One Trick Pony

One of the better lessons I've taught was the first in my middle school practicum.

It was a summer course, and so we were assigned to the district's summer school program.  It was a group of about 30 students repeating 8th grade.  Another student and I were assigned to the two teachers who co-taught the class.  Although some of the students were going into 8th grade and wanted a head-start, the majority were not interested in listening to me teach grammar, or anything else.  Nonetheless, I was asked to teach my first lesson on sentence fragments and run-ons.

It was the summer.  I had some free-time, and I was eager to please.  So I spent a lot of time planning.  I made a pretty decent graphic organizer.  I asked my fellow undergrad if she could play a small part in the lesson.  I prepared a formal assessment.  For my first lesson, I was doing alright.  Then I created a superhero alter ego to keep the students' attention.

The day for my lesson came around and we listened to Skee-Lo's version of "The Tale of Mr. Morton" before I presented a few sentences and we identified their subjects and predicates.  It was then that my colleague, AKA the Preposition Punk, wearing a clever construction paper mask (she was in drama, if I remember right) snuck up to the board and added "When" to the beginning of a sentence: 

When Mr. Morton walked to the store.

I read the complete sentence now transformed into a dependent clause to the class and proclaimed, "this looks like a job for CAPTAIN COMMA!" while simultaneously ripping open my button-up shirt (which was no longer button-up; I'd replaced the buttons with velcro) to reveal a t-shirt emblazoned with this shield:

The students were dumbfounded, but I definitely had their attention.  I heroically slammed a comma after the dependent clause and added an indepent clause to complete the sentence and save the day. 

When Mr. Morton walked to the store., he bought a gallon of milk.

I handed out the graphic organizer and had them take a crack at it.

Fast-forward 5 years.  I still teach that lesson maybe once a year.  But it's the only lesson I teach that has that injection of edutainment right to the jugular.  The only one?  What's up with that?  Not that every lesson needs to have that element of theater to it.  It needs all the pedagogy my other lessons have, including things I missed that first time like a preassessment and differentiation.  But one lesson a year that keeps students' attention like that one, that creates murmurs throughout the hallways inbetween periods, that get students anticipating my class, is no where near enough.

Whales Use Grammar

While this may not have a whole lot to do with teaching, I thought it was too cool. I've been convinced for a while that whales are way smarter than we realize.

To the casual human listener, the love song of a humpback whale sounds magnificently free-flowing and improvised.

But fresh mathematical analysis of the song shows there are complex grammatical rules. Using syntax, the whales combine sounds into phrases, which they further weave into hours-long melodies packed with information.

Full story

Correcting Writing Errors

I read an interesting post today by Dana concerning marking errors in student papers:

Exactly which method of writing instruction works best?

• Explicitly marking each error in a student’s paper.
• Marking a line, indicating an error, but leaving it for the student to identify what the error is.

Which method do you use? Which method do you think would help students learn errors and how to correct them?

I've posted on this subject very briefly before, although in a different context. In a class I took a year ago (Teaching Reading was the title), we read Breaking the Rules by Edgar Schuster. One of the book's premises (if I remember right, I can't find it on the bookshelf) was that students don't need to know the rules of grammar before they write. They can learn them along the way with minilessions and by trial and error.

Nina's comment to Dana's post was pretty much along the same lines of Schuster's and my thinking:

I would generally put a check to the right of a line and write down the section of Hacker that addressed the error. They were required to look up the info for a homework grade and correct the errors. Usually I tried to focus primarily on those aspects we’d covered in class. If a particular type of error occurred more than once, I’d make a note of it in my comments at the end of the paper.

The only thing I would add (and this isn't really adding, but elaborating, I guess; I just like listening to myself talk) is that errors in grammar and capitalization or any other aspect of "Standardized American English" can be a progressive thing throughout the year. Start with minilessons at the beginning of the year and in the first paper, only mark those errors that were taught in class. Before the next paper, do another minilesson or two and then add those to the list one marks in papers.

And while I'm thinking about it, here's another interesting tidbit I learned from Marty Marsh at Lesher Junior High, though I don't know the original source. If you use a pen when you correct papers, a study found students feel worse when the marks are made in red than in another color. Woah, Twilight Zoney . . .