Teaching the Beauty of Grammar

As far as my fears and anxieties about grammar go, I’m just worried that I won’t catch a mistake that I make. I hate when I am reading over something online (an article or a social media post or anything else) and I find an obvious error. Someone should have been able to notice that before they put it online, right? Wrong! It happens all the time. I have been dubbed a “Grammar Nazi” by my friends and family and although I dislike that term, I suppose they aren’t incorrect; I have eased back a bit since high school though, so there’s that at least. I am a bit concerned about how I might teach grammar. Growing up, all my teachers did basically the same thing to teach grammar. They would give worksheets and/or they would write a sentence on the board and have the class dissect and correct it. These methods were effective but they weren’t much fun. I want to be a fun teacher, but I don’t know how else to teach something as boring to students as grammar. I’ll just hang out at the drawing board until I can come up with something neat, I guess.

After reviewing our text, I really like the way that Anderson views grammar and all the teachings of it. I respect his thinking in the sense that as long as students are building on what they know, they will eventually succeed. He also believed that grammar and mechanics should be a door to exploration and creativity instead of correction and disappointment. He gave examples how students would put an apostrophe with the possessive “it” because they are supposed to put an apostrophe with other possessive pronouns. His scaffolding techniques make sense because now he would know that he needs to review when to have the apostrophe. I really liked how he never said he thought the students were dumb just because they made mistakes. He just used the opportunity to reteach something so that his students can be the best they can be.

Quotes and discussion:

“Pseudo-concepts are stepping stones along the way to concept development.” Page 4

I really loved this quote because I felt that it was true—and some teachers forget about it. In my experience, I find that some teachers think that if a student does something wrong, then they are just wrong and don’t understand the concepts at all. All teachers should educate by the method that some or little understanding doesn’t mean all hope is lost—they have something to work with now. If students are willing to make connections to help them succeed, then that should be encouraged.

“No matter how well-intentioned, if I deluge my students with too much of anything, they will remember nothing—especially rules and exceptions to those rules.” Page 6

                This is so important! Students are constantly being bombarded with information all day long and are expected to remember each and every thing. It is even harder in an English class—we have so many rules to follow…and then so many exceptions to those rules. It is vital that we, as teachers, pace the information we relay to our students. As a college student, I feel burnt out. I have so much going on and things to do and worry about, with so much information to take in all in a day, even though I know all these study tools and tips for success, I feel the pressure coming down on me. Middle and high school students feel the same way—but sometimes worse because they have not had the time or experience to develop the same strategies that I have.

“With what we know about the brain absorbing information visually, is it a sane educational strategy to have students stare at something so wrong for the first ten minutes of class every day?” Page 16

                I chose to focus in on this quote because it is exactly how I was brought up learning grammar. It is NOT what I want to do when I am in charge of my own class. I’m still waiting to come up with a good idea of my own, but so far, nothing.

Sentence Stalking:

“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”

                -A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin          

“The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.”

                -Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

“Before Fortunato could guess what was happening, I closed the lock and chained him tightly to the wall.”

                -Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

“It is not now as it hath been of yore;--/ Turn whaeresoe’er I may,/ By night or day,/ The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

                -Ode by William Wordsworth

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

                -Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Teaching for the First Time

This was definitely an experience to remember! It felt great to be leading a class, and it felt like it was where I belonged (hooray for choosing the right major and career path!). There were a lot of parts to my lesson that I felt went really well, and a few that could have been adjusted. I’ll just go down the list to describe what I think.

As for Content and Preparation, I would rate myself as good…but just not there yet. I knew where I was going with what I wanted to present to the class but maybe there wasn’t enough time for high school students to do what we asked of them. For example, in the peer reviews, I got three “Strongs” and one “Developing” for my Content and Preparation aspect (My colleague, Heather, and I split the feedback forms). The one “Developing” feedback was referencing how little time we gave them to compare and contrast the poems. I personally felt that five minutes would be enough time, since we were only asking them to compare or contrast (not both), and the spirituals were very short, but that could be because I am in college and understand direction and how to work quickly. This could have been improved, but seeing as how we only had thirty minutes to teach a whole lesson, I feel pretty good about the Content and Preparation. Obviously I don’t want my students to feel overwhelmed by the classwork I assign, though, and will be more thoughtful in the future about how much time I give the students to do something.

