Mini Lessons

September 19:

Prefixes and Suffixes, Homophones, Registers and Genres:

I thought E had a great idea about letting us form our own opinions on the difference between register and genre. We struggled through it, but E kept to their guns and let us figure things out for ourselves with their guidance. I liked R's strategy for remembering the difference between effect and affect, I've never been exposed to that before. I think that R's lesson was an important one, but it seemed to unfold at too accelerated a pace. Granted, it was due to our understanding of such differences already as English majors, I guarantee it would not be over so quickly in a high school class. The incorporation of an activity with such a lesson would have enhanced the content. Although, there isn't much time for such things. I think a difficulty with having to teach sort of boring topics is to make them fun and engaging, but in a meaningful and purposeful way. I liked that much of these lessons was student lead, in the sense that E,R and E sort of took a step back and let the students figure out things on their own and then called us back to monitor and reaffirm (or correct) what we came up with. I think it would be easy for students to question the purpose of these lessons, as they seem sort of disconnected from life and a bit dry, but E, E and R set up the context of these topics and related them to real-world scenarios. To be effective, I think these lessons should be recalled upon down the road when dealing with texts or students' own work - i.e making them recognize how frequently they come into contact with these topics.