Blog #7: Reflecting on today’s experience

Today we worked on the email etiquette essay assignment. To me, this seemed to be a challenging event. Not terrible or anything like that, but definitely challenging. I think that there are a lot of students who aren’t ready to commit to writing for a big grade. They might be afraid of the assignment or maybe they don’t think they can do it. Maybe they’ve had bad experiences resulting from previous writing assignments.

To kind of minimize this anxiety, students worked in pairs to get started. They were supposed to work together to get a plan, to get a thesis statement, and to get a rough draft started. I don’t think this is very easy though. As a class, I led the whole class in this exercise on the board before they got started in small groups. In one class, we pretended to be writing to John Doe about flirting with our girlfriend. John was married, so we BC’d his wife. We pretty much told him what we thought about his outrageous behavior, and we had proof. In our practice email, we attached a short video clip. It was kind of fun. :)

The second class wrote an email to a woman who was flirting with the class’s boyfriend. I think her name was Suzy Q. Suzy Q was married, so we BC’d her husband. This email was far harsher than the first class. Women are just mean. I think there were more details involved in this email too. It was kind of scary. Anyway, the class had fun writing our practice emails on the board. I hope that they helped as students worked with their partners to begin their drafts. I know when I write, it always seems like my own essay is harder to accomplish than the one we work on as a group.