Teaching Grammar: Can You Find the Errors?

I hate the "their" error.  Someone, anyone, one, a person, the person = he or she.  Every time I see it or hear it, I correct it boldly.  I have been known to use permanent marker on District classroom signage, been known to correct missives from the principal.  I have written to the D.O.E. about grammar errors in position papers and newsletters.

It may be a losing battle, but it is one I choose to fight.  Join me.

Above is a screen shot of quite a wonderful infographic, What does it take to get a job at Google?  There are three grammar/usage errors here.  Can you spot them?  Challenge your students to spot them.

• PS:  The last interview question makes for a great literacy lesson: sequence, cause-effect, vocabulary (multiple meanings, is/is not), connection-to-self.  I get it.  Can your combined students get it too?  

I wrote them and pointed out the error.  I have done this often lately.  One voice is just a voice - many voices is a shout.

Here's another error.  This video trailer for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is all over TV.  What a wide spread for an error!  Do you have the courage to ask students to pen letters to Activision?  I wrote one.

scene from video trailer

Here's another, this one containing errors in parallelism, sentencing, misplaced modifiers, capitalization:

JitterbugDirect.com

Of course, the most effective examples will come from the texts that your students actually choose to read and the media they access regularly.  Challenge your students to find similar errors in print and digital text (many YA novels are a great source of pronoun and punctuation errors), in advertisements, in media-speak.  Share these prominently in your classroom.  This might go a lot further than a set of canned, or even digital, skill lessons.

A Garden of Your Own

What a mess my gardens are! The seed heads need to go. The fall weeds need pulling. The climbing rose and that reddish shrub that goes haywire every year need to be reminded of their roots.

And yet I see coneflowers, berries, parsley, monkshood, and delicate unnamed pink, yellow and purple blooms. The witch hazel is about to drop its leaves, revealing the sculpture of its stems. Chickadees, nuthatches and jays still come to the feeders for sunflower seeds while brown sparrows hunt for the droppings. This garden is still alive, and it will be alive all winter. It is alive in spite of my neglect.

I don't think it a garden like mine that David Warlick had in mine when he wrote of A Gardener's Approach to Learning. He imagines an organic vegetable garden, a tightly interwoven community that feeds its caregivers well. I don't do vegetables (too many deer, too much rain), but I can relate to organic. A few weeks ago I stayed in Sonoma for a wedding and visited the Benzinger winery. It is hyper-organic. The claim is that nothing "outside" enters the winery. Fertilizer is provided by cows that live on the grounds, eating the crops grown on the slopes. Good bugs that eat the bad bugs are attracted to the yarrow gardens interspersed with the vines. The grapes are sprayed with an emulsion made from ground quartz that is mined from the volcanic rock in the hills. Sheep are driven through the terraces to aerate the soil. It is a fabulous, circular operation, even if you don't believe that burying manure in a cow's horn will give it special nutritional properties (I wonder if the charm requires a virgin).

Warlick wonders - isn't this the way learning should happen? What if we view learning as a closed system in which each individual student is a part of a growing, productive community - just a part, not a controller or a creator. Does such an organic learning community exist? Times millions of students? Is it possible for a student to learn simply by being herself integral to the learning process?

It strikes me that for this vision to be reality, some criteria would have to be met. Foremost, it seems to me, is the criteria that every part of the productive community has to do its job. Yarrow has to grow, bud and bloom to attract the good bugs. Soil has to absorb and use the nutrients provided by the cow waste (with or without the cow horn), which requires that a multitude of microbes and worms (I am guessing here) also have to do their work. And Benzinger's workers have to do their jobs. If one job is not done, bye bye hyper-organic Benzinger.

I used to tell my daughter, and now I tell my students, that being a student is the most important job to do. But what if the student doesn't want to do the job? It is hard work being part of a 24/7 community. My students are asked to be students less than five hours a day. Why would a student buy in to something more?

Perhaps because she chose the garden to grow in. At least that is the theory of choice and self-direction. It works for me. But I am no longer in middle school. Sometimes I wonder how I would go about learning if I were 14 today. But on reflection, that is a worthless path to follow. So then I wonder what can I do better to lead my students into a learning garden. And this is where I have to think that this country is all wrong about standards and testing.

Remember Peter Rabbit? He kept going back to that garden and getting nowhere - no food, no tail, no coat, certainly no relationship with Mr. McGregor, and a punishment besides. But all he knew was getting those carrots... His sisters, on the other hand, were gatherers. They lead neat and boring lives, devoid of extension. Nothing pushed them because they were fearful of the garden. If the Rabbits had know how to grow their own garden, they would have had time to learn about sustainability, crop rotation, and good bugs. They would have networked with their peers. And Peter might have taught Mr. McGregor a thing or two.

The Rabbit standard should not be "a carrot before every bedtime." It should be "a carrot patch of your own."

