Vicki's Class Blog: Week 7 Post →
How I have missed school house rock! I loved those videos. I thought the best one was the adverb video, I felt it explained its content the best. The preposition video I felt just kind of rattled off some words and said they are prepositions, but the song was very catchy. I love the idea of…
I agree with you that poetry can be a great way for students to implement grammar that they learn in the classroom. I know a lot of people do not like to write poetry, but I actually did the lesson and I thought it was a lot of fun. It was somewhat of a challenge to try and include as many prepositions and phrases I could with it still making sense, but it worked out well.
Erika, get over yourself.: Week Seven Post →
It was so nice to have a throwback on this seventh week of classes! I loved school house rock in middle school and while my favorites are still “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m only a Bill” I found all of the songs to be fun and informative. I think music is a great way to get through to our…
I think music is a great idea to help students learn as well. As some of us have experienced in our childhood classroom, when we learn grammar rules through song, we usually remember it a lot more than if we didn’t. I still know and can recite the preposition song I learned that was to the tune “Yankee Doodle”. If you can make learning fun and engaging, and even different, students will remember because of its uniqueness. Students will remember what stood out to them in engaging lessons.
Week 7
My Grammar girl post is called “How to Write Numbers”. In the article, it talked about how different manuals have different opinions of how to express numbers in papers. The Chicago Manual of Style says to “write out the words for more numbers than other style guides”, which means that they recommend to use words for numbers 100 and lower while the Associated Press and the British newspaper the Guardian both recommend instead that words should be used only for numbers less than 10.
But the Chicago Manual of Style recommends recommends using the words for all whole numbers 100 and lower, and also for big round numbers such as one thousand and twenty thousand.
Also, there is a specific protocol when writing fractions, believe it or not. For simple fractions like ½, ¼, etc, they should be written out into hyphened words, like “one-half” and “one-quarter”, etc. But if the fractions are unusual, like 3/16, to convert them to decimals.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/how-to-write-numbers.aspx
I thought the test questions at the end of the short lesson/presentation on Modifiers was really helpful. Not only did you get examples for each of the tips and points, but you also got specified practice at the end to test your knowledge after.
The boy
Instead of saying hi to me, as I walked around the corner
He continued on his path, without even a glance my way.
It was two on the dot, and I was late to work.
But I took my time, and turned around to stop that jerk.
I said, “What gives Joe? Why didn’t you say hello?”
And he replied, “I’m sorry, but I just got let go.”
He said, “I am upset with myself, and mad at my boss.
So please forgive me for looking cross.”
We continued to talk, and we went on our way.
And agreed to coffee the very next day.
I have never watched the Schoolhouse Rock videos, but after watching them I realize why they are so catchy. Plus, adding a tune or visuals really helps students relate and visualize grammar, making it easier to learn. However, when I watched the Lolly Lolly Lolly video, I was quickly annoyed. And so, I think some videos need to be shown for certain parts or else some students may get annoyed or bored.
I love how during the song and video, they emphasized the prepositional words either through changing the font of the word from the others, or they animated them into objects, such as a group of traveling bees. It keeps the viewer’s attention, enabling them to remember prepositional words. I also love the use of repetition in the song; it really drives the prepositions home with catchy phrases and memorable tunes.
Vicki's Class Blog: Week 6 Post →
The lesson plan by Pam Rentz was very practical, in my opinion. I think that she was right in saying students do not apply the usual grammar lessons with their own writing. I know in my own writing I make the same mistakes. I know the rules for why they are wrong, but I do not apply it to myself…
I disagree with you. I think that Pam Rentz’s lesson plan was a little confusing for me, and I thought that when we learned about the “Revision through numbers” lesson in past weeks, that lesson was more beneficial to students. But I agree with you that it is pretty horrible that when people tried to change their language because of prejudice, that it failed and they sounded more the same than they did before. Ironic isn’t it?
Untitled: Week 6 Response →
I had a bit of a harder time this week locating the videos because, maybe it is just me but, they were not on Blackboard and I had never gone on Tumblr to watch them before. I finally realized that it says that the videos are on both blackboard and Tumblr, so that is when I was finally able to…
I thought the pictures and recordings of the slaves in Texas from the video “African American English in Springville,” was very interesting as well, and it is amazing that because of prejudice, people think they have to change their language or talk differerently. Do you think that because of prejudice that we have all these slang changes and differences in our language or that it is just the way we learn it from others and it changes because of progression of history?
Week 6
I really liked the sentence combining prezi because one of the things it really showed about sentences is that they can be creatively combined. Writing and using English can be creative and can have many different ways of expressing thoughts and actions. There are so many different varieties when combining sentences that it almost promotes different styles of writing. I think this is very important when we think about how we are going to teach our students, that there are multiple ways to write correctly.
Again, another question of style is my Grammar Girl post “Alright” Versus “All Right”. They said that “All Right” is the more correct version of the word, however, that does not mean that “alright” is necessarily wrong. It is just an opinion of style, choice, and in an essence, slang. If we are to encourage our students to write in their own style, than this is a perfect example of how we should teach our students. Words and their spellings dictate a level of intelligence or art. Whichever path they choose would be their creative decision.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/all-right-alright.aspx
I thought the video, “African American English in Springville,” was astounding because it seemed as if some of the people still living there were speaking and living in the same time period as slavery. They still used the same “slave” speak as they did back then, the same tones, intonation, inflection, vocabulary, etc. As they said in the video, they spoke very differently from the current day African American English. It isn’t ebonics, but “slave talk”.
