Critiques

Here go my critiques!
Sarah Smith
I thought your paper was really interesting. After hearing your speech, I was hoping to get a chance to read your paper. You have a lot of research done on the project. It is interesting to see how sex education is taught then and compared to now. I do not think that much has changed. It’s great that realized that and allowed it come through in your paper. I do not think that there are any 499 classes this fall that you might be able to use your paper in but I think you should definitely be on the look out for one. The only thing you may want to do to really expand your paper is talk a little bit more about the people who tried to lobby for change. It would make it interesting to see who tried to have sex education taught in a more complete and coherent fashion. It would be interesting to see how these people were shot down at their attempts to reform. I feel like your conclusion, much like mine, could have been stronger. I know how hard it is to finish a paper this long, you feel like you have a repeated everything a million times over and want to avoid it in the end. I will def take your advice and get mine to the writing center. Overall, I thought this was very well thought out and research paper. Grade: B

Rickta

This was a great paper. This is one of the best papers I have critiqued. You used a lot of great facts and quotes. You can tell a lot of researched has been done. The quotes really liven up your paper. It gives the paper a lot of credibility. I think this paper can easily be used for 499, its already 16 pages. It has a lot of information and for being as long as it is you never lose focus or become repetitive. The thesis is strong and clear. You really state what you are going to talk about and focus on the change over time. I hate to say it because your paper makes mine look like crap, but I thought it was really well written. I found a couple of grammatical mistakes but nothing the writing center couldn’t fix. Grade= A/A-

Self-Evaluation

Well here is a chance for me to display that I have learned. How exciting. Let me just take a minute to say how much I truly enjoyed this class. Beside the fact that it was a lot of work and sometimes very frustrating, I met a lot of great history majors (this was a first) and dramatically improved my writing skills. This class really opened up the door for opportunities as a new history major.
My attendance in this class was probably the best I had in any of my classes this semester. I only missed one class due to a cold. Unfortunately it was the class that we went over the library resources. Lucky for me Maddie gave me a card so I could make an appointment and catch up.
Class participation was pretty easy in this class. Everyone was so easy going. Sharing ideas and topics was really productive and I feel sharing my ideas with everyone really helped me with my topic. I feel that I benefited from peer work and enjoyed reading other peoples papers. I really tried to give people an honest opinion about their paper and add some constructive criticism. Minus the final paper, in which I forgot my original paper, I think I was always on time with my work. I had my blog caught up and my rough drafts on time. I attended the Library of Congress field trip and subsequently got in lost in Supreme Court. Attending this field trip really got me started on researching my paper.
This class took up the most time this semester. It really prepared me for what is to come in 499. I spent a lot of typing up my blog. I spent even more time immersed in books for this class; some were more fun then others. Research was probably the most boring and time consuming part of this, but I think that spreading it out really helped me and allowed me to spend more time pouring over each source. I spent countless hours writing and revising my final paper and then rewriting and revising it a second time. I think all this time spent on the final paper was worth it and really paid off in my final paper.
I learned how to budget time more efficiently this semester. I learned to not put things off until the last minute and most importantly make tons of back-ups. Also, no passive voice, ever! The problems I encountered usually just came from finding adequate resources. I do not think I would have done anything differently. The skills and knowledge learned came in the form of better writing skills and actually learning how to do research, which I was previously unaware of.
Like I said previously the knowledge I gained was researching skills. I had never done any research on such a large scale before. I learned about evaluating sources. I also learned where to find sources. I had no idea that there were so many places to look for sources, I would have never known about the Lion and Unicorn database. I took three other history classes and the things I learned in this class really helped those. I really enjoyed this class and look forward to the history of animation!