UNconventional Grammar

If I got one thing out of these few chapters it would have to be: teach grammar with writing! This was one concept that was constantly reiterated in this reading. However, it speaks the truth about the purpose grammar serves in our use of language – that we actually use grammar in our formal writing when expressing ideas. I couldn’t help but think back to our first day of class when we were talking about our feelings toward grammar, what kind of mastery we have over the topic and what we hoped to learn in the class. It was through our discussion that I realized that maybe grammar isn’t so important when informally or vocally expressing ideas. Classroom discussion is a perfect example of this, because students may be talking about newly formed ideas or even just winging it as they go.

Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing definitely takes an alternative approach to this subject – I feel like I’ve never been taught grammar in this way before! (Really, I don’t think I have ever been taught any other way than through Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition.) As I started to read over the three structural features of the English language, I honestly felt a little confused by these classifications. I felt kind of dumb, but then I read on and the book explained that these are learned, implied categories. I always just thought of the standard terms used to name nouns, participles, conjunctions, etc. But what Constance Weaver stresses is to categorize these terms by their function, not by assigned meaning.

I never thought of respecting students’ dialects as a part of teaching multiculturalism, but it is true that many students will refuse to give up some of their slang. Even as an English major, I will still use improper grammar at times. But the difference is, I know what I am doing wrong and I recognize this. Does that matter? I always thought so but maybe not. Throughout all these grammar conspiracies, I was actually glad to read the part about interviewers’ grammatical pet peeves. I still want grammar to be considered where it should be, and be taught to students as it is applicable to their lives. Where better to apply these skills than the workforce?

Principles of English

"A Brief History of English" I found to be a nice little refresher on my history timeline, even though most of the info is pre-1500. It was a bit difficult to keep up with all the contributors to our language, but the article helped to slow down and clarify some of the key points from that gut-busting video. For one, I found it interesting that Modern English is subdivided into Early and Late Modern because it shows how rapidly our language is changing and branching off now. The Old English version of The Lord's Prayer was definitely cool too. But there was one statement from Mr. Roberts that continued to swirl around in my mind: "Languages don't become simpler; they merely exchange one kind of complexity for another." I guess I want to know what is stopping a language from developing into a simplified version of repetitive slang, for instance. Isn't it possible? The real kicker was at the end, where Roberts says it was "silly" to apply the grammatical rules of Latin to English, and blames this flawed system for some students' disinterest in the subject. I agree with the first part of this argument but I'm unsure about the second. Do the students lack respect for this system or are they showing apathy for a greater concept?

A few of these elements were repeated in "Good English and Bad," but this article was able to give me a more in-depth analysis of the English language. I always knew that it was sort of backwards, but now I have an idea as to why it is so confusing. Mainly it was how Latin rules were applied to English, but the contradictory classifications and such at the beginning of the piece really had me questioning this subject I love so much! I also never knew how much the potential revisions and alterations of the English language were disputed over by men like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Johnson. When I think about it, it is only natural that some should want to take action in controlling or facilitating change in the language. A united nation has a dominant language. But it seems to be getting a bit ridiculous when people are getting quite offended by a dictionary. I suppose that shows the high standard we hold to the dictionary as the language auhtority.

I chose "It's Like, EXTREME But Not GROSS" and I just couldn't help but laugh at the expression "missed the forest for the trees" in the first sentence. Perfect play on words for all this exploration into language and its meaning. As I was reading through this final article, I could recognize with at least 3 of the trends Lehigh pointed out among the younger generations. It was almost shameful. Then I felt even worse because television is eroding my and everyone else's brain. Just the other day I read that brain activity is higher when we are sleeping than when we are watching TV! It is true that watching the tube is a passive brain activity, whereas reading, like the article said, is an active one. I believe that TV is a large part of the declining language compentency rate, but there are surely more factors at play here. Both of these are part of a larger culture that has developed in the younger generations, as I see it. In this culture, where school isn't cool, why bother to study subjects like English?

My Role as a Teacher-to-be

Now that we are bringing together everything we have learned so far for our group teach, it is beginning to feel more like the real thing (I'm guessing!). As part of Group 3, the Dystopia Group, we do not yet have specifics planned out but we have an outline of what we want to do with the class and we are all pretty excited! I can't give too much away, but I believe it will turn out well. As far as the group itself goes, I think it is neat that we are all at different phases in our teaching, and I, being the youngest, definitely could learn a lot from these girls. We balance each other out because we all have something different to contribute at each meeting. We assigned tasks at the last meeting, so tomorrow we will go over what we have and try to plan everything out to more detail. I picked this group because I really like pieces of the sci-fi and dystopia genres. I am glad I went with this because I ended up picking a group based on my interests, not on who I thought would be in the group. It has worked out really well because we are focused on our work while I ended up making some new friends in the process.

