I have learned a lot so far in this grammar class. The article, Dora Learns to Write, was very helpful. It gave me a good sense in what teaching methods I should use and how I could implement them in my teaching. It really convinced me that marking up a paper with red corrections, and just handing it back to the student without any other feedback is not helpful at all to the child. They would probably just repeat the same mistakes again in another paper. The article also shows that one of ITS main focus’ is not using worksheets. Worksheets are very structured and it’s proven that children would learn better using correct grammar in their own writing, as opposed to sentences that they will probably never write. Another thing that really stood out to me in the article was how the teacher taught and interacted with Dora. Even though the teacher was guiding Dora along the way, she really let Dora figure it out for herself. I think Dora was more fulfilled, and got more out of the experience than she would’ve if the teacher just told her what she needed to do and how to fix her writing. Another thing that really stood out to me was when Dora brought one of her writings to the teacher and she used the period in the right way; the teacher smiled at Dora when she saw that Dora did something so well, and didn’t mention the other mistake Dora had in her writing. I think this made a big impact on Dora, because she was praised for doing something right, and her self-esteem was raised a little bit, as opposed to being more and more discouraged every time she realizes she did something wrong. I think this article was very beneficial to me. It showed me that how I learned grammar was a lot different than how it should be taught, and how to teach to be more valuable to the student. The Socratic Seminar was very interesting also. We discussed what we thought about the article, but more so on Thursday, effective teaching methods. We were talking about how difficult it would be to sit down with every student in a class of thirty, and try to help them out with their specific needs. A good solution would be to take the top three things that the majority of children were having a problem with and teach that to the whole class, and then the rest could come get help after class. It was also interesting to listen to my classmates talking about how they learned and what was more effective for them in English.
The article was easy to understand and I didn’t really have any trouble with that. I also understand more about how to fix my own grammar, and the poster activity was a large help for that. I cannot really think of a large concept that I’m having a huge issue with at the moment. All in All, the past two weeks were very helpful in the class, and it answered a lot of questions that I had about teaching grammar, and fixing my own. I am learning that AS A STUDENT, I am learning how to teach; AS A TEACHER, I have a lot of work to do.