English Education Professor

Step By Step Teaching Grammar

NC Department of Instruction has tons of resources for English teachers about how to teach grammar in the context of writing. I’m impressed. Also shows how to track student writing/grammar development. 5 Pandas!

Sample Items for the North Carolina End-of-Course English I – Composition

NOTE :: Various file formats are used on this page that may require download. If larger than 1mb, it will take longer to download. For instructions or more information, please visit our download page.
These materials and the information contained within must not be used for personal or financial gain. North Carolina LEA school officials and teachers, parents, and students may download and duplicate these materials for instructional and educational purposes only. Others may not duplicate or quote from these materials without prior written permission from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) Division of Accountability Services/North Carolina Testing Program.

• Composition Set 1 (pdf, 73kb)
• Composition Set 2 (pdf, 67kb)
• Composition Set 3 (pdf, 66kb)
• Composition Set 4 (pdf, 65kb)
• Composition Set 5 (pdf, 115kb)
• Composition Set 6 (pdf, 70kb)

Sample Items for the North Carolina End-of-Course English I – Textual Analysis

NOTE :: Various file formats are used on this page that may require download. If larger than 1mb, it will take longer to download. For instructions or more information, please visit our download page.

These materials and the information contained within must not be used for personal or financial gain. North Carolina LEA school officials and teachers, parents, and students may download and duplicate these materials for instructional and educational purposes only. Others may not duplicate or quote from these materials without prior written permission from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) Division of Accountability Services/North Carolina Testing Program.

Critical

• How Chasing a Star Structured a Boy’s Life (pdf, 87kb)

Drama

• Is That Your Final Answer? (pdf, 86kb)

Expressive

• Only in the Peace Corps (pdf, 77kb)
• Growing Tomatoes (pdf, 60kb)

Poetry

• How to be a Poet (pdf, 65kb)
• Art in America (pdf, 58kb)

TechCrunch » AjaxWrite, the Newest Ajax Office Entrant

AjaxWrite, an online Ajax version of Word, is the newest entrant into the online office space. It opens and saves documents in Word format (you can also save in PDF), has good basic functionality and is fairly fast. I agree with Michael Robertson, the man behind AjaxWrite, that this and other Ajax Word products like Writely and Zoho Writer significanly reduce the need for most of the world’s population to buy Microsoft Word.

When I suggested to Wikispaces that they add attachments, I got a response a few seconds later correcting me. Here it is:

We do allow attachments. Not sure if you missed that when it was

introduced a few months back. Check out the instructions here: http://www.wikispaces.com/help#tochelp26 and let me know if that’s not what you mean.

What an amazing service.

How I Write by Bertrand Russell

There are some simple maxims-not perhaps quite so simple as those which my brother-in-law Logan Pearsall Smith offered me-which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end. Take, say, such a sentence as the following, which might occur in a work on sociology: “Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner”. Let us see if we can translate this sentence into English. I suggest the following: “All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing.” This is shorter and more intelligible, and says just the same thing. But I am afraid any professor who used the second sentence instead of the first would get the sack.

What Should I Read Next?

Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our database of real readers’
favourite books (over 20,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next.
It’s a bit like browsing the bookshelves of a (very) well read friend!
(You can register on the results page and build your own favourites list)

Web2.0 List, Web 2.0 Site

One big list of new, cool, web sites.

Fidgeting in Classroom May Help Students – Yahoo! News

This was sent by Adam Skiadis. Thanks Adam!

The school replaced the standard desks and chairs with adjustable podiums that allow students to stand, kneel on mats or sit on big exercise balls.

To measure movement down to the last muscle twitch, sensors are on their legs. Levine will calculate how many calories the students are burning in the new classroom compared with their old, traditional classroom.

The concept is interesting, said Alicia Moag-Stahlberg, executive director of Action for Healthy Kids, a coalition of more than 40 health and education agencies.

While the experiment sounds “like a fun way to learn,” she says that at best it would be one of many changes in diet, exercise and lifestyle students need.

“Will this really help with the obesity epidemic?” she said. “That’s the area that we don’t know enough about.”

Chapter 3: Learning and Transfer | How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School
Transfer is affected by the degree to which people learn with understanding rather than merely memorize sets of facts or follow a fixed set of procedures; see Boxes 3.3 and 3.4.

In Chapter 1, the advantages of learning with understanding were illustrated with an example from biology that involved learning about the physical properties of veins and arteries. We noted that the ability to remember properties of veins and arteries (e.g., that arteries are thicker than veins, more elastic, and carry blood from the heart) is not the same as understanding why they have particular properties. The ability to understand becomes important for transfer problems, such as: “Imagine trying to design an artificial artery. Would it have to be elastic? Why or why not?” Students who only memorize facts have little basis for approaching this kind of problem-solving task (Bransford and Stein, 1993; Bransford et al., 1983). The act of organizing facts about veins and arteries around more general principles such as “how structure is related to function” is consistent with the knowledge organization of experts discussed in Chapter 2.

Shakespeare High: Your Shakespeare Classroom on the Internet!

Thanks to Chris Bethel for sending! She says she can’t live without it during student teaching.

Shakespeare 101 is a brief guide to help you get started on your study of Shakespeare’s plays. The guide is broken into the following sections: