Clearing some journal questions up

I thought it might be useful to explain why I'm having you do journals, and how I'm evaluating them.

Why Journals?
As you remember from your reading of Learning (Your First Job), true learning is not a passive process - it requires wrasslin' with slippery, abstract concepts and making them more concrete in your neural pathways. One excellent way to do this is through reflection - taking a question or idea, and mulling it over...asking yourself questions...seeing where your thoughts lead. This is where our journal comes in: I'm asking you questions and want to see where you go with them. To me, answering my initial question is just the first step - I'm much more interested in seeing where the question takes you.

Evaluation
I mark each entry out of 3:
Grammar/Punctuation/Spelling/Capitalization (0 or 1):

• If I have difficulty following your thoughts because of problems in these areas, or find myself getting annoyed with frequent errors, this will be 0. Otherwise, it will be 1.

Instructions Followed / Questions Answered (0 or 1):

• Did you at least spend some time answering all the questions I put to you at a surface level? Then you get 1....if not, 0.

Evidence of Deeper Thought (0 or 1):

• Did you take the question somewhere? Did it make you ask further questions, or raise some point to mind? Do you make me go, "Hey - I hadn't thought of that!"? Then you get 1; otherwise, 0.

As an illustration of the last point, I'll use a question from our second journal entry: Do you think charging high prices for a service that's very easy (but few people know how to do) is ethical?

• One could (and a few students did) liken hardware installation to providing legal or medical services...few people know how to do these things, and it's considered OK for those kinds of people to charge high prices for their expertise. This may of course lead to the counterargument that unlike lawyers and doctors, the hardware installer doesn't require years of training to become adequate at their job. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that the average person could learn to do successful installations (barring the occurrence of unusual problems) with a few hours of training.
• One could ask some questions (and even better answer them with a little digging as well), like:
• What is Geek Squad's policy if the tech is unable to successfully install the hardware? Or worse, breaks something?
• Does the Squad offer refunds? Warranties?