Week 1 Reflection

 Weekly Reflection

Throughout this week, I attended Ellie Moore’s two English 9 classes as a teaching assistant. I got a total of 24 hours and 25 minutes of work for my senior project. Most of the time was spent grading and listening to the audiobook of Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. I needed to read the book because it was what the essay they were writing was on. I normally prefer reading to audiobooks but Ellie had high praise for the audiobook and I like Trevor Noah so I chose to listen to it instead. What I enjoyed the most was class time and interacting with the students. I felt like I got to know them more and connect with them this week which was one of my main concerns.

One of the first things that I learned was how missing a lot of sixth and seventh grade due to covid impacted the class of ‘26. Those two years are really critical to developing a lot of the skills used in school like writing. It took me some time to better understand where the grade is at in terms of their writing and understanding of language, and also their general behavior as students. A lot of them seem to really like structure and are uncomfortable with abstract ideas and open-ended questions. They also have trouble with sentence structure and grammar. I think this is common for ninth graders in general but is especially true for this particular class. To be clear - I don’t mean to insult them. The kids are all very cute and many of them are really smart and have good ideas. They were just unlucky that covid hit during a very crucial time in their academic journey.

I have also found that grading essays is more difficult than grading shorter written homework assignments. With the essays, it is easy for me to label the grammatical errors and other minor problems but it is harder to give feedback on the content itself. With grammar, it is either correct or incorrect. I struggled with finding the right words to talk about the content of the essay and some of the other larger pieces that are more complicated than either being correct or incorrect. I discussed this with Ellie so I will continue to work on that so that all of the essays have decent feedback that the students can use.