“Yet even as I wince at the terrible risk we all took, I remember thinking at the time that it was the right decision—because it it felt as though the hand of fate was ushering us forward.”
Melba Patillo Beals on the Integration of Little Rock Schools in Warriors Don’t Cry (1994)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
In my experience, most students at some point struggle with the idea, both in theory and practice, of subject-verb agreement. I worked my way through college and graduate school tutoring students in writing, and more than half the time, students were referred to the writing center for subject-verb agreement issues in their prose.
This week’s Text is a simple learning support that conjugates the verb to be and explains one way of making sure that subjects and verbs agree. The school year has started, so this is a quick entry between adjusting instructional materials for this year’s freshmen, writing an IEP, and preparing lessons for my upcoming absence on account of jury duty. Are you this busy?
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, The Weekly Text
Tagged learning supports
The great American literary critic Edmund Wilson, of whom I have long been an great admirer, was famous for his refusal card, which I’ve reprinted here. At some point, I’ll rewrite this for public school teachers. Is there anything or anyone in particular to which or whom you would like to say no?
“Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him without compensation to:
read manuscripts
contribute to books or periodicals
do editorial work
judge literary contests
deliver lectures
address meetings
make after-dinner speeches
broadcast;
Under any circumstances to:
contribute to or take part in symposiums
take part in chain-poems or other collective compositions
contribute manuscripts for sales
donate copies of his books to libraries
autograph books for strangers
supply personal information about himself
supply photographs of himself
allow his name to be used on letter-heads
receive unknown persons who have no apparent business with him.”
Students with learning challenges almost invariably present to their teachers with executive skills issues. How might teachers in their content areas, while conveying the facts and skills on which students will be tested, build opportunities into our lessons for students to have useful experiences in learning to organize themselves? Since some colleagues and I conducted a professional inquiry into executive skills a few years back, the possibility of this kind of synthetic unit, using abstract content to teach concrete, real-world living skills has nagged at me. This Weekly Text is a prototype for the kind of learning activity I imagine. I use the word prototype deliberately. I have never used this lesson on the commonplace book in the classroom.
We expect students to manage larger and larger amounts information, but at least at the school in which I work, we offer no formal instruction or training to assist students in discovering and developing their own methods of organization. For students with even mild executive skills challenges, this is a devastating omission. But what would we use to teach organization, and how?
You can click through the link above to learn the basics on the commonplace book from Wikipedia’s good page (from which I was edified to learn that by “the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students”). Fortunately, cloud computing gives students and teachers a variety of formats in which to start a digital-age commonplace book. Evernote and Dropbox are two of the better-known places to start and maintain a commonplace book.
I don’t know your school’s policy is on smartphones, but both Evernote and Dropbox offer apps on the major mobile applications platforms. I believe that the smartphone has potential to serve as a powerful learning adjunct for struggling learners. If your school permits the use of smartphones in the classroom (mine, for reasons that strike me as both foolish and ignorant, if that’s possible, doesn’t), then this lesson has room to help students learn to use their smartphones to aid them in their school work in both learning and organization.
So, the Commonplace Book Lesson Plan is a reading and writing lesson that introduces students to the concept of keeping information (at least at the beginning) in one place. I expect as I begin using this lesson, I’ll find ways it might be adjusted or adapted for greater sophistication and complexity, e.g. teaching students to create, use and organize useful filing systems, so that it can be used along a continuum that matches students’ abilities.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Reference, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged context clues
“Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.”
John Dewey (1859-1952)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
On this sad anniversary, I am at work, right next to Ground Zero, on Trinity Place between Cedar and Thames in Lower Manhattan.
Here are five parsing sentences worksheets that you might find helpful in teaching your students a variety of things: what nouns are, what the parts of a complete sentence are, how to pick sentences apart by identifying their constituent parts, and how those parts relate to one another syntactically.
This is the first time I’ve posted parsing sentences worksheets, so I attach the Parsing Sentences Worksheets Users’ Manual. If you haven’t previously used worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, and you’re wondering why there are asterisks where subject nouns and pronouns should be, take a quick look at the About Weekly Texts page linked to just above the photo.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“We live in a time of such rapid change and growth of knowledge that only who is in a fundamental sense a scholar—that is, a person who continues to learn and inquire—can hope to keep pace, let alone play the role of guide.”
Nathan M. Pusey The Age of the Scholar (1963)
“Our best chance for happiness is education.”
Mark Van Doren (1894-1973)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
School begins Tuesday, September 8th here in New York City (and as Joey Ramone once said, the sun is out, and I want some!), so I’ll quickly publish these two takes on the word ally, as a noun and a verb, that I use to assist students in understanding these oft-used words. I emphasize to students that these are fundamental terms in their social studies vocabulary. You might want to take a look at the About Weekly Texts page above for information on the format of these two worksheets (what’s with the asterisks?), as well as the Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual. I generally mention in passing the word allied both as an adjective and past tense of the verb. Does allied need its own worksheet?
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“We pass through this life but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
Excerpted from: Gould, Steven Jay. The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996).
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