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?
I personally think it would be a great idea to show them that even professionals make mistakes. I know for me, as a student I'm always concerned about making a mistake. To see that someone in the professional world does the exact same thing, makes me realize its ok. I wouldn't enforce them to make the mistakes, and would correct them. Showing them the right and wrong way to could be more beneficial than just teaching the right way. For example, us doing the activities with the paper show us that we know what we've been taught. I think, I know as a future teacher. I might even do a grammar unit and do the mistakes in published work as an assessment of the unit. Overall , I think it would be beneficial.
ReplyDeleteYou can probably guess that I agree with Heidi. Mistakes are good. They mean we're taking risks--and actively learning.
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to say something about your semi-colon examples. In this one:
"I have learned one eye-opening thing this week; even professionals make mistakes. "
I would use a colon. But the second one (which carries almost the same idea):
HOWEVER, SEEING THE ERRORS IN THE PUBLISHED NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE WAS A BIT OF A WAKE-UP CALL; EVEN PROFESSIONALS MAKE GRAMMATICAL MISTAKES.
I'd probably use a semi-colon.
Can you tell what the difference might be?
I would like to play Devil's Advocate here, even though I feel like I agree with you guys. I'm going to say no, you shouldn't show students these mistakes. Obviously students should be shown mistakes in other works, but I'm not sure it should be at the professional level. Students should be shown writing that is truly exceptional to give them goals to reach for. This is a bit of a stretch, but I would rather see a good, polished law brief than one that is filled with errors. I feel like the students will still know that they can make mistakes, but if you show them exceptional work then they can have some great models to examine as well.
ReplyDelete