solo will put his stories here...he didn't make this thread because he is a baby

Awesome, a Lounger actually picked up sponsorship!

HaHa I was going to do that.

I'm honored and ashamed at the same time! Wonderful. Thanks, sir.

The only update right now is that my students still don't all understand nouns, despite the fact I thought they did. I am asking my dept head for advice tomorrow. I feel like I'm overteaching or expecting too much from them.

If I do anything with verbs other than "action or state of being" they're going to definitely do poorly overall.

For reference, I gave a quiz over nouns that was the nine classifications we've talked about for two weeks (singular, plural, possessive, common, proper, compound, collective, concrete, abstract). They had to write a definition for each in their own words and then give an example noun for each category. 18 blanks. 18 points.

Average score for 72 students was 13.1 out of 18. 72%.

I feel like they should have done better since, ya know, I gave them all the answers the day before (and we'd been covering it two weeks).

I'm worried this thread will turn into me ranting, so I'll stop there and try to get better stories tomorrow.

Solo, this is a tough subject because it is very mechanical, many people feel insulted when told they could use work on it, and the learning process can be difficult and uncolorful. Teach kids how to ride dolphins or something, and I'm sure they'd all get straight A's.

Just a thought ... are the sentences you may be diagramming or otherwise using at all colorful, funny, or interesting? If you make up sentences at random or use ones from a textbook you may have good sentences, but if you take popular quotes from movies or the punchlines of jokes, for instance, you might find students a tiny bit less turned off or zoned out. Not a lot, but there's a chance for a little, perhaps?

And are you diagramming sentences? Some people get energized by puzzles, and there is something of the puzzle in diagramming sentences. It's a practical way to put concepts into action and make them more memorable by testing them minute by minute. When knowledge seems too theoretical and removed from active use, it can be a lot harder to remember.

This may sound uber geeky and I don't want to get too crazy, but I could even see having a race to diagram five sentences.

Blarg,

I used AFI Top 100 movie quotes for the first nouns quiz. Obviously, only like two students even realized what was going on there.

I should start creating my own sentences that are more oriented toward people their age. Talk about cars and Megan Fox or something. I don't know.

We haven't really done any diagramming sentences yet because all we've covered is nouns and pronouns. I want to ultimately have them able to pull out the major parts of speech from sentences, but they're struggling with N and Ps so far.

I like your race ideas, I just don't know how to incorporate it all that well. Maybe I could pull/create some random paragraphs and have a race to see which people/groups can find and label the nouns and pronouns or something. Not a bad idea.


I want them all to understand parts of speech and do so well. I figure if I focus on it and badger them all year with it, at least the next three years of high school will be easier in terms of that stuff. But I'm not sure they're mentally capable of it yet. I've tried some different things and the results, shockingly, all seem to come up the same.

If they couldn't do better than a C after you told them the answers then the only remaining possibility is that the faculty is having you teach a special ed class as a practical joke.

It's an entire freshmen class. And I'm a little worried there's some truth to your comment....

I don't want to just make it easy, but the learning culture here is TERRIBLE.

I will elaborate more when I can find better ways to express it.

I was thinking something like every Friday is race day, with as many races as you want to hold, or just one. Five unrelated sentences, hopefully funny or interesting or outrageous ones, each printed so they take up a fifth of a page. That should give plenty of work space. An error disqualifies, so the sentences couldn't be too complex.

Everybody gets a hard candy with his paper, and top three guys get their respective pick of one of three candy bars. Alternatively, they then race against each other for one more candy bar.

Second category of races maybe for everyone who got only one error, or maybe one to three errors. But perhaps only the first place guy gets a candy bar.

Gyms and video game communities find themselves very compelled by ladders and scorekeeping against each other. Keep a running tally of weekly scores with a grand prize winner at the end.

Maybe final bonus competition between winners of the "no error" races versus the winner of the "some errors" races.

You could keep it going by steadily introducing new parts of speech, perhaps. Not necessarily racing with them the same week you introduce them, but when you feel the class as a whole is ready. The introduction of new subjects to the races would probably be better left to judgment than a strict schedule.

Competitiveness and a little fun(and candy) might prompt some kids to try harder and enjoy the work more.

Or maybe not, but I can't help but think something like that once a week would be more fun than the usual question and answer grind, and inspire kids to drill the ideas enough to retain them a little longer than they would otherwise..

I love your whole post and please don't let the terseness of my reply make you think otherwise....

but I feel like that idea is going to cater mostly to those who do already get it. Some do. Classifying them into "good student races" and "bad student races" seems a little iffy in terms of how to approach it.

I like that idea, but I need a different approach. I suppose I can't have you do all the work.

Make them sing some choice School House Rock?

Edit:

Seriously.

The Tale of Mr. Morton

Idk, u do all n txt spk they get it?

The team races are not a good idea. The smart kids end up carrying the load.

Just volunteering ideas. If there's even some small part of that which sounded interesting or like it could apply to something you could use, cool.

I wouldn't do it before a majority of the class has a workable understanding, because there's no point doing it with only two competitors everybody already knows are going to win. It might not be the kind of thing for every class, either, just for some. Like many things, it could probably be good or bad depending on the circumstances and how it was applied.

I'm not sure where you got the "bad student races" idea from. I was distinguishing between perfect and other than perfect, but the concept of bad wasn't one that had occurred to me. What I mentioned was a second run of people who made 1 to 3 errors, and that just as an option, not a necessity. Either way, the "bad" students wouldn't even be competing at all after the first race.

Anyway, it was a pretty random idea put out there to stimulate your creative juices. If it got you to think of your own fun or creative stuff, that's all I was really aiming for.

There were no teams mentioned. There were categories mentioned, though. But I was suggesting individual competition.

I'm no fan of group work either, and from my experience it's hard for kids to resist trying to stick the biggest sucker and/or smartest kid with all the work. Even when they're not outright jerks, kids can be very perverse.