THERE WILL BE A QUIZ ON 20 OCTOBER!

A study guide will be posted by the end of this week, so KEEP YOURSELF INFORMED. 

Guided note-taking

When you're given a short text to analyze and respond to, you can benefit from taking notes as you read it for the first time. This will help you organize your thoughts, identify the parts of the text that give you trouble, and focus on finding answers to the questions or prompt provided. 

****PLEASE NOTE: When I assign you questions that come attached to a text, I expect your answers to be supported by the text. You will not receive full credit for answers that are not based in textual evidence/logic. 

Below is one way of structuring your notes for better organization and clarity:

1. First ask yourself: What do I need to know?

• Accompanying questions to the text will often provide specific information about what you need to know/what you need to find out.
• If there are no specific questions, but rather a prompt or directions for a guided response, then you should try to answer: how will I prove my opinion?
• Bottom line: read questions/guidelines/directions before you begin to read the text.

2. What do I know/how do I know what I know?

• As you read, underline or make note of any passage that may provide an answer to the questions in the previous step. 
• Summarize these ideas in your own language
• You must support any conclusions with evidence/logic from the text. 

3. What questions do I have?

• Is there anything unclear in the text? Are you missing certain key information necessary to draw conclusions? Is there something you disagree with? Write it down for further investigation.
• Developing questions about the text helps us think critically about what is being written, and helps us identify gaps in our own knowledge. 

4. How will I find my answers?

• Questions are an important part of beginning to understand a text, but the pursuit of answers will actually help us deepen our learning and give us a clearer idea of what we're dealing with. 
• Finding answers may involve re-reading the text to check for details you might have missed.
• Finding answers may also involve taking matters into your own hands: asking a knowledgeable source, doing research, thinking deeper about the question, etc. 

Clarification of corrections policy.

I have gathered that many of you seem mystified by the corrections policy. Let me explain. 

I encourage you to make corrections on homework, classwork, or quizzes in order to raise your grade and to learn from previous mistakes. You may do this to recoup a maximum of half the points originally deducted. 

For example: Let's say you received a 5/15 (33%) on a quiz. 10 points were deducted from the highest grade possible (15), which means you have the ability to make up a maximum of 5 points (ie: half of 10) if you do corrections and receive complete marks for each of them. You would then be left with a grade of 10/15 (67%), which is a significant improvement, especially when it comes to tallying up your marks for the report card. 

****PLEASE NOTE: You have ONE WEEK to complete corrections on a given assignment/quiz starting from the day that it is returned to you in class. Once this week has passed, you have missed your opportunity to do corrections on the assignment in question.

The reasons for this policy are as follows: I want you learn how to budget your time and complete the corrections while the material from class is still fresh in your mind, and while we are still covering the same unit relevant to the task. This way, if questions from the homework/classwork/quizzes appear on a test or cumulative quiz, you will have already have strengthened your knowledge of the material and will be better equipped to succeed. 

****PLEASE NOTE (part II): Your corrections must actually be correct in order to receive credit. Simply re-writing answers that don't reflect any work or significant learning on your part will not be considered. 

Welcome!

Welcome to your ERC blog! The purpose of this blog is to provide an additional learning resource to help you succeed in class.

On it you will find:

• Skeleton copies of lesson plans (this does not include the notes that you should be taking during class)
• Clarification of assignments, terms, and class policies
• Dates of upcoming exams, quizzes, projects, etc. 
• Study guides
• Vocabulary words
• ...and more! (on a per need basis)

I will be updating it weekly. If there is something covered in class that you are having difficulty with, I encourage you to let me know so that I can post additional explanations on this site. Please use it as a tool to help strengthen our meager one-hour-per-week learning schedule.