Food Assignment Templates

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Short Writing Assignment #2: 800 words

• Stage 1: Please write an 800 word maximum answer to the following question by Monday, April 8, 11:59pm.

• Topic: Present and assess David Montgomery's thesis about the relationship between agriculture and the fate of civilizations, as well as his view of the implications of this history for organic methods of soil management. Consider other viewpoints such as Pinker's. How strong is the case for more active conservation of soil and promotion of sustainable farming methods?

• You may bring outside research into your answer. Citations do not count in the word count.

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes and readings, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "SW2".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Q&W dropbox.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will only be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Thursday, April 18th, 2019, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be on the Sharepoint site under Student Writing, but please do not edit these files or add comments directly on them. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 28 points in Q&W.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [1]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Up to 10 points, in Q&W.

• Back evaluations are due TBD, 2019, 11:59pm.

Writing

*Writing Workshop with previous student writing (This will be an in-class exercise.)

• Intro: another look at Assignment Rubric

• notice typical ranges for our work.

• For this exercise, you will be working with student writing from last semester, specifically a 600 word short writing exercise on this question:

• Topic: What is "food value"? Why is it so hard to determine the value of food(s)? Consider the different ways that food(s) can by valued (nutrition, cost, quality, satisfaction) in formulating your answer. Are the "real" and "fake" food values? Have you found any useful approaches to solving this problem?

• Part 1. Your groups will receive an essay by Catshark, which was a pretty successful answer. Please take 3-4 minutes to review it relation to the Flow, Content, and Insight areas of the rubric. Then share with your view of the strengths and weaknesses of the answer with your group. (3-5 minutes)

• Part 2 Your groups will receive papers by Jay and Tiglon with scores attached. Please read these, comparing them again to the rubric and to the two papers you worked with. (10 minutes). Compare notes with your group. Does it seem reasonable that Catshark falls between these two?