On the other hand, we have some teachers that are coming in Wednesday for us to listen to, ask questions and get advice from. I really liked the teacher panel that Shannon organized last Spring semester, where each teacher talked about their different classroom experiences and included a segment entitled "10 Things I Wish I Knew About Teaching 10 Years Ago." I especially liked when the one teacher talked about how, on the first day of school, he would bring powertools into his classroom (this was usually for ninth graders I think). He would pick out one of the burly boys in the class and give him a hammer to try to get a screw into a two by four. When the boy couldn't do it, he would find the smallest girl in the class and give her a powerdrill so she could complete the task with no trouble. The message from this exercise?: Teachers have to give students the right tools to succeed, but then it is up to the student to use those tools. There was also a teacher who talked about her move from the high school to the middle school, and how refreshing it was because she felt liek she had fallen in a rut. She said not to be afraid to branch out if you ever feel like this. One teacher I observed with at Greencastle told me after she got her degree, she worked in another field for about 16 years before going back to teaching! So that was another good piece of advice to think about. Even though I wasn't able to stay for the whole presentation, it was reassuring to hear from experienced teachers about real problems and solutions that they dealt with. I took a lot away from that, so I'm hoping to do the same this time. I would like to hear about everything from cool activities in the classroom to their student teaching experiences to their opinions on censorship since that was a really hot topic we talked about. My list of questions will include ones like these:

What is one cool activity that you use in your classroom?

Do you teach classes that are diverse, or a part of a more specific population?

Do you ever teach controversial or banned books? How about books you don't enjoy to read?

How much instruction time do you devote to grammar and other writing skills?

If you could give one piece of advice to a future teacher, what would it be?

Etcetera, etcetera. These are adopted from our classroom discussions, my reader profile project and just my own uncertainties and misgivings about my future as a teacher. But I must admit I think that sometimes no matter how much advice you get, eventually we're all just going to have to take the plunge and go on the journey, which is the only way I can describe how I think teaching will be! I realize that it is a process of trial and error, and that it will become easier once I get some experience under my belt. Is there anything you guys are unsure about when you think of yourself as a teacher? What questions do you have for our visitors?

From Collins to Bowman... What Is our Future Outlook?

After reading The Hunger Games, I just have to say that I am excited to have this book included in my group teach! When I started to read about the point system used for the Hunger Games players, it really showed how much the concept was made to seem like a sporting event we would see on ESPN, showing player stats, sponsors, and the whole nine yards. I also thought it was really interesting how, in relation to the title of the book and the themes of food, food-getting and hunting, people’s eating habits seemed to demonstrate their rank. One example is when Katniss and Peeta are first on the train with Effie Trinket, and she compliments the two on their table manners, saying how barbaric the last two were at the table. Katniss then purposefully eats with her hands, wiping her hands on the tablecloth. She does this just to irritate Effie, using it as a tool to her advantage. We also see three characters, Katniss, Peeta and Haymitch, dunking their food when they are eating. Peeta first dunks his rolls in hot chocolate, which Katniss imitates, and Haymitch dunks his pork in wine. I thought, that is a lot of dunking! But I also realized those three are of the proletariat class, while Cinna, Portia and Effie are “Capitolists.” Maybe I’m reading a little much into the symbolism, but it really helped me to think about the related themes I named off earlier. Can you guys think of any other times when food is used symbolically in the novel?

Probably the most shocking moment for me was when the wolf “muttations” appeared and then Katniss finds out they are the dead tributes. I was wondering if they really brought back the players’ bodies or if they simply harvested their DNA to make these creations, but either way it was a pretty disturbing scene. As I said before in my last blog, I’m a sucker for a love story and The Hunger Games definitely delivered in that aspect, because the whole time I was wondering if she would end up with Gale or Peeta (or neither!). But even at the end, that wasn’t really answered. The ending in its entirety urges the reader on to the sequel. As I went with Katniss, on her journey, it was like I really shared her belief that once the Games were over, it would be a happy ending. But in the back of my mind, I knew this not to be true.
Would I teach Hunger Games in the classroom? Yes. It is a little violent maybe, but it removes the cursing that can become a deterrent as it is in some books I would want to potentially teach. I also like the fact that it is part of a series, because if the students liked it enough it would be possible to read the next two books in the trio. However, that might take up a significant part of the school year as the book was a tad lengthy.

