Blog #7

I just taught my first 45 minute lesson two days ago, and I taught it in a group with three of my peers. This was definitely a challenging assignment because the longest I had ever taught was 15 minutes, and it was to a group of 3 peers/students. So to jump to 45 minutes, teaching in a group, and teaching to a classroom of students was really difficult for me. However, I was really pleased with how I did and how our group taught as a whole. If I'm honest, I don't see how this experience is entirely applicable to teaching in the future. I understand the idea of becoming accustomed to collaboration with other teachers and planning a unit or lessons within a unit, but I've never seen teachers teach together, so that part is a little odd for me.

 

With this assignment, my group taught on how to make our creative writing more vivid (using specific verbs, adjectives & prepositional phrases, and similes & metaphors). My part was the adjectives and prepositional phrases, so I was in charge of coming up with how I wanted to present these skills in a way that students would understand and in a way that would be engaging. I struggled with this at the beginning because I only had about 10 minutes to teach my part of the lesson, while making sure that they understood what I was telling them. After our group decided to use a mentor text (Fahrenheit 451) as the foundation for the lesson, with each of us incorporating it in some way and discussing it with the other teachers (Aly, Heather, and Lauren), I chose to use pictures and group interaction to convey my points.

 

I chose to use the students as a tool in the lesson by asking them to define an adjective and prepositional phrase and get them to provide examples of each. By doing this, I was able to quickly gauge what they already knew and guide them to where they needed to go. This also enabled them to become more involved in the lesson. I used a picture from Aristocats as an example for the class to look at to help them think of unique and specific adjectives. Then I provided them a list of prepositions and a few examples of prepositional phrases to help them in creating their own. I feel that I effectively taught this information and this was because of the time I spent in preparing for it and working with my group members (which wasn't easy at times). At some points, I feel that I could have done better explaining what I wanted them to do, and if I had instructions on the board, this may have been a little bit easier. It was also tough, because at one point I asked the class to get into pairs, but no one moved to do so. So while I was explaining what they were to do, I said that they could just stay in the groups they were in (I was trying to roll with it and not make a big deal out of it, but I was told that it was somehow confusing for a few students).

 

Overall, I think that I did a good job in preparing for and teaching this lesson, even though it was a large struggle for me and a huge time commitment when I had a lot of other things going on. I also think it was a tough expectation to teach after not meeting with the group for a week and on the day coming back from Thanksgiving break, but I feel that we did well regardless. My group members were helpful in this process! Aly stepped up as the leader for the group and became the moderator for the lesson, in charge of transitions and the opening and closing activities. She was also the main person to work on the lesson plan and prompt us to put our parts into it. Heather volunteered to create a worksheet for the presentation and then we all put our pictures on a Google slideshow. It was difficult to find times to meet with our group and/or having all the group members show up to the meetings, so this was an unfortunate obstacle that we had to deal with (as in all group projects).

 

In the future, I will definitely be including more visual instructions, either on the board or on a handout because even though they were very simple instructions, not all people can follow them just by listening. Even though I know in my mind what I want them to do and what my expectations are for the students, they don't know that, and it's my responsibility to make it clear. Overall, it was a tough project, but it definitely taught me how to be responsible for myself and how to work in a group in a difficult situation.

 

 

Blog #6

 

For our Literature Circles discussion groups, I read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss. This was a funny and intriguing book about the uses of punctuation (I know it sounds nerdy, but it was actually really cool)! This book was a great refresher on the general uses of punctuation and how they increase the overall quality of your writing, teaching me a few new things to incorporate in both my own writing and my future classroom. This book taught me three main lessons that will help guide me in my future writing and teaching students how to write in the future.

 

1. The Importance of Punctuation



"To be fair, many people who couldn't punctuate their way out of a paper bag are still interested in the way punctuation can alter the sense of a string of words."

Here, Truss is stressing to us, in her usual humorous way, the importance of punctuation, even though most people don't realize it. In this sentence, she is referencing those fun sentences where you place a comma in between different words to change its meaning. While I like punctuation and its variety, I don't think that I've ever stopped to fully consider how important it truly is. Without a question mark at the end of a sentence, someone could think I was simply stating an opinion. Without periods anywhere in my writing, my train of thought would be hard to follow as I would keep rambling on with no definite end. Punctuation is "a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling."

