2017 Wednesday -- Watery Reflection

On Wednesday I meet with my favorite class. Today we worked on their Project #6, which will be collected next week and will consist of four summaries of the four articles that my students have had to read and dissect the past couple weeks. They must find the author's main point and quote it and then they must find the author's subpoints and paraphrase those into one paragraph of summary.

This is quite difficult for most of my "basic skills/remedial" students because they have not spent their lives reading. At the beginning of the semester 95% of them can't find a main point even when the author writes, "And the point is . . . . " When I point-out that phrase to them, they are astounded that they have missed it.

During the semester they spend with me, it is my responsibility to help them improve their reading and their written response to what they've read. It is my privilege to help them discover that within the world of reading are worlds that they can only enter through the covers of books, and every now and then one of them believes me enough to open a book and then enjoys the imaginary world they find there.

This morning we also reviewed pronoun usage. They sometimes struggle with when to use "I" and when to use "me." They are used to saying a sentence like "she is taller than me" and they don't realized that the object pronoun "me" is wrong. If they write the sentence with the verb then they realize it must be "she is taller than I am."

They also struggle with pronoun agreement; they will write a singular noun, such as "student," and then later in their sentence use the plural pronoun "their," and not even realize that they have made an agreement error.

Pronoun reference is also troublesome. They will write a scenario like this one:
"Because Tara and Diana worked the closing shift at Tito’s Taco Palace, they often arrived to class with their eyes barely open. Tara would have given Diana the correct answer to number seven on the chemistry exam if she hadn’t fallen asleep in the middle of it." They don't realize that the "she" in the final statement is a reference error because no one knows who "she" is.

So teaching Basic Writing -- that's what I do. For almost the entire six years of my college journey (as a reentry adult student), teaching English, specifically writing, is what I wanted to do. It has been a privilege to get to do what I wanted to do for the past 27 years.

That's my thoughts for this Wednesday in southern California. Tomorrow, maybe, just maybe, we might get to leave for the Central Coast. I can hardly wait. We haven't been their since the final weekend in September.
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol