Grace was able to immediately respond and present alternative definitions and thesis statements for the questions once this issue was pointed out to her. Her homework will focus on drilling more questions to keep up her ability to unpack and correctly respond to them.

Grace continues to strengthen her ability to define key words in her responses, though still defaults to relying on her use of a key word to speak for itself.

Grace showed excellent lateral thinking in interpreting her questions in clever, unique ways. These were mostly supported by good examples to construct an argument from. Her thesis statements were clear and could be argued in relation to the question.

Grace sometimes skims questions and misses key information (such as how many texts she needs to refer to). Sometimes Grace's definition of the question and thesis statement are not easy to back up with her examples. We discussed how she must pay attention to when she is setting herself up for a greater challenge (for example, arguing that Eliot is trying to help readers through his poems, when there is not clear evidence of him providing them with a helpful guide to life's problems). Grace's brainstorming did not convey any strong personal reflection to the poems this week, but it will remain to be seen if this appears in her full responses for homework.

Grace has an excellent grasp of her prescribed text, able to jump in and out of different sections to provide useful examples. When prompted, Grace provides strong definitions for keywords from the rubric.

While Grace does provide strong definitions for rubric keywords, she does not yet apply these definitions when responded to questions unless prompted. Instead, Grace focuses on a handful of key words that she is comfortable with and tries to apply these to questions, even when they are not appropriate. Grace needs to continue developing familiarity with other terms. Grace also tends to lock onto a single word in the question to structure her entire response around. This can lead her into missing crucial parts of the question, especially when they are phrased as literary quotes - such as one referring to good literature as being "like stimulating coffee".

Grace has a much stronger sense of how she feels about poems, and is capable of extending this to make critical comments about the poem. It was good to see how she noted parts of the poem were "boring" and "depressing" and that this did not match the ending of the poem, which suggested that the Magi had experienced something amazing. This allowed us to have a discussion about Eliot's techniques.

When brainstorming, Grace does not focus on the wording of the question, but rather her idea of what she wants to say in relation to a keyword (as per last week). We went through more detailed work on how to brainstorm from a question. Grace sometimes skips over sections of the poem that she doesn't immediately gel with. This is something that is useful to discuss in a reflection, but can mean that she ignores key information and makes up her own meaning external to the poem.