(OT) From the teacher's desk...

[ebonyink at hotmail.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 10320

Parker wrote:

> I, too, have had the same problem.  I've been using British 
> spellings, punctuation, and grammar since I learned to read 
and write.  However, *I* won the arguments with teachers.  (I was 
*so* Hermione).  

What happens when both student and teacher are 
Hermione-types?  :-)

Heidi asked about intellectual property curricula... Allyson and 
Heather, are you aware if your school districts provide anything 
like this?  I'd like to incorporate these and other ethical issues 
into my teaching, but time is the #1 commodity that teachers do 
not have nearly enough of.  As a matter of fact, surveys show that 
most American teachers would prefer smaller class sizes 
(meaning more time to devote per student!) than pay raises!  
With more than 180 students and seven classes on my roster 
this school year, I know I would...

Speaking of which, the recent grammar thread was very 
interesting.  

I'm not a linguist, but studying composition and rhetoric, which 
means I tend to emphasize the overall process of writing and 
style in my teaching and research rather than "nuts-and-bolts" 
mechanical issues.  This means that my fifth grade English 
classes very rarely consist of writing 50 sentences, underlining 
the subject, then double-lining the predicate.  In fact, I have given 
papers with no "surface level errors" grades of C or less... and 
I've given papers with one or two spelling mistakes As. 

Most UK spellings do strike my eyes as being "incorrect", but I 
certainly wouldn't mark a student down if they used any of them... 
I'd just call the UK/Amer. variance to their attention.  One UK 
spelling that I prefer is grey--I learned my colors (colours?  ;-))
via 
Canadian Sesame Street, so our American g-r-a-y strikes me as 
strange looking!

When I mark up my students' English papers with Hogwarts 
green ink (each of the teachers on the team I lead has their own 
distinctive "color"), I toss in some editing marks.  But most of the 
time, I write notes in the margins.  "Read this sentence to 
yourself... does it make sense?"  "Was this what you were trying 
to say?  Here's my suggestion..."  Or often, "Can you back up this  
value judgment with a quote from your reading?"  I've found that 
kids who have challenges with grammar are often awesome 
abstract thinkers--and once they get over their anxiety, the 
spelling and grammar miraculously improves!

I'm not trying to start a war here... but the biggest problem with 
American education is that most classrooms still use the factory 
model of education... and are not teaching twenty-first century 
children how to think.  Just my not-so-humble opinion.

On a side note:  Teachers on list, are you subscribed to any of 
the HP lists for educators?  If so, what did you think?

--Ebony AKA AngieJ