I’m not going to lie, but in the other two videos, I felt like I was in elementary and middle school again. Between the sentence diagramming with the separated lines and the connected words, to the FANBOY acronym, it was a nice little review from the grammar I learned so long ago.
I personally liked the activity/lesson about revisions using numbers better than this lesson. I thought that this lesson takes a lot more time, and there was too much involved. I think that the revisions with numbers lesson that we looked at weeks ago was more beneficial to student learning.
Emily at FSU: Week #5 Post →
For the Week 5 I chose to listen to the Grammar Girl podcast on “Versus”. I really enjoyed this podcast and even learned that the word “versing” is not Standard English. At work I often hear the children say, “It is Jane versing Jack on the Foosball table.” I had never thought anything of it…
I really liked your personal example about how “hearing discrimination” can sometimes be incorrect. This just shows that people, even thought they don’t mean to, judge others based on every single detail. I remember watching a specific Tyra Bank’s episode where they talked about how some African-Americans actually are white skinned. So regardless of the sound of someone’s voice or the color of their skin, it does not mean that they should be judged and discriminated based solely on those two qualities. They are not always correct assumptions.
Casey's FSU English Ed Blog: Linguistics Week 5 Discussion →
Though I was disappointed to learn about racial profiling by voice, I wasn’t surprised to hear that the results of that experiment turned out as they did. I don’t think someone’s dialect is always specific to their race, but it clearly can often be an indicator. That video reminded me of when I…
I wasn’t surprised by the results either. I think discriminating based on skin color is bad enough, but discriminating by the “sound” of color I think is ridiculous. I personally think people put too much emphasis on people by their dialect than their character, but I guess that is just the way life is right now, and I don’t see it changing. It all starts in our schools. If there are teachers that are still discriminating based on dialect, and they don’t give students the education they need, than how are they supposed to become intelligent adults?
Week 5
Verb practice score: 16/25
I agree with Angela, I had more trouble with these than I thought, but I will keep working on it!! :D
The Grammar Girl post I chose was “Yo as a Pronoun”. I think this fit perfectly with our videos this week for language discrimination and profiling when it comes to “Ebonics” and African-American English, and also how our assigned reading in Mechanically Inclined includes Pronouns and how they “stand-in”. Apparently, Yo is used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. As an example, teachers would hear that, “
Often the students would be talking to another student, would point at the third person they were referring to, and would say something like ‘Yo threw a thumbtack at me.’” They also did tests and the results showed that students indeed replaced “he or she” with “yo”. So instead of how we use “they” when replacing “he or she”, students are using “yo”.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx
In this week’s reading in Mechanically Inclined, pgs 103-139, I felt that it was a good review on Pronouns, subject-verb agreement, and adjectives and adverbs. I remember when I was learning pronouns, and when I had to figure out if I was supposed to use me or I in a sentence, and what the correct position was for “my guest” and me in a given sentence. I like how they used clever tricks in the book. I remember using the blocking and replacing with me and I, to see without “the guest” which one was more correct standing alone in that given sentence. But what I thought was really helpful from this book was “Put the guest first”, because it is, or how I viewed it, “polite”. These are two great ways to help students remember pronoun placement. Also, I still sometimes have trouble in papers with sticking to one verb tense, but that is something that I continuously work on. In that specific case, I know I can use it with students to say that even though your grammar may not be perfect, you can still work on it and continuously practice.
I found the videos to be very fascinating. Starting with “English in North America II”, I viewed the chart about the sound changes to be very interesting, especially since I experience it everyday. My boyfriend is Canadian, and although he has lived in South Florida for most of his life, he still holds onto his Canadian dialect. I constantly hear the difference when he says words like house and about, which is the “Canadian raising” but I will definitely have to look out for the “Canadian shift” the next time I talk to him. He is going to be spending six days in Canada soon, so it would be very interesting to see if when he obtains more of an accent, if I can pick out and find more dialect changes. And since I am from the North, I found out that we share the same sound changes because of our similar origins, even though we have both drastically changed our current location to the South.
In the “Linguistic Profiling” video, I specifically picked up the quote “the color of their voice,” and I absolutely agree. It is true that you can pick up someone’s race based on their voice, by how they speak and their dialect. However, discriminating and profiling based on that is unacceptable.
In the “Linguistic Discrimination” video, I noticed the quote, “when they spoke, as they did at home in African-American English, their teachers simply assumed they couldn’t do school work”. This is incredibly frightening, because I know that there are teachers out there that still do this. They judge students’ learning based on their dialect, which is wrong and leads to students receiving an inadequate education. From TSL classes, I have already learned of situations where ELL students were tested and placed into special education classes. But these were students who spoke English, but were not receiving a good education because they were being discriminated against, so they were tested and placed into these same special education classes. This does not make sense at all, and it is no wonder that the parents of these students took action.
