What we did today and what we learned

Conversations

Students asked each other the questions about their week and this class. All the students were able to take notes and write a short paragraph in the time they had. We then discussed the negatives and positives of taking notes. Oddly, all the negative parts about taking notes ended up being positive things! For example, when students took notes they had to decide what was important, and they had to figure out how to "translate" the ideas they heard into writing that someone else would understand. Yet these issues mean that their writing can be understood by others, and means that they'll have the main ideas when they write!

Note-taking also helps students deal with writing anxiety and with writer's block: it's hard to feel scared when you're working from notes that help you write. It's also hard to feel "empty," or like you have nothing to say, when you can turn to your notes to spark a new sentence, paragraph, or idea.

Notes are a key technique to success in writing. They're worth the time and effort.

When in doubt, take notes. 

CAT-W Review and Practice

Since most of the students in our class have already taken the CAT-W, our review went pretty well. We looked at the "CATW Practice Materials" handout from last week, "Individuals in Groups." We read over the "Guidelines for Summaries" and noted some of the "rules" that appeared with the main ideas. In addition to noting the main ideas of the passage, for instance, the guidelines also emphasized examples and evidence that supported those main ideas. In one of the main ideas, too, we got a key term, "diffusion of responsibility," along with its definition. So our rules became:

1. Find the main ideas.
2. Find one significant idea.
3. Find a key term and its definition.

We then talking a bit more, and we added these rules, too, to remember:

4. Include the title of the article and the author's name, preferably earlier on in the piece.
5. We can use the main ideas to support the idea we feel is most significant. We can do this in many ways.
6. When we talk about a main idea ,we can summarize an example in our own words.
7. Once we summarize the example, we can relate it to a personal experience, or something we read, or something we learned.

CAT-W
We then took a practice CATW exam for 45 minutes: "How your birth order influences your life adjustment."