oh hai. i has a title.

I figured posting a title in lol-cat speak would get a lot of future English teachers' attention.

So...Practicum. Not half bad - I really like the atmosphere of Central High school - though it may just be my class. My class is weird - I'm in there with a student teacher from Drury and another practicum student from SEC 302, so there's four people walking around wanting to teach. Sometimes the kids must feel like they're in a fishbowl. But I like the classes I interact with, though I know they aren't typical (I'm with an AP English class and a sophomore honors class). I really love her AP English class. At Central, the general makeup of AP classes are the smart kids who aren't supermotivated enough to take IB classes. This week we had a great two-day discussion (and these are hour and a half classes) on essay writing, what the teachers wanted and what the students felt like the teachers wanted. I've never seen high school students get so excited about talking about essays! It was great. I did a think-aloud last week with the same class on a John Donne poem - it was a blast. I really have a lot of fun teaching in a classroom. I love to see high school kids excited. *sigh*

Um...so I-search. I did mine on teaching Grammar in the context of Student Writing. Most of the info in my paper you could find in chapter 6, but I strongly suggest getting this book for some great ideas on mini-lessons. If you're interested in the more theoretical reasons behind it, check out this book. One of the most important things I want to stress on the blog, if not in my paper, is that most schools want you to teach grammar. In fact, most students want you to teach grammar, at least in some fashion. Believe me, when adults perceive their writing as deficient, the first thing they do is blame their English teachers. From the late sixties to early nineties, many theorists decided grammar is intuitive and didn't need to be taught at all. It is true to some extent that kids who read a lot understand innately why a sentence sounds wrong...but that isn't true of most students. We still have a responsibility to teach students how to write "correctly," because if we don't, we are handicapping them in a society that judges them on how they write and speak. We just have to teach it in a way that actually INFLUENCES the way they write and speak.