The last of our Hamlet discussion resulted in a single sentence thesis statement that everyone in the class completely agreed upon for the first time. When we were discussing the main ideas of the piece we all agreed, but the wording was a different story. One of the words we used originally was “determined”. We decided it was too final and constricting and instead went with “influenced”. This change reminded me of true/false questions. Sometimes there is just one word that makes the entire statement false, like “always” instead of “sometimes”. This is probably the reason I am so bad at true/false questions. I never trust myself enough to say the entire statement is true or false, which is the point of the question.
We have also been studying for the final using Ms. Holmes very new age approach. I had Ms. Holmes in freshman year and I remember this method working very well for studying and discussion purposes. When all the information was finally put on the page, I was surprised to see we learned so much. With so much discussion and self driven learning, it is hard to notice all the information being obtained. When we started making the multiple choice questions, I noticed the section I did the information on (existentialism and "theatre of the absurd") became ingrained in my mind. Part of making the questions is synthesizing the information. It’s kind of similar to the idea that teaching a lesson to someone can help you remember it.
Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteAnother good post! I am very impressed with your work. I found the review to be kind of hard to add too, there was so much information on there already that I was having trouble adding information that would be relevant to the test, of course I could add more but would we really need to know. So that's what I found difficult but I totally agree with you that making multiple choice questions makes you remember information way easier. I did like the review as a study guide. I agree with you again about true and false questions, I also have trouble totally committing to one way or another, I always second guess myself. Good post!
Hi Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteI always get confused by the "connecting things to life outside of school" aspect of these posts, but yours really gave a good example of what that means. Hopefully I'll remember for the next one!
I think it's really interesting how much one word can change a sentence. Our class gets into those arguments all the time, and no matter how similar two words may be I always have an opinion about which one we should use. Language is crazy!
Really great post!