4 comic slides with grammar mistakes

This is part of your final exam:

Here's a LINK to four slides (comics) with one grammar mistake each.

Find ONE grammar (no punctuation) mistake in each of the slides!
The grammar exam you will get on Thursday, May 6th, as a take-home exam to be sent to me before Sunday, May 9th, 8 a.m., will have a place where you can put in the four correctly rewritten sentences.

Have fun ;-)

Dr. V

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Today, we are playing the game, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

As you come into the classroom today, pick a post-it note and write a number on it from 1-6 in the order of people coming in.

We'll do a lottery (one student will choose a number from 1-6), and the person who wins is selected to become a millionaire: You'll get 10 comic slides with grammar mistakes in them to be displayed on the Smartboard, and you have to find the mistakes in front of the class. The good thing is, you have three JOKERS:

1) you can ask the audience (everyone gets a sheet of paper, and each individual student will write the answer he/she thinks is right on it in fat letters).

2) you can call someone you know on your cell phone, read the text to him/her, and get the answer this way.

3) you can ask the instructor ONE question of the following:
a) Which speech bubble is the mistake in?
b) What kind of category is the mistake?

For each right answer you give, you receive one piece of candy. If you give a wrong answer, you're out, and the person with the lottery number following immediately yours will get to take your place. You are allowed to keep the candy you have already won up to the point where you made the mistake. If you get all 10 questions right, you're the candy millionaire of ENGL485a ;-)

Here is the link to the slide show of 20 comics with grammar mistakes.
We can play the game twice.

Homework for Feb. 25th: Weaver's "Perspective on Error"

Read the assigned article by Constance Weaver, "Towards a Perspective on Error," and offer your personal opinion about student errors as a comment to this thread.

The 5 Paragraph Essay

I found the articles to be very interesting and very much an awakening to the responsibilities and the thought that is going to have to go into my future English class. The five paragraph essay was always taught at my high school and I learned how to perfect the formula without really ever putting any critical thought and work into the essay. After reading some of the articles on this subject I realized that I myself was forced into the limitations of the five paragraph essay because that is what I knew and what was expected from me by my teachers. Now looking at how I will guide my students to write I realize that if I want them to be able to express their thoughts and think critically then I will have to move outside of the five paragraph essay. By gaining ideas from some of the articles, I hope to give my students the freedom to be able to choose the amount of paragraphs and the style of the essay. But I still think that their needs to be structure and a way to be able to assess my students so that I can grade them fairly with their classmates. I agree with the article by Noskin that expresses how important the prewriting process is and how teachers should not limit this to 20 minutes inside of the classroom. For students to fully form ideas and be able to think critically about a given topic I feel that they need a more open amount of time or space. I also agree with setting up both open ended and close ended writing prompts so that students of all writing and thinking styles can find a topic that intersts them. Overall, I know that my opinion on the five paragraphy essay will change whenever I have control over my own classroom, but for now I feel that it is neccessary to have structure and guide lines when teaching writing but there needs to be more room for creativity and critical thinking.

The Five-Paragraph Essay: Good or Bad???

Many high schools teach the five-paragraph essay. There are voices pro and contra this instructional method of composition. The following links might help you when you are composing your own opinion:

1) This link just explains what the five-paragraph essay is.

2) This link is a pro-5-paragraph-essay research article from the English Journal entitled, "To the Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay" by Kerri Smith. Here's another pro-article: "Breaking the Five-Paragraph-Theme Barrier" by Thomas Nunnaly.

3) This link is a contra-5-paragraph-essay research article from the English Journal entitled, "The Ill Effects of the Five Paragraph Theme" by Kimberly Wesley.

As a comment to this thread, please post a short statement (ca. 500 words) about what you think with regard to the five-paragraph essay -- have you learned it, will/do you teach it, is it beneficial, does it harm students...???

Welcome and Introductions

Dear all,

Welcome to English 485a, Teaching Writing!!!

This is our first assignment:

As a comment to this post, write a short (approx. 500 words) introduction about yourself (your student teaching experience, your strengths/weaknesses, your expectations of your K-12 students, your personality as a teacher, your interests/hobbies, your aspirations for your future, something personal (websites, etc.).

I will use these introductions when we start our exchange with a writing class from a local high school, to tell our cooperating teacher a little bit about you. So keep in mind that a K 9-12 teacher will share your introduction with his students ;-)