In my future classroom, I will have to convey the importance of proper punctuation to my students if I hope to see them become successful readers and writers. Without punctuation, all of literature and language would be lost. I could incorporate those fun sentences into a mini-lesson, showing the students how punctuation can change what the author is trying to convey. By using punctuation correctly, my students will be able to succeed and rise above most others in our society who still fail at where to place a comma in a sentence.

 

2. The Changing of Punctuation

"It is useful to remember, however - as we struggle to preserve a system under attack - that a reader from a couple of hundred years ago would be shocked by present-day punctuation that we now regard as flawless and elegant."

While punctuation definitely is important, we must all remember how much punctuation has changed over the years. Taking a quick look at Shakespeare's writings will reveal the changing punctuation and spellings of the English language, so much so that most people struggle to understand what he means. I learned, through this book and some of the discussions in class, that some punctuation is a choice of style (for example, not all people see the necessity of the Oxford Comma, even though I believe those people are wrong).

As teachers, we cannot change our students' writing style by forcing rules upon them that we follow. We have to take a step back and look at their content before attacking their mechanics. It's important to show them how writing can help them before we lay out all of the rules they must abide by. After they see the importance of writing, then we can slowly work towards correcting their mechanics (at least the ones that must be followed). After all, the rules could change in the next 10 years for all we know.

 

3. The Capability for Punctuation

"If I did not believe that everyone is capable of understanding where an apostrophe goes, I would not be writing this book."

Here, Truss is explaining why she chose to write this book: she believes that everyone is capable of learning how to properly use punctuation. I used to think that some people would just never learn how to properly use punctuation (and taking a look at any Facebook post would prove my point), but it may be that they just don't care enough to learn. It's not that they are too "stupid" to understand how a comma is used, it's that they don't see the importance of it (refer to point #1).

While teaching in the future, it will be my job to spur my students on from not caring about punctuation to seeing it's importance and taking the time to learn it. I will have to approach all of my students through lessons and activities with the though that they are able to complete that which I am asking them to do. My students will all be capable of learning how to mark their sentences properly, and it's my job to take them to that point of success.

 

 







Blog #5

While reflecting back over when I taught my Grammar RX lessons and completed the writing diagnosis assignment, I can honestly say that I've learned a lot! My first Grammar RX lesson focused on the sentence in general, including subject, verb, simple/complex/compound, and prepositions. While I can generally identify the subject and verb in a sentence, I had forgotten what prepositions were and how they were used. I realized that I use them all the time in my writing, but I never thought about them as prepositions. While teaching this part, I was able to show my classmates how a preposition is anything a squirrel can do to a tree (on, in, around, about, into, for, etc.), incorporating how I was taught the use of prepositions. This was a great refresher for me and enabled me to better teach this aspect of sentences. Along with teaching a few lessons, being the student was also really beneficial because I got refreshers on the "basics" of English that we tend to forget about when we move on to more advanced literature and writing practices. This helped me remember the basics because that is generally what I will be teaching in the future.

Grammar lessons must be exciting and interesting to the students if we expect them to pay attention and learn the material. By knowing this and thinking about how I feel about boring grammar lessons, I tried to make my lesson engaging. The students were able to work both individually and as a group to accomplish the tasks on the worksheet and the other activity. By doing this, I was keeping them from both silent work and lecturing, hoping they would receive the information easier. I did have to deal with a problem student (Aly), but she was creating distractions to show me how to better keep control of my classroom and the lesson itself. Heather helped out by asking a ton of questions that she already knew the answers to, forcing me to better explain some terminology and to show that I truly understood what I was teaching.

Also, by working with the Writing Diagnosis assignment, I was able to put into practice what we've learned about editing essays. While before I would tend to mark every error on the paper, making it overwhelming for the writer, this time I forced myself to focus on patterns. Instead of circling every comma error,  I would circle a few and ask the student to use those to find the other errors in the paper. This forced the student to take responsibility for her writing and saved time on the editing and grading for me. In my written response to the student, I pointed out 3 main error patters in her paper and explained to her that once she corrects these errors and works on keeping them out of her work in the future, her writing will become better and elevated above what it is now.

All of these assignments pushed me out of my comfort zone, making me work harder to improve my abilities and strategies with the students. I hope that in the rest of this semester, I will get more opportunities to do this because I feel more prepared for the classroom already!