As for the article I read “Is Stupid Making Us Google?” by James Bowman, and it had me thinking about this trend of educational apathy we were talking about in the last class with the references it made to “The Dumbest Generation.” Among other dilemmas he discusses, Bowman poses the question, Is it our generation’s fault, or are our mentors to blame? I thought, Is the blame on the rise of technology? The whole time I can’t help but find it ironic that I am reading this article online. While going through the article, I also related it to two other ideas. The whole time I was reading Hunger Games, I kept thinking about how so many of my generation wouldn’t be able to survive in such a dire situation. We are so focused on man’s own culture and creations that we have fallen mostly out of touch with the Earth. I actually have a somewhat decent about of friends who are more skilled in hunting, trapping and other outdoors skills than I am, but somehow I feel that this is the minority. I feel that not only are we not being taught to read in an educational sense, but we are also not pushed to learn everyday, common sense practices. The article also took my mind to what type of society we live in, which is a monochronic society, meaning time-oriented and progressive. Americans are expected to be on time to class, work, appointments, or wherever we go. Consequently, we expect to move along with our day in a timely manner, and this depends on all things from the services we receive to the daily traffic flow. I for one feel the constraints of time every day, as I go to school five days a week and work three. As I have to make enough time to do my reading for school, making time for leisurely reading is the last thing on my mind. At one point Bowman references “Nicholas Carr [who says ]that what we are witnessing is not just an educational breakdown but a deformation of the very idea of intelligence” (Bowman) I would agree with something along those lines, maybe more like that the value of intelligence and an educated mind seems to be deteriorating.

Censorship in "Feed"... Censorship in the Real World

Feed is now one of my new favorite books. I don’t care that it is an adolescent novel! I think it speaks volumes about what our future could look like if we that live in the core (not those who live in the periphery) continue to live as we do now. In America at least, our consumerism and greed has overtaken our endeavors in life and our measurement of success. The capitalist economy has created an apathetic attitude towards anything lying outside of individual self benefit. I could go on and on but I loved this book because of the ideas expressed in it, and I always am a sucker for a love story. I also like sci-fi thrillers if they’re not too weird. It’s funny because I always try to make predictions for what the future will be like and what technology will bring us – one of the ideas I had before this book was that instead of iPods, we will have a chip in our head that whenever we think it will just play a song. And Feed definitely took that to a whole other level! I picked the Group 3 dystopia theme because I love books like this. I could definitely see myself teaching this in my classroom.


Webb’s chapter about Huck Finn definitely challenges any plans I had to teach that novel. It is one of my favorites and I would love to teach it, but I feel like I would be throwing myself into the middle of a hot debate by doing so. However, it presented a solid argument for why Huck Finn is racially inappropriate, and it made me see a side of it I’d never seen before. However, I still don’t see the novel as negative because while it is showing a depiction of Jim as a uneducated black man who is surrounded by the white people who betray him, I still look at the book in its historical context and I think that it is not condemning black people to this image but I think rather “exposes injustice” about attitudes toward the African population during the time period. I also wish to point out that throughout all this the book is about more than race: it is a coming of age story which shows what Southern culture was like in the early twentieth century.


The NCTE article, however, made a very good argument as well and took the other side. It makes bold statements like the one saying that teachers who only use bland, “safe” pieces of literature are “lying to their students about the nature and condition of mankind.” Besides showing how censorship has had harmful repercussions throughout history, it mentioned a lot of things I found generally interesting as a teacher. One instance is when the article mentions how John Knowles’ A Separate Peace is a good choice to teach because the book has received wide critical recognition, partly “because it is relatively short and will keep the attention of many slow readers, and partly because it has proved popular with many students of widely differing abilities.”


When I read about Carole Marlowe being fired for using a certain text even though it was approved for the classroom, I instantly thought of a documentary I watched where college professors were fired for including any suggestions of intelligent design in their lessons, theses, etc. Noll writes on the practice of experienced teachers guiding novice ones on what literature to use, “They have become keenly aware of their own precarious positions in the school and recognize that fighting for the right to teach certain literature could cost them their jobs” (60). I think it shows that we as teachers are only valued so far as we teach to the school and state standards, to what is PC; it is amazing that a teacher would be fired due to an ignorant comment made by an unnamed parent who had never even read the disputed book. I think there is a difference between when students oppose a book being taught and when parents step in whose views are threatened. The NCTE statement says that protests also derive from outside groups as well as instructors themselves. The point is that students need exposure to conflicting viewpoints and debatable topics in order to form their own opinions about the way they see the world. Keeping uncomfortable topics away from children only hinder them from realizing the truths about history, culture, society and so much more.