I am most proud about our Organization. There are no negative or working critiques on the feedback forms and each one that I have mentions how nicely everything flowed. It was really great to see that all the hard work Heather and I put into our lesson paid off. I do think that we could have scaffolded our lessons a little better so that our students would gave more feedback during the lesson. In addition, I should have stated our LEQ more clearly than just having it play on the PowerPoint. Overall though, I really think our Organization was done well.

Delivery wasn’t too shabby either! We did say “um” a few times but from what I could remember, and what I can tell from the peer reviews, our volume and pronunciation was good and our eye contact was great. I did get advice from one peer telling me I should not stand behind the computer because no one was able to see me. In my defense though, I am only 5’1’’ and someone had to be responsible for moving the PowerPoint along. If I could do things differently with this, I would try to time the PowerPoint to play on its own, or make sure that there is a clicker to the computer so I can stand in front of the class.

I am really proud of the handouts and the opening PowerPoint for the bell-ringer. I think it playing on a loop was a nice touch and everyone agreed with that. The background information PowerPoint could have been better though, maybe we should not have had full sentences on the board like we did. And, I would definitely play one of the spirituals as they were doing the bell-ringer if I could reteach this lesson. I received many comments how it would have been cool to play one in the beginning and then a different one at the end; they really loved hearing the spirituals being sung. I also got a comment about how we should have had a PowerPoint slide with Frederick Douglass’ speech on it so that all students would be able to read it instead of just listening. This would have helped everyone immensely and I am disappointed in myself for not thinking of this myself, since I have trouble listening without reading too. So in general, I think our Visual/Multimedia/Learning Styles was okay but there is room for improvement, for sure.

I think our students really enjoyed the lesson. Everyone seemed to have a good time when we were talking about modern songs, specifically when we discussed “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. In some areas, like the directions we gave them, we could have been more specific so that there would be less confusion. Overall though, I feel great about my first teaching experience and am looking forward to many more in the future.

My FIRST Lesson Planning Experience

The experience of writing and carrying out my first lesson plan is exciting and terrifying. I have always thought of myself as relatively good at public speaking, and I can prepare for those pretty well.

Lesson planning is not like that at all.

Firstly, I should have spent much more time thinking about what to teach for the first lesson. My colleague and I chose something that neither of us know a whole lot about simply because we were running out of time. Everyone else in class had topics already so we chose one in haste. Because of this mistake, we now need to do extensive research before we are able to construct and practice our lesson. Secondly, the frustration is very real. On top of choosing to teach something we don’t know about, figuring out how to teach is exasperating. After going through and trying to address each type of learner, we realized it is almost impossible. But try we did. And it is almost good, I think.

It was so incredibly rewarding when we finished our second rough draft of our lesson plan. One step closer. Our careers are almost real. With only two more years of college left, we are almost there. It was the light at the end of the tunnel that we needed to see in order to push on. There are still a lot of changes that need to be made in order to have a cohesive and effective lesson plan, but I really think that for our first try, things are going well.

Transitions are something we know we need to work on. It has been so challenging, in fact, that whenever we think of something to say, we have been writing it down on our lesson planning sheet (draft). We already decided that we need to set a few hours aside strictly for practicing. Before now, I had never thought about all the transitions that teachers need to accomplish in order to get through their lesson plan, and have even a stronger admiration than before for my successful teachers in the past.

To write successful lesson plans, I believe it is important to cater to all learning styles, or as many as you possibly can, in one lesson. We have been practicing this in our own lesson plan, especially with adaptations for students with IEPs.

SHOUT OUT: to my special education major friend who saw me and Heather struggling with this part and offered some tips on how to accommodate certain types of students.

Another aspect of teaching that I never thought of was time management. For our first lesson plan, we need to teach a topic on diversity with only THIRTY MINUTES. When we first tried this we thought it would be easy, but after adding up our minutes at the end, we realized we went over, big time. No wonder so many of my college professors don’t get through their lessons; there’s no time! Thankfully, though, I think Heather and I finally managed to fit all we plan on doing within our time restriction.

Overall, I actually really enjoy lesson planning, as wearisome as it is, and I am growing more and more excited about my future in this field of work. Fingers crossed, though, that our lesson plan runs as smoothly as it looks it might…but who knows?