Challenging the beast: Writing a Beowulf boast announcing your awesomness

Is this the most difficult assignment I give out? Most students struggle to write their Beowulf Boasts, poems where we narcissistically brag about just how epic we are. In 15-20 lines, students write alliteration-filled psalms to their own greatness. As I explained it a number of times, this is essentially a Hakka, like the video above, aimed at a student's greatest enemy.

Below is a list of all the students in my British Lit classes. The assignment is for every BritLit student to go to 5 other blogs and comment on them. In class, we talked about using the Sandwich Principle (positive-negative-positive) to comment on someone's post; in the past, I've written about good commenting techniques. For this assignment, I'd like to debut the second part of TOAST—JAM (logically).

When commenting on blog posts, you MUST use do at least one of the following:

• Join the conversation by adding new information, opinions, or perspectives.
• Ask a question related to the post.
• Make a specific compliment about the post.

For this assignment, make sure that you're comment by using at least one of the above techniques. For A-day classes, have this done by Monday the 27th; for B-day classes, by Thursday the 30th.

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A-day	B-day
Aleena Annika Belle Brian Chanda Christine L. Emily Joyce Kevin M. Mandy Patrick W. Robert Sally Samuel Sian	Amy #1 Anderson Grace C. Grace Y. Janelle Kathrina Kelly Krikki Minnie Takako Vivian

A reminder: TOAST is for eating and grading blogposts.

Hey everyone, hope you're having/have had a great CNY break, and that you'll be ready to come back to school on Monday and get back to work! ^BOOO! I've spent a lot of time relaxing and planning torture homework and lessons for you, and now I'm working on the 170 unread blogposts I have yet to grade this semester. FUN¡

However, before I start leaving comments on your posts and you start getting all kinds of email notifications on your scores and I start getting all kinds of emails complaining about your grades, remember how I grade posts: using our tried-and-true TOAST^™ method. As I've stated before:

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.

Got it? So please, before you write me angry emails complaining about your final score, please take a peek at how I've graded you so you'll understand why you failed epic-ly earned that grade.