More on Literature Circles

Reading these chapters opened up to me the options a teacher has with LCs. If I do choose to use this method in my classroom (which is pretty likely) I would probably use them a couple of times a year intermittently, but not all the time. The roles seem like a good idea to start off with, because I do worry with this method that students will not vocalize as much as they'd be expected to, especially with those students that are not "readers." I would probably use the roles as journal prompts in order to eventually assimilate the students into free writing journal entries. The book talks about teachers who are too interruptive and try to control the discussions too much. Again, I think a little more teacher facilitation at the beginning of the process would be helpful, but out of place once the students got the hang of things. I also found a lot of the general tips for up-and-coming teachers really helpful. For instance, Daniels gave the listing of favorite Lit Circle books in Appendix C, the listing of peer reviewed journals and the methods for building one's classroom library in order to show us what we will be dealing with once we get in the classroom.

However, I found it interesting that in Nancy Steineke's section, she said that groups need to mix it up so that they don't fall into the same ruts. Somehow I don't think students would do this on their own, so there would probably need to be days when the teacher says, "Today, do this first..." or "Consider this in your discussions." I also wanted to point out Sharon Weiner's observation: "Too many of my kids were unwilling to trust their own responses - they far too often wanted to know what the 'official' interpretation of an event or character was or what I (the allegedly infallible teacher) thought the story 'meant'" (Daniels 172). I feel like I always was, and to a degree, still am that student. I always think back to the first time I read "Metaphors" by Sylvia Plath in my AP English class. When the teacher announced that it was about a pregnant woman, all the other students agreed that's what they thought it was about. But I didn't get that at all out of the poem, and it seems like I never seemed to get that "accepted" meaning everyone else understood. So in this way I can identify with the suggestion that students should not be told the accepted interpretations of a work, but instead discover what their experiences lead them to believe about it. Maybe once students are done hashing out their viewpoints they can be told, but they need to understand that it's not always about seeing what everyone else sees. In fact, a perspective that strays from the everyday is what is truly valuable in my eyes.

Literature Circles, Linguistics and Tracking, Oh My!

Starting with the Literature Circles readings, Daniels sheds new light on an age old concept: the book club. When he talks about using this concept to get students reading who normally wouldn't, for some reason it made me think of the movie Mean Girls where Kady is made to join the Mathletes because her grades are so bad. While the circles are a great idea to get students who are lethargic about literature motivated, you don't want to make it a punishment. How to do this? Expanding lit circles into your classroom gets everybody doing it. It may be a little scary as a teacher to allow so much free discussion based on reader response, but Daniels seems to have this practice down to a science so that it is done right. I also like how Daniels says that we need to keep these groups permanent, though members will be mixed up according to what book they choose.

After reading "Untracking Students" I started thinking about the pros and cons to tracking. Basically, I concluded, that tracking is beneficial because students' learning styles can be identified and they can be placed where they are getting the specific attention they need. Tracking is disadvantageous because it labels students and segregates them. Christensen notes that "the notion of great differences in student capacity is false" (171). Students "come with different sets of skills, but not necessarily different sets of intellectual capacities" (172). I used to think that all types of students were being put in the general education classes just to save money in school districts. Even so, this can be a great thing as longs as every student still has his or her individual learning needs met as fully as possible. Daniels offers LCs as a method of detracking because it creates a diverse, yet "heterogeneous" learning environment where these different personalities and "sets of skills" come together.

"When more attention is paid to the way something is written or said than to what is said, students' words and thoughts become devalued" (Christensen 101). This sentence really seemed to sum up the article for me and got me thinking about my place in the argument. Honestly, it is hard for someone like me who plans to teach the importance of grammar, syntax, etc. to read that maybe it is not so important, especially when I already can already feel these lessons slipping out of classrooms. In a txt msg world where proper English seems to have less meaning every day, I must say I don't think we need to put less importance on liguistics to put more emphasis on student voice. If we help students realize their opinions are important by demonstrating this on a daily basis, a grammar lesson is never out of place. I believe that since their opinions are valued, it is their right to be taught how to communicate them correctly.