Ap English Grammar Essay

As a high school English teacher, there is almost no single way that I can receive more groans of sorrow than introduce a lesson on grammar. Even worse than how much the students resist, is the unrelenting fact that they retain almost nothing from a traditional style grammar assignment of underlining clauses and phrases, circling parts of speech, or correcting error riddled sentences. Long ago I had abandoned these methods in favor of more fun and vastly more effective methods like Harry Noden’s Brushstrokes method as explained in his paradigm shifting book, Image Grammar, or using writer’s craft instruction, as described in Mechanically Inclined, by Jeff Anderson. After winning a set of highly prized Grammar Punk dice at a conference, I

I would post the writing prompt as a notes and the students would respond via reply. This way, everyone shared every time, errors could be caught by me and edited immediately, and confused students could see multiple examples before creating their own sentence. The assignments were so much easier to grade and quality and accuracy skyrocketed. Suddenly a “better” way became the best thing I had ever

Edmodo keeps adding new features, like Snapshot for targeting standards, and Spotlight for sharing resources with my peers, that I become a better teacher while working smarter, every day. I can so easily see how these same methods could be used in so many different types of classrooms too. In a History class, students could write their own Costa’s style questions and have their peers answer them or their own research questions and their peers could share resources as they came across them. In a Math class, students could write the equations, and let their peers solve them. The thing that all these ideas have in common is taking the burden of teaching out of the teacher’s hand and empowering students to take