Part of the overall Claremont 9th grade assessment in English for the year is a memoir with 3 or 4 chapters. Each student is responsible for assembling the memoir throughout the year, creating one as an assessment following some of the major units. You Don’t Know Me was one of these unit; the young adult novel provided a perfect canvas for telling narratives of identity formation and a search for oneself.
The students were familiar with the instructions and rubric from earlier in the year, though I adapted the rubric to better accommodate You Don’t Know Me:
I also had major success with student’s formatting the typed memoirs correctly while in the computer lab. I attribute this to “Directions in Context,” as I call them, which are instructions that are actually in the format that student work needs to be in.
Every memoir was turned in with correct formatting…a major success.