Brandon and I finished reading all of his course materials for College Composition. Afterwards, we proceeded to post to the discussion board, as per his assignment requirements. We ended with a discussion of tentative thesis ideas for his english paper.
We finished getting through all the material and came up with a pretty solid discussion post. We then started researching/talking about the topic for the paper. I'm really trying to get Brandon more involved in this one.
We started working through the lecture and reading material.
Session Minutes
150
Minutes Student Attended
150
Lesson Comments
I'm really trying to focus on putting more of the onus for working on Brandon. I'm worried he's getting a little too comfortable with the help he's receiving.
Brandon and I worked on his discussion posts for English, reading/listening to two of the assigned NPR lectures on minimum wage. Brandon had some very strong opinions on this issue, and we were able to have a very lively discussion on the evidence presented by each article and the pitfalls in the arguments presented. Afterward, Brandon responded to the discussion posts in his digital classroom.
Brandon completed two of his discussion posts today, which were centered on his responses to two peer essays. In general, Brandon was surprised at the lack of clarity in both essays, as neither did a very good job of articulating very clear Cause/Effect relationships. In addition, Brandon noted that there needed to be clearer connections between cause/effect relationships in the first body paragraph of each paper.
After reviewing the T.A.'s comments on Brandon's essay, we discussed the most pertinent changes needed. In general, Brandon has a tendency to eschew his reviewer's comments, but I made him focus on the comments that addressed two of his weakest areas: organization and qualification. Structurally, Brandon had to specify which religious avenue he was implicating in his discussion of homophobia, and he had to qualify his ideas about gay parades and feminine stereotypes. After revising these issues, Brandon then worked on formulating his bibliography, and we concluded our class session by turning in the final draft of this assignment.
We researched and finished the main discussion post for this week. I find it interesting that Brandon will defer to pretty much anything I say in history, but loves to argue with me in writing. I think we came up with a really interesting response about China in the 19th century. He then wrote one discussion post response before it was time to go.
