Entering a new world

Well, tomorrow I'm entering a world I vowed never to inhabit: substitute teaching. I'm meeting with a principal at a private high school. It will be very hard to put myself into a roll of "babysitting" when I so want to instruct.

Trina's concerns

How does a teacher create a desire in students to improve their writing skills? A comment earlier asked this question and it's a doozy. I wish I had the magic lamp and could answer. One of the only ways I ever saw a difference was by using a rubric to grade. Rubrics accomplish several things. One, they take away the "the teacher doesn't like me" crutch. My favorite rubrics awarded 80% of the grade to content, organization, sentence structure/word choice but kept the 20% for grammar. I have never believed that  students who have terrible grammar or lazy grammar should make an A on a paper. When they finally realize that they are hampering themselves by consistenly being lazy (ie texting language such as bc or u) or some incorrect grammar, they are a bit more serious during the prewriting, drafting stage. No matter how many positive remarks I ever made, the only strategy that ever seemed to catch their attention was the lower grade.

Today's Truth

Today's truth has nothing to do with teaching but does make a comment on life: bikes after age 60 may not be the best idea. I'm having a difficult time typing since my left wrist in encased in a splint. I was not a pretty sight as I landed in the flowerbed along the Tennessee River. I literally stopped to smell the roses!

Is Writing Going the Way of Reading??

Of course, I'm a dork; that goes without saying, right, since I'm an English teacher. I love words, the sounds of them, the nuances of them. I think that students like a teacher who has a passion for his/her subject matter. They might not like your subject, but they like it that you do! I used to tell my students that I live with the illusion that they think everything I say is exciting and they hang on my every word. They would laugh and I would, too, but I cautioned them not to burst my bubble--side thought: burst--when was that dropped in preference to bust--BUST IS NOT A VERB--Back to writing and reading: good writers are readers; reading broadens the vocabulary; a wide vocabulary leads to clearer, more interesting writing--agree??

It's so true

Where have all of the pronouns gone???? The typical conversations today are peppered with "him and I went..." "me and John went..." You get the picture? Or perhaps you don't. I think our laziness in other areas has drifted into our speech and even worse to our writing. I used to hear "him and I" but the students usually wrote with some degree of correctness; now, however, it's as if no one has the slightest idea of the difference between nominative and objective case--I know this makes me sound old but how is it acceptable to speak so slovenly; we wouldn't accept this in math. If it was easier to say one + one is four, would we just say all right???