Today felt like a constant rush and I'm not sure why; however, classes went well. After the reading quiz in the 10:00am ENG 120 class, I handed out my "Proofreading Notation" sheet and we quickly breezed through the notation and its corresponding errors. I answered any questions students had about specific points (ex: a student asked if I could give an example of a problem with parallelism).
I then handed back the students' corrected, 'graded,' Diagnostic essays. I reminded them that this was a first draft that they wrote in class, in 50 minutes, and after a break of at least a month from school, so their grades were not going to be stellar. (Truthfully, I think only one student eeked out a first draft over 70%.)
After the initial shock, head-shaking and nervous laughter, I opened the floor up to questions. As I expected, only a couple students were brave enough to ask specific questions about errors in their essays, so I changed the the "Scavenger Hunt" tactic: I chose an error off the Proofreading sheet and everyone had to find an instance of it in his essay. I had the class look for fused sentences, comma splices, run-ons, verb tense shifts, and other errors, then asked for volunteers to share an instance from their papers. After initial shyness, students started to volunteer their errors so they could ask more specific questions. Success!
In my 1:00pm class, we finished the last two types of Prewriting and covered START. I then had the students get into groups of 5--I wanted less groups for this exercise. I wrote "Homophones" on the board and asked someone to define the word for me. The agreed-on definition was "words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings." I gave the groups 10 minutes and asked them to come with as many homophones as they could.
Each group came up with bundles of examples:
where, wear, ware, weir and were (as in werewolf)
two, too, to
dear, deer
flower, flour
four, for, fore
And then we came to the examples I was hoping I'd hear: the homophones that only work in an Anglo-Caribbean dialect.
team, teem and theme -- many English-speaking Caribbean natives do not pronounce th sounds, so "three" sounds like "tree" and "thought" like "taught."
See the issue here? Suddenly pair, pear and peer are homophones, even if they are not for a more Midwestern U.S. accent. We talked and laughed about it--I believe that if students can recognize and laugh at their own idiosyncrasies, errors and differences, they will better recognize and be able to correct them. We will spend more time, in all the ENG 120 sections, on homophones and on 'regionally-specific' homophones.
More tomorrow!
On an unrelated note, I am personally against both PIPA and SOPA. You may have already noticed that Wikipedia blacked its site out today, and even Google blacked out its logo in solidarity. If you are also against PIPA and SOPA, be sure to reach out to your local and state political representatives and make yourself heard!
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