From the Classroom and From the Baby's Room #1

23 January 2012

I've decided to do a weekly installment during the school year where I catalog my students' and my child's "milestones"... I'm hoping that it will help me more thoroughly embrace my current roles as teacher and mother. 

I give you Numero Uno

From the Classroom: 

It's Monday morning and Jake's asleep and I should be seizing the moment to....grade.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

I really appreciate my job. I enjoy my students (mostly). I don't mind lesson planning. But I hate, loathe, despise, and abominate grading. 

Today I have but to grade some short little weekly writing assignments. I've been trying to start grading them since Thursday afternoon, but all I've managed to do is put them in alphabetical order.

Enough with that rant. Now two weeks into a semester of teaching Intro to Poetry, and overall I'm enjoying myself. I've never had my students write any of their own poetry in this class because it's actually a writing ABOUT literature course. But this semester, to teach my students iambic pentameter, I've been having them write their own.

For my non-poetry buffs:
Iambic pentameter is your basic English poetry fare: a line of verse with 10 syllables and five beats. In straight iambic pentameter the beats will alternate between unstressed and stressed syllables. Here's an example a la Shakespeare (I've bolded the stressed syllables):

That time of year, thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang.

I'm not a meter nazi, but I want my students to build some awareness of the rhythms of language. Anyhow, their first attempts at iambic pentameter woke me up to how much more explaining I needed to do because they were laughably terrible. But we've been working on it and they're getting better. As evidence of their improvement I give you my two favorite examples:

I wish I had a Justin Bieber doll.

They told me not to eat the yellow snow.

 And there you go.

From the Baby's Room:

Jake's been working tirelessly on one of his alveolar consonants. So our lives have been peppered with:

Da da da da da DA DA da DA da da, etc

AND

He has two teeth. He got them for Christmas...terribly cliche I know.



Best to you and yours.


1 comment :

  1. Ah, FINALLY a Rhodes Log update! I check daily. Maybe to make up for the times that I did not follow religiously and you made me feel like a shmuck (like I'm sure you do to everyone), but more likely because I love seeing my nephew and really enjoy your subtle humor.

    P.S. If you got tea and tea things in the mail...they were from me. Merry Christmas.

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