Stalking Sentences: Grammar in Context

My summer work station

This week I’ve been stalking 2-word sentences: 

• “I guess.” Wonder p. 3
• “I promise.” Wonder p. 16
• “She knows.” Wonder p. 191
• “I concentrated.” Code Talker p. 117
• “Everyone worried.” Code Talker p. 200
• “It’s hard.” Barak Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis

This is an exercise from Jeff Anderson’s Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop which I’ve been reading this week. Anderson says to teach and learn grammar in context, you have to become a “sentence stalker.” Two-word sentences is one of the first sentences he has students stalk. 

As I stalked, I noticed several things. For one, 2-word sentences really aren’t very common, but they are around. After finding some in Wonder, the novel I’m preparing to teach in September, I also started noticing them in Code Talker by Chester Nez, the autobiography of one of the designers of the Navaho-based code used by the US military in World War 2 that I’m reading for my own recreation. So 2-word sentences occur not only in middle grade fiction, but also in adult biography. When I didn’t notice any in the nonfiction book I’m reading, America’s Original Sin by Jim Wallis, I wondered if that were characteristic of argument, so I scanned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Congressman John Lewis’s final letter, and Barak Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis. I found some short sentences, but only one 2-word sentence, and that is actually a 3-word sentence because one of the words is a contraction. 

What is the subject in every 2-word sentence I found? A pronoun. Anderson listed some sentences with a proper noun for the subject. I can imagine plural subjects: Dogs bark. Or noncount: Water drips. But most singular nouns would have to take an article. And so many sentences expand at least a bit with more than one verb and an object after, like John Lewis’s shortest sentences at 4 words: “You must do something.” “You can lose it.”

Once we can identify that 2-word sentence core and the bits that come along with it, we can “add on without running on,” as Anderson says. Here are some examples I've noticed for picking out participles and participial phrases (also prepositional phrases, an absolute phrase, and a dependent clause, but Anderson emphasizes focusing on one thing at a time):

• “Another girl came over to the table carrying a tray.” (Wonder 51)
• “…she said, smiling, her eyes open wide, as she waited for me to get it.” (Wonder 52)
• Whooping, I ran into the ocean fully clothed. (Code Talker 118)

The last time I read Mechanically Inclined, I was teaching 10th grade, and while some of the author's ideas seemed a little too middle school (that is his audience), several of them were really helpful:  

• The mindset of identifying students’ pseudo-concepts instead of errors, seeing the strengths and what students need to mature those strengths. For instance, seeing run-on sentences as a student’s first attempts to express more complex ideas in more complex grammatical forms—only lacking the appropriate punctuation. 
• The use of models from reading. I recently did that for teaching punctuating dialogue. Noticing patterns in published work and practicing the pattern. Then going back to literature to find more instances of the pattern. 
• The use of wall charts to track and curate deepening understanding. I haven’t done that since we started the new school year distance learning in April, but I need to re-figure out how to make it work whether virtually or in person.

I'm excited about incorporating even more of Anderson's ideas into my 6th and 7th grade English class this fall. I think that as I become curious about and attentive to sentences, modeling it and prompting students to observe, collect, hypothesize, and try it out, I can make that attentiveness and curiosity contagious in my classroom. And as my students and I foster this relationship with language, we can wield it with more skill, confidence, and power to love God and neighbor in our world.

7 Things I Learned Starting a School Year Online

The box of books that came with me on vacation...

The first week of school is always the hardest for me, even in normal conditions (even after 30 years!). Getting to know students and establishing classroom culture are huge, crucial jobs which lay the foundation for the whole year’s learning. How do I even begin to imagine what that will look like online? Those were my thoughts back in April when I started a new school year at a new school with new classes—because the international Christian school in Japan that I’d just moved to operates on the Japanese academic year. So if those are your thoughts now as US schools begin to gear up, here are a few things I did and learned:

