Update: The standing girl from yesterday finished day two today. She mixed it up a bit with some one foot for about ten minutes here and there. She said she doesn’t do it in other classes. Hmmm. Clue one. She said she will do it again tomorrow. Inspired another kid in that class to stand. He only lasted about 25 minutes. We’re working on verbs now. We have watched “Verb! That’s What’s Happening” at least four times… (Aside: When I was a high school wrestler back in the 70′s, our assistant coach was a body builder. He was runner up Mr. California–he lost to our former governor out here in California–but he did win Best Arms. Needless to say, he mocked all of us mercilessly if we couldn’t lift a stack of weights taller than he was. But I filled the 90 pound spot on the team, and could actually benchpress my weight…which was some sort of line for him. So I got mocked a bit less. Unless I took off my shirt. But every time he competed, we got our revenge. He would spend the week before a competition buffing up and ripping as he called it. By the
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Before we start: This is the third year of this blog. I’ve run out of ways to refer to the current group of students. This year’s bunch, the current crop, this year’s geniuses, the current crew, etc. I’m getting tired of coming up with new ones. I have to come up with a nickname, a shorthand way of referring to them. I’m leaning toward TCS: The Current Shmarties. (“Mmmmm. Smarties.”) Ok. TCS are finally getting a bit entertaining. I had mentioned a while back that I was finding them a bit, shall we say, conventional. That’s starting to change. Maybe it’s the weather. Exactly a week ago, it was 107 degrees. Today it was 55 and raining, and kids were warming their hands on the exhaust from my lcd projector. We were back working on commas, renaming the rules on the pink sheet: *Before the but *Three in a row *Double adjective *Intro *Interruption *I’m talking to you *Appositive They were still having trouble with the appositives. I think it’s the name. If I didn’t know that they like to put an appositive question on the state test every year, I’d be renaming that one too: My new best friend.
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OMG. These kids do not know from commas this year. Some years, they use commas like salt: they just sprinkle them everywhere. Sometimes it seems, there’s even a little pile of commas for dipping here and there. This year, it’s run-on sentences and single paragraphs as far as the eye can see, with no room to take a breath. (The “salt” for the current crew is capital letters. I swear I have never seen so many randomly-placed capital letters: “…and So i looked under the Bed and I Saw a creepy Looking maggot wriggling and then I ran And tripped on my…” Not since the colonial days have we seen such rampant, random capitalizing.) So we’re working on several of the rules for commas, and going one of the few handouts I use that came with the anthology years ago. (They’re called pink sheets since one of my servants a few years ago decided, as she was doing the copying, that “all grammar sheets should be pink.” OK. Even when we’re out of pink paper, and I have to copy them on goldenrod or canary or whatever, they’re still called pink sheets.) The first rule on the sheet talks about
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When I tried to put the ellipsis dots (…) as a title, my blog software couldn’t cope, and title in the permalink became 1903. So I’ll just call this entry 1903… Today I witnessed another sign of the continuing de-evolution of seventh graders – isn’t each succeeding generation supposed to get smarter? We were working on apostrophes, and they were doing ok until… #11. (Lets/Let’s) go to the store. Two-thirds of them picked “Lets.” And to add insult to injury, they thought I was joking when I reminded them that “let’s” is a contraction for “let us.” “Wha? Lettuce? What are you talking about?” OMG, second day back from vacation, and they’re already wearing me down… 46 more days… Awhile back I talked about how the head of our district instructional services department had to finally track me down in my classroom to get me to show up for an EL in-service. I suggested to her that the way things ended up — with her coming to observe me and then sticking around after to talk about the things she saw, and how I could incorporate some of the stuff she was pitching into my routine — might be the way
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After almost 20 years of doing this job, I’d like to think I sort of know my way around the junior high psyche. Plus I remember 7th and 8th grade like they were yesterday, and some might still accuse me of being a seventh grader yet. But every now and then…well, I got nothin’. Sometimes I have no idea what is going on in their heads. It’s actually one of the fun things about this kind of work. Last week we were again slogging through prepositional phrases. I was going around checking their pink sheet homework. The pink sheets are about the only thing I use from the vast array of materials provided with our hefty literature anthologies. They are basic grammar and punctuation worksheets, and after we go over them in class, we use clickers for other exercises, and watch some grammar rock and such. This week’s sheet on prep phrases had a section on placing them near the words they are modifying. You veterans know from the old misplaced modifiers and “dangling participles.” (“Don’t let your participle dangle” is right up there with “Don’t let your meat loaf.”) You know like, Johnny mailed a letter to his gramma
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A few years ago, while we were reading Outsiders aloud, I was about to give them my usual “reading check” type quiz to make sure they were following along, thinking about what we’d talked about, connecting the literary terms to the examples in the book, etc. I can’t quite remember what my inspiration was (probably just to throw them for a loop like I like to do), but I decided to let them “cheat.” My quizzes on the books and stories we read are always open book, but this time I told them they could take the quiz, not only open book, but “open mouth.” I told them they could talk about the questions and answers as much as they want in any way they want, and decide however they want to, which of the answers to choose. “You can share what you know…or not. You can decide whether to heed the wisdom of the group…or not. You just can’t lie. You can’t knowingly tell everyone the wrong answer on purpose.” One class that day came up with the name Quiz for Dummies. The rest of the periods thought that was a little “mean,” so we’ve stuck with Open Mouth. [...]
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That reminds me of those great SNL skits about the Sofa King. You know, how the prices are "Sofa King" low, the deals are "Sofa King" great, etc. (You obviously have to say those phrases out loud to get the joke.)