Professional Ponderings

Horay!!! I survived my first day of student teaching! I hope everyone else had a good day as well.

Since we are all going to be having less time to do anything soon, I decided to give a few time saving tips that I have discovered this past year. They have helped me to survive my busy schedule with school, teaching and a baby, and to maintain a small bit of sanity.

Food!

We all need to eat and PotBelly and Brueggers don’t cut it every day. The following websites have easy and good recipes.

Kraftfoods.com is obviously sponsored by Kraft, but it has easy recipes that take very little time. Many of them can be made ahead and/or frozen. You can also sign up to receive recipes by email and they have a seasonal free cooking magazine. Most of the ingredients are just siting around in the pantry, and don’t worry store brand groceries cook just fine in the recipes.

http://www.campbellkitchen.com Campbell’s soup and their related products also have a recipe website. If you ever need to cook something fast take any cream soup, some chicken and whatever else you have on hand mix it together and bake for about a half hour.

Rachel Ray Has a searchable archive of many of her recipes. Her 30 minute meals take 30 min or less, even if you are awkward in the kitchen.

My favorite Recipe: Flat Bread Pizza

• Heat oven to 400
• Cut up vegetables
• take flat bread (I like Flatout Wraps) and place on a cookie sheet
• Spread spaghetti sauce on
• put on toppings and cheese
• Cook for about 15 min

To make cooking even less painful fill your sink when you start cooking. That way you can throw your dishes in the sink, let them soak. While the food is cooking rinse them and you are done!

Stick a serving of whatever you cooked in a Tupperware (or the ziplock or Glad type) container for lunch the next day and freeze whatever you don’t think you are going to eat before it goes bad.

As for the readings. I feel like I am technology-overloaded. Maybe it is because I have been studying media since 1999 and have been aware of many new advances in the communications field. I think that many of these new technologies can be used in the classroom but that we need to remember TPCK and use these resources responsibly, effectively and appropriately. Using a blog or a wiki just to use one is pointless. (Now I love doing blog postings for class way better than normal journals) So just think before using a technology tool: “Am I using this because it will advance my students’ learning or am I using it because it is cool?”

Here is a Wiki site that is fairly easy to set up and use: PBwiki.com

Sorry I missed all of you in class today.  I just couldn’t rationalize driving my daughter out in this questionable weather.  For some reason people forget how to drive in the snow.  MMMG group (Emily, Jacob, Joe, Eugene and Rob) I’ll send you a note about compiling our stuff.

I have actually seen with my own eyes 12 year olds excited about grammar. I know this sounds rare and straight out of “The Twilight Zone”, none the less it is true. The key is they learned grammar along with usage. Williams does a great job at distinguishing the difference between grammar and usage: “Grammar is how words fit together in patterns to communicate meaning, Usage is about the words we choose to communicate meaning” (171-2) I think that this distinction helps put teachers, students and parents in a position to understand what issues in writing really are, as well as to begin a discussion about where they come from. (My cooperating teacher uses the Kansas method of grammar instruction, she took a seminar on it)

The most important thing, though, that I gleaned from this chapter is that we need to focus on discussing usage issues. However in order to have a common language to discuss these issues by we need to have some type of grammar instruction. When going through the common usage mistakes I was racking my brain to remember what parts of speech Williams was talking about.  If we taught grammar with usage in some type of context maybe we could improve writing.  Who knows though.

Another thing I kept thinking about is our favorite linguistics class.  It seems as if what we learned in there applies to teaching of grammar/usage. The problem is it was not taught in relation to teaching English.  Maybe if it were in the grad program, or related specifically to the teaching of English it would have been more beneficial.

Here is a link relating to grammar www.grammarandmore.com . It has some tips, activities and articles on teaching usage and grammar.