70% of high school graduates don’t have adequate writing skills. How does that happen? One way it happens is that students don’t do the foundational activities that teachers provide and then end up trying to write an essay with any support or having learned anything. At least that’s what I’m seeing in my classes.

We discussed the rubric in class today, I made sure that everyone understood what the refutation paragraph is, and then I clarified the difference between an expository essay and a persuasive essay. I’m seeing a LOT of expository thesis statements out there. If you have a question about it, e-mail me or have me look over your essay!

Then, I gave time for people to revise their essays by adding in the persuasive techniques that we did yesterday, but I’ll be honest with you: most people don’t even have a rough draft. I would have thought that students would use the time today to get things taken care of, but instead, I saw most people today just play around.

Y’all. I seriously spend a lot of time developing activities that are based off of the rubric. I spend a lot of time writing the same assignments that you do. For what? Why am I stressing out over this? I have a high school diploma!