I'm not sure if I actually learned a new skill this week in class, but I definitely think that the magnetic letter activity and our class discussions helped me understand the current subject/verb rules more clearly.
The magnetic poetry helped solidify my understanding of transitive and intransitive verbs. I DEFINITELY APPRECIATE HANDS-ON ACTIVITIES; THEY MAKE GRAMMAR LESSONS SO MUCH MORE FUN! Moreover, it's not just that the lessons are more enjoyable for students, but they would also make more sense in the end. In my education classes, my teachers are constantly going on about how students need hands-on experience in order to fully understand a concept, and I can't agree more.
True, some students are able to learn something just by hearing it mentioned once. Some students could make it through their entire academic experience and prefer lectures over discussion classes purely because they learn best when they hear something. Is that a common occurrence though? Probably not. I think fun activities dealing with sentence diagramming would certainly help make grammar seem less daunting to students, and hopefully they'll remember the rules in the long run.
I have learned one eye-opening thing this week; even professionals make mistakes. I have found that while they are rare, errors in professional work are not completely impossible to find, and I've noticed them both in this class while preparing my scrapbook and in a few of my other classes. I recently copy-edited a New York Times article for my Journalism 330 class, and before I realized I was tearing apart a professional piece that had been printed rather than the copy my professor had added errors to, I had found numerous errors. Much to my dismay, my professor realized that he hadn't given us the mistake-ridden copy of the article. HOWEVER, SEEING THE ERRORS IN THE PUBLISHED NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE WAS A BIT OF A WAKE-UP CALL; EVEN PROFESSIONALS MAKE GRAMMATICAL MISTAKES.
While this isn't a grammatical lesson per-say, I think that teaching students that it is okay to learn mistakes - that it helps to learn from them - they will be more willing to try. This thought may just come from my need to normalize things...if I see someone make a mistake I have this instinct to make them feel as though they are not alone. I would argue that this lesson is just as valuable as any grammar lesson we could drill into our future students. If they are comfortable enough with us (teachers) and with the idea that it is okay to make mistakes every once in a while, they will probably be more likely to take risks with their own writing and fully understand the fundamentals of grammar in the long run.
Okay, now that I think about it, will showing students that professionals make mistakes in their writing and are able to get away with it actually be a good thing? Will students think that since professionals are able to make mistakes they don't have to be perfect either?
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Subject/Verb/Object
This week I didn't completely learn a new skill, but I did learn a new part of the structure of sentences. I have never really struggled with the subject-verb-object order of a sentence, and I rarely mess up on subject/verb agreement, but I did not know that there was a different name for a verb if no object followed it!
I'm sure I had heard the terms 'verb-transitive' and 'verb-intransitive' somewhere along the journey of my grammar education, but I don't think I have ever been able to apply them to what I was doing. It was very helpful to break down the different sentences and take out the adjectives and adverbs, and even the object itself, to change the structure of a sentence but still keep the meaning the same. However, while doing this, we did come across a few exceptions that end in a different meaning do to suggested meaning of words (ie. uses). BUT, even with this, I still found the lesson to be very helpful and I learned a lot about transitive and intransitive verbs!
However, though I enjoyed the lesson and felt like I learned something new about verbs, I think that parsing sentences in general is helpful in understanding proper grammar. It would be interesting to have my future students do an activity like this in class because they would be able to pick out the different parts of speech, and perhaps I would have them substitute words to see if they actually understood the lesson or if they were just assuming that the first word was the subject, the second was the verb, and so on. I think it would be a good way to assess learning without the activity seeming too overwhelming.
I also feel as though this is a lesson that I will be able to use in my future classrooms. I am constantly looking around for fun and interesting ways to teach grammar so that it actually sticks with the students, and I think breaking down a sentence in this way might be just the ticket to success! I think that this has been the most applicable lesson so far and that it would be easy to modify for use in a high school classroom. The lesson on apostrophes might seem to overwhelming, but even with the oddities in this one, I think it would be easy for students to pick up fairly quickly. Also, since sentence structure is the basis for writing, it will help them in the long run to learn the basics of it right off the bat! Students won't only benefit in their English courses, but any classes that also assign writing (which should be most other classes) would find use of this lesson.
However, after ending up with "Seth uses" and its double-meaning in our mature class, I wonder, how will high school students take the odd exceptions to converting a sentence from transitive to intransitive? Are there very many cases like the one we faced on Thursday?
I'm sure I had heard the terms 'verb-transitive' and 'verb-intransitive' somewhere along the journey of my grammar education, but I don't think I have ever been able to apply them to what I was doing. It was very helpful to break down the different sentences and take out the adjectives and adverbs, and even the object itself, to change the structure of a sentence but still keep the meaning the same. However, while doing this, we did come across a few exceptions that end in a different meaning do to suggested meaning of words (ie. uses). BUT, even with this, I still found the lesson to be very helpful and I learned a lot about transitive and intransitive verbs!
However, though I enjoyed the lesson and felt like I learned something new about verbs, I think that parsing sentences in general is helpful in understanding proper grammar. It would be interesting to have my future students do an activity like this in class because they would be able to pick out the different parts of speech, and perhaps I would have them substitute words to see if they actually understood the lesson or if they were just assuming that the first word was the subject, the second was the verb, and so on. I think it would be a good way to assess learning without the activity seeming too overwhelming.
