Learning is Change

• My questions:
• How can we use our language so that our students become more metacognitive and reflective?
• Others’ questions:
• Is peer editing actually useful for students or only for teachers?
• How would our teaching practice change if we were to consider all of our students as gifted?
• Iquiry works for all students, no matter the level of giftedness.
• Naming things makes writing more powerful (specificity is potent).
• Food
• Japon Spicy Tuna handrolls at the happy hour price.
• My wife’s savved second breakfast of Lucky Charms.
• Ordering Dairy Queen Blizzards with chocolate ice cream.
• People/Pets
• My wife as she picks at her stretch marks.
• Charlie when he sees his red leash.
• Places
• The fear of never breathing again after the SCUBA gear fell out of my mouth.
• Objects
• My Quick-Write on the Naming:
• Kara goes into the kitchin, stepping on the slightly-off new tile floor. She sets herself up for her first breakfast. Try number one at filling her stomach. Out come the rice chex and the two percent milk. Out comes a big spoon to get it all down quickly. She scarfs in front of a tivo’d family feud, sitting on the couch that she sinks into and hates because of it. She waits. She hopes. She knows. It is is all in vain as she heads for the toilet that she knows too well…
• Intentionally use one craft that we discussed and that is present in the “professional writing” and use it in your writing piece.
• Make your writer’s notebook special. Give students cool tools to do the mundane things.
• All writing is personal. We need to make this fact more apparent.
• Teaching sentence fluency through the use of commentary (Rick Reily, Leonard Pitts)?
• We should be looking at professional writing and student writing side by side. Quick-Writes and imitations of short pieces can be great for this.
• We can look at a genre, not by definition but by inquiry.
• What is the author doing in this piece?
• Are these elements of this particular genre?
• Example:
• Memoir Crafts (Murphy the Dog):
• Short/Long sentences fluency
• frames setting first
• aides-voice
• personal/universal
• Writing workshop:
• Getting ready to write
• Writing
• Making a little bit better
• Celebration/Publication (making writing public).
• Either you will share your writing in my classroom, or I will share you writing anonymously. I will never embarrass you or call you out on your writing, but we will share our writing in this class, otherwise we will never progress as writers.
• Research:
• Grammar in context.
• Guided writing is more effective than free writing.
• Modeling good writing of your own, published writing, and student writing is important.
• Sentence Combining works.
• Use scales for success in writing.
• What is the target for your writing?
• Inquiry in writing is powerful.
• Asking questions as an author or a reader of authors is a virtue.
• All writing choices are based upon data.
• Resources:
• Shakespeare Set Free (Writing prompts for each chapter of Shakespeare’s plays).
• When kids are in a writing group there needs to be a good process for talking about writing.
• Mark Overmeyer will be e-mailing us his classroom process.
• The play-do protocol for revision.
• Sculpt
• Take Away
• Add to
• Write about other’s sculptures.
• How is this like the process of revision?

• Linguistics is a sub-set of Cognitive Science.
• Linguistics is only a study of natural langauges (not like esperanto)
• If Language is a mirror to the mind, unnatural language (created langauges) are like fun house mirrors.
• The different schools of thought in lingustics define linguistics in very different ways (parsing the parts of a sentence vs. trying to figure out how the mind works with words) (surface language vs. deeper meaning).
• What is the nature of language? (Innate? Arbitrary? Messy? Rule Governed? All languages use some aspect of word order (place holders, SVO (Subject/Verb/Object) or SOV) and/or inflection to differentiate meaning, Spontaneous? Recreated with every generation (generative)? Novel? *These are not really questions, but things to think about).
• What is it that makes language possible? Context.
• How does communication work? Physical, Cognative, Non-Verbal, Conventions/Social aspects of language.
• Maxims of:
• Quality
• Quantity
• Manner
• And one more that I can’t remember.
• Prescriptive rules vs. Descriptive rules. Generative Grammar is the best of both worlds. It is both at the same time.
• Language is a preeminent trait that develops in a child spontaneously and formal instruction is not neccesary.
• Children instinctually desire language (the art of langauge) (according to Darwin).
• What is the difference between teaching language, vocabulary, and grammar.
• Language is prior to undersanding symbols. Language is not a substitution for symbolic representation.
• Black English Vernacular (BEV) – it has its own grammar.
• Double Negatives are okay.
• Deletion of verb “to be” and other unnecessary pieces of english.
• Contracting auxiliaries.
• The distinction between a language and a dialect is political rather than linguistic.

I am now taking a graduate course called Language Theory at the University of Colorado at Denver for my graduate program, “The Teaching of Writing.” It is taught by Ian Ying. This is my first introduction to Linguistics, so much of my notes will be of an elementary nature.

Continue reading“Language Theory 08/21/06”