Groundhog Day...Again

Remember your first year of teaching?  Wasn't ignorance bliss?

Yours, I mean-- not the students'. You taught something once, and they learned the skill. Ahhhhhh.

Wasn't it frustrating to have to teach skills they should have learned in 5th, 6th and 7th grade?   I mean, what's going on?  Are those teachers just kicked back reading romance novels while the kiddos run amok?

Once you put it all together you gasped in horror.  Those teachers were teaching, so were you. Your students were going to advance to the next grade with no ability to demonstrate some of the lessons that you taught them.

Ouch.  Yeah.  I can still feel the burn.

I feel it every time an 8th grader asks me what similes, metaphors, hyperbole and personification are...again.

And again.

If you're like me, that last one always gets you.  Personification has all of the quietude of Vegas.  PERSONification.  It's like a neon sign with dancing girls wearing fancy costumes and big, foam "We're #1" fingers pointing to P-E-R-S-O-N.  It's the official "If it were a snake" literary device.

I feel it for every apostrophe a child rains down on his paper to make something plural. I feel it every time there's an "a" slammed next to a "lot."   Contractions?  To, Two, Too/  Were, We're, Where/  There, Their, They're...   I could go on.

I'm not talking about the Queen's English.  I'm talking about what it takes to read and write on grade level.  Lawd.

This morning I stopped by the workroom after dawn cracked to flip the switch on the copier, so it would be ready for the first user.  Someone had left a worksheet behind.  Golden.  It was full of commonly misused and confused words.

Are you going to suffocate under (to, two, too) many papers to grade?  (Your, You're) students are over (there, they're, their) crawling out of the library's window towards freedom.

Okay.  It didn't say that exactly, but that was the format.  Eighth graders can always use more practice with these skills.  AND I just happened to read about a cool dry-erase marker technique on a Facebook page.  Teachers were advising a French instructor to allow students the chance to write their vocabulary words on their desks for practice. They are (They're) easily erased.  Cool.

So, instead of handing out the worksheet, I read each sentence aloud and indicated the word that I wanted them to spell.  They wrote it.  I walked around the room to check their work.  If they were correct, I told them to erase the word to get ready for the next.  If they were incorrect, they tried again.  And, yes, I retaught contractions.

Again.

And I bet the fat lady hasn't sung on that one yet either.

(Luckily, I stocked up on dry-erase markers at Walgreens during the Back-To-School sales like a true hoarder who had no idea how 50 markers would come in handy during this school year.)

The Daily Spark

"The Daily Spark series gives teachers an easy way to transform downtime into productive time.   The 180 exercises-- one for each day of the school year-- will take students five to ten minutes to complete and can be used at the beginning of class, in the few moments before turning to a new subject, or at the end of class." (from the introduction)

Writing, poetry, journal writing, spelling & grammar, vocabulary, Shakespeare and SAT: English Test Prep!

The Daily Spark is full of possibilities.   For most 8th graders, five to ten minutes will not be enough to complete the writing activities.   That's okay.   Be flexible.   Use the prompts that best fit your students and the time frame that you have.   Some are intriguing enough to transform into longer writing assignments.

Simplify the topics, or add rigor.   I have done a quick browse through the books that I own penciling light circles around the page numbers that would most likely interest my students.

Here's a sample topic from the Writing edition:

________________________________________________
Sweltering, Not Hot

Even the best writers rely on obvious words.   Practice mental flexibility by writing a paragraph describing a typical August afternoon without using the words hot, humid, heat or sun.
________________________________________________

Please note that the above material is copyrighted by Spark Publishing, but I thought they wouldn't mind if I just gave you a little preview.   You may purchase the book on Amazon http://amzn.com/1411402286

Stephen King isn't as scary as you think he is.

I grew up in a neighborhood with sewers.   After the made-for-television film of Stephen King's novel It stalked our living rooms, I noticed that formerly fearless friends no longer saw that clean patch of concrete hugging the curb as an acceptable gathering place.   Commonplace manholes had transformed into cursed portals to fear overnight.   This is the power of prose.   I remember spending a day of spring break as a teenager stretched out in my backyard reading It.   Horror is not my preference, but I loved the film Stand By Me which was based on King's novella The Body.   I decided to give It a try.

Zoom.   That book is a hunk of pages, but I was done in record time.   King's writing style is economical and his pacing is genius.   It's like getting on a well-oiled machine and zipping along a track.   Weeeee.   Even if you don't care for his subject matter, there's a lot to learn from his style.

Pick up a copy of his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.   My favorite bit of advice is to prune adverbs from our writing.   An adverb can be a blinking neon arrow that says, "This verb is weak."

Now and then, you will need adverbs, but be merciless when it comes to those that water down your writing.   Once you are on the lookout, bad adverbs become very, very, very obvious.   It's also great fun to teach the workbook lessons on adverbs and have students get the right answers and then revise the sentences that remain.   Sure, they are grammatically correct, but we can do better than that.   Really.

If you need to brush up on your adverbs, here's a link to Schoolhouse Rock's instructional film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWYmEICNgOQ

Thank you to one of my Christopher Newport University college professors who helped shape my writing style, Dr. Roark Mulligan, for donating a new copy of On Writing to my classroom.