1. Keep the main thing the main thing: My main thing is students growing in their English skills of reading, writing, thinking, listening, and speaking. We might not cover every lit term, grammar construction, or piece of literature that was planned, but as long as students are growing in their English skills of reading, writing, thinking, listening, and speaking, we’re good. 
2. Ask questions: I started with a letter of introduction to my students, and then asked them to write a letter back to me. (I supplied a list of optional questions they could respond to in case my model was not enough to give them inspiration.) This also gave me a baseline writing sample. Here's another idea for getting to know your students by Betsy Potash on Spark Creativity. I started synchronous classes in Google Meet with an attendance question to be answered in chat. As in person, linking learning to life is important: what does this theme look like in your life or in the world today? Write a poem about a time you were afraid. Write a personal narrative about a time you learned something. 
3. Start slowly: I used small pieces of reading and writing, low-stakes assessments, mindful that the relationships, class culture, and procedures established now would be foundational to the rest of the year. Start with why and how. Content can take a back seat in the first weeks.
4. Keep it simple: There might be 25 different applications and websites out there I hear colleagues raving about. I don’t have to use all 25. That’s too much of my time and the students’ time learning new platforms and programs rather than reading, writing, thinking, listening, and speaking. My school uses Google Suite, so I’m focusing on those tools and learning to use them well (see #5). Plus CommonLit for resources and Quizlet for vocabulary. Maybe in the fall I’ll add Flipgrid for a video recording response option. 
5. Actively engage students: This is part of the class culture I want to build, and this was probably my biggest challenge in distance learning. “8 Ideas Designed to Engage Students in Active Learning Online” by Catlin Tucker is a blog post with fantastically helpful ideas I’ll be using heavily as I make my fall plans. And in keeping with #4, it’s all doable with Google.
6. Provide models: While this is always ideal, I found it golden in distance learning. You know the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”? A model poem, reflection, paragraph is worth pages of directions. See below for part of the model poetry project I wrote with my 6th and 7th graders. (Here are 5 other ways to provide models.)
7. Get mentors: Follow educator blogs/podcasts that inspire you and feed you ideas. Here are some of mine: Cult of Pedagogy, Spark Creativity, Truth for Teachers, Catlin Tucker.

How are you planning to start the new school year?

What I Plan to Learn This Summer

There's a video I've watched many times this week: the one my daughter posted on Instagram of my youngest grandchild's first steps. Other highlights? Finishing all the required spring term school stuff: turning in grades, documenting unit plans, and writing up my professional development plan. I also read the leveled English edition of Cry, the Beloved Country that I'll be teaching in my high school EFL class in the fall.

At the beginning of the summer, I usually write a post on my planned summer professional reading (here's 2019 and 2018). But since I have a shorter summer than usual, and since I'm teaching new courses which will require more planning than in past summers, and since I'm wanting to explore a number of websites with resources because who knows when we'll have to go to distance learning again, and since with the pandemic-disrupted mail service from the US to Japan making ordering books a risky proposition...I don't have a stack of new books this year. But I do have that professional development proposal I just wrote up, so I'll share that here instead:

Goals:

• Help students increase their ability to read, write, think, listen, and speak in English.
• Grow in my ability to use technology to increase student learning, both to differentiate and to prepare for the possibility of online learning being necessitated again by the pandemic.
• Increase my toolbox of EFL teaching strategies to increase student engagement and learning.

Objectives:

• Plan grammar and mechanics teaching in context in English 6/7.
• Investigate new tech tools and resources and integrate 1-3 into courses.
• Find more resources for increasing student engagement and learning in EFL. 

Activities:

• Re-ead Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson, and incorporate its ideas for teaching grammar and usage in the context of writing into English 6/7 curriculum, documented against the standards/benchmarks, in unit plans developed for the course. (I wrote about this goal last week.)
• Read Teacher’s Guide to Tech 2020 by Jennifer Gonazles, investigate tools/resources found there, and integrate 1-3 into courses.
• Follow conversations on the Facebook group ESL Teachers K-12 and explore resources recommended there, such websites of Larry Ferlazzo and Carol Salva, and incorporate 1-3 new strategies/resources into unit guides for my EFL courses.
• Stay current with best practices in ELA and education by reading, such as membership publications from National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and ASCD.
• Reflect on my own learning and implementation by writing a weekly blog post.

In addition, I continue to learn about the racial conflict in the US, reading So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo and American's Original Sin by Jim Wallis.

