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!