Week 2: Grading and Fiction Workshop Preparation

 During this second week, while the students had work time for their final projects, I worked with the other TAs to get a lot of grading done. The main thing that we were grading were the artifacts, an exercise that the students completed at the end of every day. They would receive ten minutes to create some sort of small poem, drawing, or short paragraph that gave a snapshot of one small part of their world. Like everything in the class, these were just graded on complete/incomplete, but we made sure to provide feedback on each artifact. One problem we ran into was that many students were only writing a sentence or two, and we agreed with Zach and Rennie that this wasn't enough for a proper artifact. When students submitted artifacts like these, we would offer comments on how to expand the idea further, such as what aspects seemed most interesting. For the artifacts that were substantial, we would instead provoke further thinking for what else the student could develop from their idea for future artifacts or even something more significant, such as the World Fair Project.

One other thing the TAs and I did this week was prepare for our upcoming Fiction workshop, where we would help the students get started on creative writing, since many students wanted to do some form of this for their project. We wanted to use what we had all learned from our individual workshops to make a really effective workshop, so we decided to split it into three parts. The first part, led by Olivia, would involve a clip from a film that showcased good 'show but don't tell' techniques, and then discussion about how the clip accomplished these things. Then, Abby would lead a short lecture on creating round characters and plot, and finally, I would lead the students in an exercise. After all of this, we would have the students write a flash fiction piece, with the intention of having them start to exercise storytelling within their world. This workshop will be led next week.

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