Friday, March 27, 2009

Perfoaming Grammar

My students love fragments. Really. Drives me nuts. After the first paper, I selected a few "excerpts" to put on the overhead. No names, just a paragraph here and there to illustrate the point. We worked through them as a class, first finding the offending fragments and then attaching them to previous sentences, or adding to them to make them complete. While listening in during workshopping for the second paper, I heard a number of students pointing out fragments--so at least a few of them understand the point.

Other than that, I haven't really done any formal class grammar lessons. I've saved that for the individual papers for the most part. I usually pick out the patterns of error, and if more than a couple of students are having the same issue, we'll talk about it as a class. A number of times students have stayed after class to ask about a grammar issue--sometimes from another class--and we've had a good discussion. One student brought his paper from another class because he didn't understand what "passive voice" meant. We started a discussion with a few other students, and then a few more from the next class (Dr. Schwiebert's literature class) joined in. All we needed was the pizza.

I will say this: I think English 1010 has been detrimental to my own grammar skills as I've misspelled two words on the board this week. The students loved that. Good grief. But, hey--if Weber State University can misspell the words on permanent signs (Perfoming Arts), I should be given some slack, right?

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