion tools. I was trying ease pressure with regard to written assignments, but the strategy ended up backfiring.

 

What I wish now I'd done was add more informal writing into the mix; for us this would have also made discussion time more fruitful and eased the formal writing process. That said, my son was fairly well prepared for college writing with one exception. He tends to take life at a very leisurely pace and I accommodated that tendency more than I should have. His first semester of juggling multiple classes, assorted assignments, and firm due dates/exam times was a challenge. He made the transition sucessfully, but that first semester was an eye-opener.

 

I want to add that I'm not advocating replacing all essays or term papers with response papers. And, based on what I've seen by looking at online resources, it's typical for the first two semesters of college English to require a series of essays one after the other so it would be wise to prepare for that. I definitely think substituting response papers for some essays in literature and history would have eased some of the pressure (and my worries) about discussions and would have made writing essays less painful. Another thing I looked at at is how well the "prewriting" excercises in a composition program transfered into writing about typcial history, literature or science topics. My experience was that some composition programs do better than others in this respect.

[Another Lynn]

 

<snip>

 

Another thing I looked at at is how well the "prewriting" excercises in a composition program transfered into writing about typcial history, literature or science topics. My experience was that some composition programs do better than others in this respect.

 

 

:bigear: I'd love to hear more about this if you'd like to share.

 

Thanks :)

[angela in ohio]

I placed out of the usual comp classes and into a "Readings Conference" series in college, which was basically the four years of WTM high school over one college year. We had similar assignments. We had a set of questions to respond to, and they served as background for discussion and for longer papers.

 

I assign what I call response papers a few times a semester in my home and outside classes I teach, but they are more open-ended. They are a student's choice of response to a particular work, usually about two pages long, and they may focus on content, technique, or both. It's a common assignment from writing handbooks (Scott Foresman, Little Brown, etc.) I agree that it is pretty typical in college assignments, and something many high schoolers miss.

[Candid]

SWB includes these sorts of papers in her "Plan for Teaching Writing, High School" talk. She says about them about what you've said here. I've been using them. I don't have a bunch more to say. She does say they are mostly used by the teachers in college to determine if a student has read the work.

[Tullia]

SWB includes these sorts of papers in her "Plan for Teaching Writing, High School" talk. She says about them about what you've said here. I've been using them. I don't have a bunch more to say. She does say they are mostly used by the teachers in college to determine if a student has read the work.

 

I'm curious about how you use response papers. Do you use them to check to make sure the reading gets done or do you use them for other things, too?

 

Thanks for mentioning SWB's talks! One of the reasons I don't respond a lot to general curriculum questions anymore is that I'm out of date. PHP has released so many new materials since I read the first edition of TWTM and I haven't kept up with all of them.

 

I used TWTM as a general guideline beginning in about 5th grade, but sometimes chose different materials. We did use the downloads from the old website for writing term papers which were helpful. One of the fun things about home schooling high school is how quickly you discover that knowing how to write a term paper (you can

also fill in any other skill of your choosing) and finding the best strategy for teaching those skills to a sometimes unmotivated teen are two completely different things. :banghead:

 

ETA: Just to show how out of date my curriculum knoweledge is, I waited 6 weeks to check out TWTM (1st ed.) from the library when my son was a 4th grader, and remember buying the first volume of SOTW even though my son was a little older than the intended audience because right after it became available, people came to the old, old boards and criticized the book for being (a) too Christian or ( B) not Christian enough. Memory may be failing me on this one, but I think I once saw both on the same day! :svengo:

Edited December 17, 2012 by Tullia

[Candid]

I allow a lot of self choice using the SWB guidelines, but I do provide the response paper questions as part of that self choice. The big thing I am looking at is regular writing with some critical thinking involved. Lately he's been consumed with politics so we've had a lot of new analysis.

[angela in ohio]

Here are the directions I give to my outside students for a response paper (I am less rigid with my own dc, because I know they know what I expect :D) This will likely c/p badly, but here goes....

 

 

An Academic Response Essay

 

In a response paper, you communicate your personal viewpoint and what you have learned as they relate to the book, paper, essay, article, play, etc. you have read and the ideas and values it expresses. It is a conversation with both the text and your reader.

 

A response paper is a very common assignment in subjects such as political science, history, and literature. The response paper shows that you are able to critically analyze a work instead of just summarizing it. You may respond to the essay as a whole or to a particular point or points made by the author. The focus may be on the author’s main ideas, the author’s effectiveness in writing, or a combination of both. You should make a clear, overall claim in response to the assigned reading. Everything in the essay should relate to this claim.

