Cheers

“Jehovah Witness knock on my door to spill the word,
Seven minutes later we drunk off of that Steel Reserve.”

This blog is brought to you by 40 oz. of 211 (cheaper than bottled water); getting tilted in the back seat of my own car with AJ, RC chilling with Marley in the front, while headed southwest towards the delta netherlands and a rained-out Friday night bonfire. It also wouldn’t be possible without this red-pen I sacked from the Guyton supply closet … a poor teacher’s sticky-finger frugality. Only regret was that I didn’t inform my compatriots in paucity of the all-off special just next door.

After tonight, the weekend will be spent in the delta, for my first extended visit, with our second year hosts AH & ES and a billion hungry ‘skeeters’. I’ve been told huge amounts of spray is rained down over the area several times every year to keep them at bay (the mosquitoes, not AH or ES). In addition, the crop dusting prevalent in any large-agricultural region gets right into our water and food supply, if not taking a straight shot through our lungs. Ahhh, clean country air. Perhaps if we didn’t kill off all of their predators we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.

Right, the assignment: inductive, collaborative paper-folding. I joke. I guess I attempted group work this week in class, but because of absences and time constraints my troupes quickly became tandems. We only have six aspiring scholars anyway, so every class is essentially an exercise in group work, as it’s generally assumed in 20-30 person classes. Our students were working on autobiographies, and had been taken through the entire process from thesis formulation to final revision. Before turning in a completed copy, I wanted them to do a little peer reviewing. Or a lot, preferably. Armed with multi-colored pens, my mercenaries were loosed onto one another’s hand-written memoirs. I guess our summer school approach to grammar has been somewhat inductive, conducting several self-guided lessons where the student’s assess the formal integrity of their own sentences on the dry erase board by what sounds/looks right vs. what sounds/looks wrong. There simply isn’t enough time under a month to build a solid foundation, but there is always time for a little interior decorating. While peer editing (after self-editing) their autobiographies, they were not asked to provide explanations as to why or how they know it is incorrect but to simply make suggestions for improvement. Then we discussed a few examples of problem sentences and elaborated on the reasons for specific, oft-repeated mistakes. It went well, and I think they get a lot more out of analyzing their own writing rather than sentences that a generic textbook or my own bland imagination can come up with. Again, this worked so well because of the small number of students we have in our class, which has enabled us to form a quick, strong rapport amongst one another. But I do see the translation into a larger classroom environment – divide and conquer. Disappointingly I opted for no paper burritos or parchment chilli-pups - but two out of three isn’t bad.

Time to stop at another gas station.