I also feel as though this is a lesson that I will be able to use in my future classrooms. I am constantly looking around for fun and interesting ways to teach grammar so that it actually sticks with the students, and I think breaking down a sentence in this way might be just the ticket to success! I think that this has been the most applicable lesson so far and that it would be easy to modify for use in a high school classroom. The lesson on apostrophes might seem to overwhelming, but even with the oddities in this one, I think it would be easy for students to pick up fairly quickly. Also, since sentence structure is the basis for writing, it will help them in the long run to learn the basics of it right off the bat! Students won't only benefit in their English courses, but any classes that also assign writing (which should be most other classes) would find use of this lesson.
However, after ending up with "Seth uses" and its double-meaning in our mature class, I wonder, how will high school students take the odd exceptions to converting a sentence from transitive to intransitive? Are there very many cases like the one we faced on Thursday?
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Apostrophes' rules are numerous, but I'm understandin' them more and more.
Apostrophes kind of overwhelm me, to say the least. I know when to use them, and I can generally tell when they are used incorrectly. However, there are so many random situations in which it is acceptable to use apostrophes - I lost count on Tuesday - and when it is kind of okay to use them, but that falls into the gray area we discussed.
So far, this is what I have gathered, and feel fully comfortable with.
Apostrophes are used to show a few different things: possession, contractions, extra clarification (ie. M's = Mariners, not Ms so it doesn't look like Ms.), slang, and plural numbers. So, basically, apostrophes are POSSESSIVE, CLARIFYING, CONTRACTING. Or maybe INFORMAL, OVERUSED, MISUNDERSTOOD.
Okay, so I say they are overused and misunderstood because too often people use them incorrectly for the simplest of things, such as "it's" vs. "its"...and I'm not quite sure I can blame them because there are so many exceptions and various rules. I hope that after this class I will have a better sense of how I can teach proper apostrophe usage to my future high school students, because I know it is a struggle for a lot of people. Another thing I struggle with is the use of contractions in literary writing. I was taught to avoid "informal" language within my writing, unless it was a creative writing piece of some sort, and I constantly find myself surprised when classmates choose to use contractions within their own formal writing - but maybe it's a new trend? I'm not quite sure. I have found that I use contractions when I'm writing blogs, but that is because I see this form of writing as more of a conversation with the reader, and I have trouble imagining formal writing for a class at this level of communication.
Perhaps I'm being a bit too picky though. And I have gotten a little side-tracked...the point is that I now have a strong understanding of the proper uses of the apostrophe within writing, and I feel more accomplished now that I know why I'm using an apostrophe. I also think it will make me seem more credible with my future students, because I won't just be telling them how to use apostrophes, but will instead be able to include my own struggles and misunderstanding with apostrophe usage in the past. However, even now I know there are still different opinions on when and when not to use apostrophes, and I imagine there will never be one complete universal rule.
I found it very interesting that not only has apostrophe usage changed within the past few decades within formal education, but that there were also differences regarding preference just in our small class. Personally, I don't like to add an extra "s" to show ownership. Now, while I am a tad overwhelmed by the various proper uses of apostrophes, I think that I have a better grasp on the punctuation. The only remaining frustration I still posses remains in the fact that from source to source, the expectations for apostrophe usage changes. So, as a teacher, how should I instruct my students to properly use apostrophes? Or should I let them use them all sorts of ways?
Hmm.
So far, this is what I have gathered, and feel fully comfortable with.
Apostrophes are used to show a few different things: possession, contractions, extra clarification (ie. M's = Mariners, not Ms so it doesn't look like Ms.), slang, and plural numbers. So, basically, apostrophes are POSSESSIVE, CLARIFYING, CONTRACTING. Or maybe INFORMAL, OVERUSED, MISUNDERSTOOD.
Okay, so I say they are overused and misunderstood because too often people use them incorrectly for the simplest of things, such as "it's" vs. "its"...and I'm not quite sure I can blame them because there are so many exceptions and various rules. I hope that after this class I will have a better sense of how I can teach proper apostrophe usage to my future high school students, because I know it is a struggle for a lot of people. Another thing I struggle with is the use of contractions in literary writing. I was taught to avoid "informal" language within my writing, unless it was a creative writing piece of some sort, and I constantly find myself surprised when classmates choose to use contractions within their own formal writing - but maybe it's a new trend? I'm not quite sure. I have found that I use contractions when I'm writing blogs, but that is because I see this form of writing as more of a conversation with the reader, and I have trouble imagining formal writing for a class at this level of communication.
Perhaps I'm being a bit too picky though. And I have gotten a little side-tracked...the point is that I now have a strong understanding of the proper uses of the apostrophe within writing, and I feel more accomplished now that I know why I'm using an apostrophe. I also think it will make me seem more credible with my future students, because I won't just be telling them how to use apostrophes, but will instead be able to include my own struggles and misunderstanding with apostrophe usage in the past. However, even now I know there are still different opinions on when and when not to use apostrophes, and I imagine there will never be one complete universal rule.
I found it very interesting that not only has apostrophe usage changed within the past few decades within formal education, but that there were also differences regarding preference just in our small class. Personally, I don't like to add an extra "s" to show ownership. Now, while I am a tad overwhelmed by the various proper uses of apostrophes, I think that I have a better grasp on the punctuation. The only remaining frustration I still posses remains in the fact that from source to source, the expectations for apostrophe usage changes. So, as a teacher, how should I instruct my students to properly use apostrophes? Or should I let them use them all sorts of ways?
Hmm.
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