 

A response paper should interpret and analyze a work in a manner that is as concise as possible, with several parts: a brief summary of the author’s argument, a point or thesis that describes the student’s argument, and the logic used to justify that point. The last part is supported by evidence from the text in the form of paraphrase, summary, and direct quotation. When information from the primary text is used, the page number is cited, MLA style, within the paper, but a Works Cited page is usually unnecessary. There is usually no outside research required for this type of essay.

 

à Follow my directions on the next page for writing an academic response.

 

Other notes:

 

1. Use the present tense throughout.

2. Double check to make sure that the author’s name and the title are correctly spelled and that you have correctly formatted your quotes according to MLA style.

3. Use direct quotations for less than 1/10^th of your paper.

4. Use the author’s full name the first time you mention him or her, and then refer to the author by last name only for the remainder of the work.

5. You use the first person in an academic response. (I knew you would all like that!)

 

Quotations – MLA Style:

Refer to the OWL site at http://owl.english.p...esource/747/03/ or your MLA Handbook (p. 92-104) to ensure that you format quotations correctly.

 

 

Then on the next page (these are probably ripped off and adapted from an English handbook, but I can't remember which one.)

 

 

READ

•Read the assigned text.

•You may want to take notes, and you may need to read it more than once.

•While you read, think: How do you feel about what you are reading? What do you agree or disagree with? Can you identify with a situation? What would be the best way to evaluate this work?

THINK

•Determine whether you will discuss the content, the author’s method, or both.

•This can take many forms: Do you agree or disagree? Why specifically? Are you confused, or is the author unclear? Why? What did you already know about this subject, and how has your understanding changed? Has seeing things from the author’s viewpoint changed or reaffirmed you own? Are there strengths or weaknesses in parts of the author’s arguments? Are there contradictions in the logic?

PLAN

•Write down your thesis/claim and briefly outline your supporting arguments.

•Do NOT simply agree and restate the author’s points. You need to have an original opinion.

WRITE

•Introduce the text: Include the title and the name of the author. State what you think the author’s position is: what belief or thought he or she is expressing overall in the work. This is a very brief summary of the text’s main points in your own words.

•Clearly state an overall claim in response to the essay you’ve read.

•Show how you have reached your overall claim. Use examples form the text to convincingly support your claims. Do not move too far away from the text to general thoughts or questions; instead, stay with the text and respond to what the author is saying.

•Write a conclusion. Include a brief restatement of your thesis.

EDIT

•Revise and proofread your work.

[Tullia]

:bigear: I'd love to hear more about this if you'd like to share.

 

Thanks :)

 

More thoughts on evaluating brainstorming techniques and writing prompts. [Oops, I should have used multi-quote. The buttons are in different places and I guess it's out of sight out of mind. :blush:]

 

First, in light of Candid's post I should point you to the disclaimer to my earlier reply. I'm only keeping up with SWB's new writing materials in a general way, but I expect that the specific methods taught in those already published as well as future projects will address some of the problems we encountered. What I noticed in the pre-high school years was that it was relatively easy to take the brainstorming/pre-writing assignments from just about any composition program I had on our bookshelf and have my son either adapt the "composition" assigment to a topic we liked better, or write additional short papers/essays about a literature, history, or science topic for extra practice/reinforcement. It was pretty much cut and dried--well, other than pencil phobic issues which is a different thread :rolleyes: . Whatever pre-writing or brainstorming activity was included was reasonably generic and all you needed to do was plug in the desired topic.

 

But, when I started looking ahead at the "high school" writing programs available at the time, most of them seemed focused on writing canned essays for SAT/ACT or on churning out the basic essay formats--and a lot of the writing prompts seemed to be--as my son used to say "cheesy". If you're using a classical framework, high school students need to be working beyond those simple essay formats. The only basic essay form ds has used since he started college was the comparison essay. We used SWB's guidelines for term papers during the high school years.

 

The other problem I had is my own doing--an artifact of my choice to use writing programs which incoporated a theoretical approach to writing classically. The writing assignments tended to be so specialized that you couldn't really "double-up". So, I used TWEM for literature, and Spielvogel for history as a framework for writing about literature and history. I looked at college websites for 100-200 level courses for ideas on writing about science topics and talso to double check myself on how I was using TWEM and Spielvogel's.

[Tullia]

I allow a lot of self choice using the SWB guidelines, but I do provide the response paper questions as part of that self choice. The big thing I am looking at is regular writing with some critical thinking involved. Lately he's been consumed with politics so we've had a lot of new analysis.

 

:D My son was still in high school (barely) in 2008. We had no problem finding good topics that year and I looked forward to grading papers! This year I got the occasional FB chat from my no-longer-living-at home-college student.

[Kareni]

More about response papers and their context.

 

 

My son discovered these in college. We had several discussions during and after that semester about response papers because ds liked them and wished we’d used them during high school. ...

 

 

Thanks for bringing up this topic.

 

Regards,

Kareni