How does this work for education and real kid people? Take my least favorite standard, grammar. There is not a single student who would choose to do grammar worksheets during an LA class period. But in order to write full-credit answers on the mandated reading tests, students do need to understand the applications of correct grammar and usage. In order to communicate effectively, they must apply grammar correctly - in fact, they need to apply it intelligently and inventively. Teachers spend endless hours dialoguing about grammar and usage, editing student work, finding online and print worksheets - students spend endless hours doing this work (their "job").

If the grammar standard thread were removed from the Maine Learning Results, students would still learn this grammar. Why? Because grammar lives in the garden called "writing." Focus on the garden as an organism, not on every little bug and carrot sprout. Students who enter the garden (by whim, by requirement, by choice) grow with it.

Peter Rabbit gives us pleasure because he continues to have a terrible time - and we can root for him to someday get out of that flower pot on his own. We are involved with him because he endlessly chases a standard he will not meet. Peter is all about picking and taking - and not at all about learning. This is what too much education has come to - because of our standards.

We need to rethink standards and their assessment entirely - what is it really that we want our students to learn about learning? And how can we help them to plant or find the gardens they need in order to learn?

The more we focus on our "standards" the further we push our students from their education. I wonder what would happen if we asked them to design their own gardens? A lot of messes, I guess. But what a lot of flowers! I am all about flowers.

Day 5

With this phase of the project, Brainstorming Possible Solutions, I made two changes to the process: I allowed group members to sit together in class, and I actively joined each dialogue.

There was idea-popping! It seems that F2F communication, at least at the middle school level, is an important element of collaborative work. The groups were actually doing very well with digital communication - most continued to use the wiki Comment tool to sustain a running dialogue about ideas and information. Every group has built quite a nice Research page. The problem is this: in earlier grades, and through some poorly overseen project work, students have developed the habit of copying entire articles or posts and pasting them into a Word document, to be actually read and mined at a later date, if at all. Therefore, every group member has had to plow through quite a bit of text in order to make good evidence-based conclusions about the topic.

Most did not want to do this. As I listened to conversations, I realized that most researchers were so excited about their new knowledge that they could summarize accurately; most had already memorized the most persuasive numerical data.

So I challenged one member of each group to read through the Research and delete all but the key statements and facts (leaving the URL's). The "delete text" skill does, it seems, have a use in middle school academia.

Here is what else happened:

1. 6th grade teachers refused to give their students the HW poll because they (correctly) ruled that the questions were leading to a predrawn conclusion. I told the group this and we read over the questions - my students got the point, and they will write better questions next time. Nonetheless, the poll is over whelmingly a statement about HW.
   
2. The 2nd HW group is able to access this poll and use it in their discussion of the same question.
3. The Self Abuse group focused, after research, on cutting. After reading and discussing all of the Research, they decided not to reinvent the wheel: good organizations already exist, with good campaigns, to raise peer awareness. They are going to leverage their f2f power to become an active "cell" inside one of these national non-profit groups. They have made a large poster for the lunch room.
   
4. One of the Animal Abuse groups found that although all states have laws against pet abuse, few of these laws are rigorously enforced. They are creating a kid-campaign to write a tougher law in the state of Maine.
5. The Beef & Global Warming group was stunned by their research results. They are creating a "no beef" campaign for the school cafeteria. We had a long discussion of economic cause-and-effect, which led them to understand that a small change in eating habit can create a large change in culture - and have an impact on global warming.
6. The Animal Testing group is focusing on cosmetic products (Cover Girl). They began to write the text for an informative brochure, but realized that their language was so good that it should be a PSA instead. They plan to complete the PSA and try to get it onto MPBN (NPR Maine) - or at least onto the web.
7. The School Budget group brainstormed their topic for over an hour. When I jumped in, they were beginning to focus on the issue of a shared nursing position and on the possibilities of budget savings as a result of green energy. So they have interviewed the nurse and one sub-group is costing out house-sized wind turbines and solar panels (they know about these from science this year). We had a lively intergroup discussion of how much 10 watts really is.
   
8. The Bicycle Helmet Law group decided that they did not really object to the law, but wanted it to be more flexible, or at least revisited, and they feel strongly that bicycles need to be separated from ATV's with regard to helmet law (the statistics are mostly about ATV accidents). They too are proposing a campaign aimed at their state representatives.
9. We may have a proposal for a non-violent demonstration.

And there are others. Not all groups have been able to make the break between personal involvement in topic and research/information-gathering. Some groups do not seem to have any sense of time. But by and large, the kids are involved in their topics - they are sorry that the projects will not actually happen.

I watched one student today as he did research and used the wiki. I was impressed by his facility with the laptop as a tool for learning. A boy who has trouble following oral or written directions was able to use multiple menus, icons, and keystrokes to complete every task I put in front of him.

Success (and therefore learning) are not based on the quality of the teaching or of the directions, but the quality of the task. And task quality measurement must include relevance, choice, and accessible information. Which is, of course, what the good books tell you about learning.

