Quiz procedures and facts "catchup" schedule

Quiz content

Quizzes are to check preparation of the day's poems and monitor your growing ability to write analytically about poems.

They will be short enough to fix on a single index card. The front of the card will have from one to many questions that basically check facts. (Grammar patterns, vocab items are considered facts.) The back of the card will ask one question that invites analysis in some way. All questions are based for the most part on the green bold font parts of the web site. Questions can, and probably will, be cumulative to some degree but not at a high level of detail. (Example: when Komachi lived is a possible recurring question, that Ise gave birth to a daughter who became a poem is not.)

What to do at the beginning of class

We will begin sitting in a circle for the rest of the term. Please make that circle when you arrive to the room, including chairs for me and late arrivers. However, for the quiz, please leave your chair and your things, take a pencil or pen with you, and scatter far from each other around the room. Don't sit near the back if you can't see the projection screen and don't sit near the back door since we are often interrupted by students who are salivating over our many empty desks.

Grading of quizzes

I will collect the cards. Write the briefest of comments on them. Perhaps write some sort of grade. Return them to you. And then either the session they are returned or the next session you are to return them to me. Any missing cards at the end of the term will be scored as zero.

This grade category will not have a mathematical grade. I want to continue to allow students to miss class occasionally but I do not want to get involved at all in makeup quizzes. So, the reason you return the cards is that periodically I will give a summary grade to give you a sense of how you are scoring. I will consider factual information as about half of the grade and analysis as about half. However, I will look for consistent accuracy for fact but look for improvement for analysis. Both strong and weak students can improve and I expect both types of students to try to better their analysis.

Fact "catchup"

We are starting this mid-stream and there have been many important details present that seem not to have been mastered yet by students. So, up until the first midterm, quizzes will not only cover the material for the day but will go back and begin to cover material from the beginning of class. I will introduce what needs to be covered in a stepped manner so you don't have to go and memorize everything suddenly. This is the chart that shows the areas I plan to reach into for the past factual information (I will not write interpretive / analytic questions on the poems themselves):

• Session 15: can include factual material from Session 05
• Session 16: can include factual material from Session 06
• Session 17: can include factual material from Session 05, 06, 07, 10
• Session 18: can include factual material from Session 05, 06, 07, 10, 11, 12
• Session 19: No quiz, this is Midterm 01 day