September 26:
Gerunds, Wordiness, Greetings and Closings, and the Active and Passive Voice:
Each lesson had a particular thing I focused on that I found worthy of note; aside from the usefulness of each of these topics (I've never even heard of gerunds!). I enjoyed C's incorporation on pop culture media and their application of their lesson to real-life situations, i.e writing formal and informal letters. This is a great example to help students see writing outside of the classroom - that it's actually useful to learn such skills. E's lesson was beneficial to their students and had a direct link with their own writing, so it was both informative and practical. What better grammar practice is their than examining your own writing? S's lesson grabbed attention with the use of powerpoint and was related to real life by illustrating the preferred writing of academia. M's lesson was a bit confusing to me (I really felt like a high school student learning unknown material) but they were supportive of our blunders and continued to guide us through practice. Each used student oriented practice instead of just pointing at samples and engaged us with an open dialogue, which was nice. Even if things didn't run smoothly, they would just interject to put us back on track to make deductions of our own instead of just correcting us and moving on. I'd be interested to see how they incorporate these lessons within a larger unit, or if they would recall them later to access students' progress.
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1 comment:
Thank you for your thoughtful blog commentaries. I highlighted some text and issues below that your writing made me think about:
"The last thing I want is to fall on my face in front of a class because of a lapse in self-confidence; I'd rather a downfall come from taking a risk in trying something new that didn't turn out."
You go on to talk more about the relationship between teacher confidence and authority as well as the place for social implications in the classroom. These, for me, are related. We can discuss social implications of the content or curriculum, and we can also discuss the social implications for the teacher's role. Given the debates you were having without yourself throughout and after teaching this lesson, what are your thoughts now about the social implications of the teacher's role? How are these similar/different from the social implications of the content/curriculum?
What's at risk if the the teacher loses their self-confidence in front of the class? Who do students think we are, and who do we need to be for them? Why?
These are great issues you've raised. I'd like to continue to address these in class. Thank you for your serious engagement of questions that get to the heart of the power relationship between teachers and students.
k
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