And it also applies to grammar. I have taught more grammar in the last week than I have in all of the other weeks combined. How? I used a NoteShare notebook to structure mini-lessons delivered entirely as quizzes - both online and on paper. The goal was complete the quizzes for a topic (eg: semi-colons) until a 90% grade is achieved. Students who are totally confused (generally with pronouns, which they assiduously avoid learning about for some reason) get me over their shoulder for an entire question set. Then they try one on their own. The final task is a difficult paper Punctuation post-test. Most students have earned about a 50% the first time. A wake-up call. I meet with each to talk about specific errors, then I give them the corrected paper and tell them to use it to edit the 2nd post-test correctly. And I put them in pairs.

What happens is discussion of grammar! It is cool to hear a pair argue about whether a dash or a colon is appropriate! It's encouraging to see one student teach another about parenthesis or semi-colons. I think I will use this approach for all of next year - I can put up a sign, "Grammar Begins Here," or maybe G(rammar) U(sage) M(echanics) Allowed.

Aside - Online Self-Assessment Learning

In addition to reading conferences and our Smartest Generation Projects (see previous and next posts), we are doing final touches on grammar self-assessment via online exercises, which I find really push most students to an understanding of commas, apostrophes, semi-colons, and pronouns.

We are ALSO completing the online information literacy (research methods and process) assessment designed by ILILE (The Institute for Library and Information Literacy Education - Trails). The overall profile of this 8th grade will inform our librarian and ELA teachers about research skills that must be taught (eg - have been missed). Our kids are taking this seriously, even though they do not get a "score." They are asking the questions that help them to learn - like about Boolean search terms.

Why does this self-assessment thing work?

I think it works because middle school students are, in an environment that is comfortable for them, put under the microscope in one small area - and measured. Sounds terrible - and that terribleness is part of the success of the exercises. Note the key word: small. The assessments, which are often auto-graded exercises (all except for the Trails), are no more than 20 questions long. The "scoring" is instant, or at most it requires the student to self-check against a digital answer sheet. It works because students know how they measure up and how they can improve their scores. Surprise! This is the same system used by edutainment software and online curricular/intervention packages (like Plato). These systems, which I have been evaluating since forever it seems, are still in production - because they work, for many skills, for most students.

They work because a small isolated skill is assessed intelligently at a serious level. The bar is not low. Students have to work to do well. Redo's (cheating) are possible, but with the best tools another and different exercise can be taken immediately.

It is the nature of the process that students complete the exercises at different times. Teachers can therefore work 1-1 on problem skills, both during a test (I allow students who don't know an answer to ask for instruction) and after a test. For students, this is a win-win learning situation, as every student exits a skill lesson/assessment with a 90% (my standard) or better score.

It is important for the teacher to set some guidelines for students. I do this is a NoteShare notebook, which has the advantages of allowing student to get ALL of the exercises in one download, to work at home if necessary (they take screen shots to prove completion), and for me to update exercises (add, improve) on the fly (it will be necessary).

My guidelines are:

• I provide a GOAL for students to meet in order to EXIT the exercise. It is always at least 90%, often mastery (95 or better).
• For high-importance skills (like commas), student must complete a practice before they shoot for mastery. This allows for teaching moments - very successful.
• Multiple exercises are available for every learning skill. This is important. If you don't master Exercise 1, you can try again in Exercise 2. Otherwise, kids will just do Exercise 1 over again (the smart ones screen shot the results too).
• You have to show me the results (if I am grading this, as I am this year) OR you have to log your own progress (if I am not grading this, as I did last year). Frankly, I don't see any difference in the student learning outcomes, but students liked the logging-of-progress so much that I think I will return to logging rather than grading. The demonstration of learning shifts from me to student, which is healthy. It will come in handy during parent conferences too. Of course, you have to trust your students.
  

So what are the best tools?

It is the teacher's job to locate the best tools and send students to . I have always placed a high level of trust in Purdue's OWL. Unfortunately for me, the exercises that supported the grammar instruction part of the site are being removed, as we speak. One day students can use them, the next day they are gone. The end result is going to be a very fine tool for self-instruction, but for now it is unreliable. So I have had to scrabble.

It takes time, but generally speaking a simple Google for "____ exercises" will lead to several good exercises (apostrophe exercises). The best online exercises:

• Focus on one specific skill
• Provide feedback (right - wrong answers)
• The very best tell you why an answer is correct and/or incorrect - instruct! Exercises made with Hot Potatoes tend to have this teaching feature.
  
• Are correct in terms of the grammar or skills YOU teach - some exercise creators follow a different set of rules, so it is a very good idea to check the answers against what you want students to know!

Getting back to the Trails lessons (information science). The online tool meets the criteria above. I highly recommend it. Teachers should consider taking an assessment - find out what you don't know! Working students through a difficult question has been a great teaching experience for me. In a back-door way, this simple assessment has provided me with a window on how kids think through problems, not to mention a confirmation about how they read questions... I am using the individual "unit" tests for grade 9 because I took the General test myself and found it exhausting. I think that by doing 4 sub-tests of 10 questions each, our students will learn, and we will focus in on the research skills and vocabulary that are most important.

How much time does this take in my classroom: 15 minutes of 75 minutes. Big gain for good organization.