Gretchen,
I think it's important that we have some idea of what we want students
to do (eventually) and a strong sense of what they need to know to get
there and make some progress along those lines from year to year. If
the sixth grade curriculum was followed, (though you should ask your
sixth grade teacher rather than the state standards), you may be able
to build on that. Here are some quick responses to the sixth grade
list:
1) Students have been using simple, compound, and complex sentences
almost all their talking lives. It's a little like saying "students will
grow taller and observe new things." They do it already. On the other
hand, it would be good for them to know what a clause is, know they
already compound them, know that some clauses downrank into a lesser role
in the sentence. It's hard to tackle clause without dealing with
phrases.(In other words, you have a better chance at being successful by
being somewhat comprehensive. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences.)
2) Effective coordination and subordination is a nice goal, but don't
forget that they have been doing that for years. We are simply asking the
question about when it's effective and when it's not. Is that effective
within the sentence or effective in reaching an audience? What do they
mean by "complete thought"? My guess is they don't want sentence
fragments, but the goal of effective coordination and the goal of
"complete thought" are at odds with each other. Sentences can vary widely
in the way they are organized and in the amount of content they contain.
In the same rule, they are mixing philosophies of language. If you do
one, you can't do the other. >
3) "Identify and "properly" use various verb forms." Do verb forms not
have meaning functions? Why do we need to identify them? What do we mean
by "proper"? Is it important enough to state as a major goal that verbs
should agree with compound subjects? Do these people know that most
grammarians don't beleive we have a future tense? Is perfect a tense, or
is it an aspect? What does aspect do when it shows up?
I could go on in this way, but the point, I hope, has been made. These
people have not come up with a sequence of standards that makes any
sense.
I like the idea of finding written work they admire (including their
own) and trying to figure out how it works. Avoiding error seems a
terrible goal. These are not easy issues, but it's hard to forgive
anyone doing it this badly.
Craig
Hi,
> Several of you have asked what the sixth and eight graders are being
> expected to master, so I went to the state website and copied it below.
>
> I just object to the whole mess. Expecting me to teach commas, for
> example,
> in one year is ridiculous. It's one of the most complex decisions a
> writer
> makes. I've spent the entire year trying to show my kids that language
> comes
> in chunks that we can move around to improve meaning. To do that we've
> looked a prepositional phrases, verbals, appositives, participial
> phrases,
> infinitives, etc., but it was all with an eye towards improving their
> writing.
> We've written participle place poems, pronoun story books, and all manner
> of
> projects around grammar; again, the emphasis has been on what these
> various
> pieces do to our writing and meaning making.
>
> One of the best days of the year came Thursday when we were looking at
> some
> sentence imitating from a sentence combining book I have, and one of my
> kids
> called out, "Hey, Mrs. Le, look up there. He started the sentence with a
> participial phrase to make us see the action he was doing! Just like us
> yesterday." We another had a great discussion about how moving the
> participial phrase
> around changed the sentence and the meaning the reader got from it.
>
> Now I'm being presented with this disconnected and seemingly random list
> of
> things that I'm responsible for, and I'm at a loss. How much time do I
> spend
> dragging them through parts of speech so that each and every one of them
> "knows" the parts of speech. (How many discussions here on the list are
> about
> the function of a word and how we'd classify it? How much is enough for
> seventh grade?) What do I leave out to make time to do that? I have no
> problem
> teaching participles and infinitives (I just finished a section on
> those), but
> is that all?
>
> I'm back to my basic gripe, though. If not this, then what? My school
> wants to put up our benchmarks and standards on the website so that
> parents know
> what we do. What do I give them instead of this mishmash?
>
> Did I mention that I have a whole 1.5 hour meeting to thrash this out
> with
> the sixth and seventh grader teachers?
>
> ~Gretchen
>
> Sixth Grade:
> Students write and speak with a command of standard English conventions
> appropriate to this grade level.
> Sentence Structure
> 1.1 Use simple, compound, and compound-complex sentences; use effective
> coordination and subordination of ideas to express complete thoughts.
> Grammar
> 1.2 Identify and properly use indefinite pronouns and present perfect,
> past
> perfect, and future perfect verb tenses; ensure that verbs agree with
> compound subjects.
> Punctuation
> 1.3 Use colons after the salutation in business letters, semicolons to
> connect independent clauses, and commas when linking two clauses with a
> conjunction in compound sentences.
>
> Eighth Grade:
> Students write and speak with a command of standard English conventions
> appropriate to this grade level.
> Sentence Structure
> 1.1 Use correct and varied sentence types and sentence openings to
> present a
> lively and effective personal style.
> 1.2 Identify and use parallelism, including similar grammatical forms, in
> all written discourse to present items in a series and items juxtaposed
> for
> emphasis.
> 1.3 Use subordination, coordination, apposition, and other devices to
> indicate clearly the relationship between ideas.
> Grammar
> 1.4 Edit written manuscripts to ensure that correct grammar is used.
> Punctuation and Capitalization
> 1.5 Use correct punctuation and capitalization.
>
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>
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