Toasting all your great work!

via McMaster University

Horay for our first rounds of blog posts! In response to reading the first part of Beowulf, where we first met the literary technique of kennings, my British Lit classes were required to both define/explain what kennings are and translate 5 common words into their own kennings. In just looking at them the past few days, I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing. Keep up the good work, guys!

Now comes my part: grading your work. Usually, if we're working on formal 5¶+ essays, I'll use this little rubric to base my score. However, for something like a blog post, which is short, informal, and often times more to-the-point, I think it would be unfair to grade off of the same rubric. For this reason, I've developed a new way of giving points for posts, called TOAST:

• Technical elements: grammar, linguistics, spelling, etc.
• Originality: creativity, new perspectives, different outlook.
• Appropriateness: Completion of the objective of the assignment (e.g required length, subject matter, quality).
• Supplements: Inclusion of applicable multimedia (e.g. images, video) and formatting (e.g. lists, links, blockquotes, text formatting).
• Time invested: visible effort put into the assignment, not simply thrown together.

I'll usually give 3-10 points per element, meaning that each post (depending on its level of difficulty) can be worth from 15 to 50 points.