I really have learned a lot this week and plan to learn more. But after spending several hours exploring resources on a couple of websites, when I sat down to write this blog, I stared at a blank screen for an hour. That's my cue that the best practice I need right now is to give myself a little summer vacation and go watch that video of my granddaughter walking again. 

Wishing all of us plenty of rest and learning this summer!

Strengthening the Reading-Writing Connection

“Mrs. Essenburg, is this dialogue, like we were talking about?” 

A 6th grader beckoned to me in the midst of a classroom of heads quietly bent over independent reading books. It took me a moment to recognize what her confusion was. Then I realized the novel she held was an edition printed in England, so the convention for dialogue was to use single quotation marks rather than double. 

Then she pointed to a particular line, “What does this mean?” The line of dialogue started with “I’m,” so what it looked like on the page was this: ‘I’. I can see why that would be confusing: a single quotation mark, a capital letter I, and an apostrophe. Why would a first person singular pronoun be enclosed in single quotation marks--something she’d never heard of before. We had a little whispered conversation right there about all those conventions. It’s a confusion I never would have thought to address, so I’m glad we’d been focusing on dialogue in class, resulting in the student being aware enough to identify her confusion (and bold enough to initiate the discussion). 

We started by noticing the dialogue when we read “Funeral,” an excerpt from Ralph Fletcher’s memoir. We inferred the rules for formatting, capitalization, and punctuation from what we saw: 
     “A funeral!” I laughed. “Hey, I’m moving. I’m not dead!”
     “You’ll be dead to us,” Larry pointed out. 

We wrote our own character sketches which had to include dialogue. When revising and again when editing, I put two lines of dialogue from “Thank You, Ma’am” by Langston Hughes on the whiteboard, reviewed the guidelines we’d noticed, and asked students to check all their dialogue to be sure they’d applied the guidelines:
     Firmly gripped by his shirt front, the boy said, “Yes’m.” 
     “If I turn you loose, will you run?” asked the woman. 


One of my professional development goals for this summer is to re-read Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop and make a plan for intentionally integrating this kind of reading-writing connection throughout the 6th and 7th grade ELA curriculum.

We know that grammar and rules instruction not embedded in reading and writing produce limited or even negative improvement in writing (Constance Weaver, Teaching Grammar in Context). We also know that there is a correlation between wide reading and sophisticated writing (Stephen Krashen, Free Voluntary Reading). My goal is to make the transfer even more efficient by raising students’ awareness that reading is watching professional writers at work so we can improve our own craft.

Priming the Pump for Summer Reading

 “Mrs. Essenburg, are those new books?” Two 6th grade girls accosted me eagerly as I walked into the classroom Friday morning. On top of my stack were several new books. One was Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper, which I’d just finished the previous night and had helped me know a child with cerebral palsy as I never had before. There were 2 new arrivals I’d already read: Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai and Genius: The Game by Leopold Gout, and the old classic Black Beauty I’d snagged from the school library for our resident horse lover who hadn't heard of it.

The 2 girls looked over the books. (“Is this a poem?” for Thanhha Lai’s verse novel about fleeing Vietnam.) Then finally retreated to their seats with a plea, “Can I read this when I’m done with the book I’m reading?” I promised them that even if they didn’t finish the book they are reading, they can take an extra one or two—whatever my nascent classroom library will bear—home for the 6-week summer break. (One is working on Gary Schmidt’s Pay Attention, Carter Jones. My favorite line is the one the butler always sends the children off to school with: “Remember who you are, and make good decisions.” The other has both Prince Caspian and The Horse and His Boy—because after she’d finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, she started Prince Caspian, and then one day she forgot it, needed another for the 10 minutes of reading at the beginning of class, and ended up not wanting to give either back.)

I delivered Genius to the student who ripped through New Kid but has been moving more slowly through Samurai Shortstop. He loves computers, though, so maybe this one about 3 global adolescent digital natives—a Latino computer programmer, a Chinese human rights blogger, and an African engineer—teaming up to overcome evil will engage him a little above his reading level. By the end of the class he gives me the nod that he’ll keep the book. And when I checked in with the one reading Black Beauty she marveled, “I’ve never read a book with a horse as the first-person narrator before!” (Terms we’d just been learning to use talking about the short stories we’ve been reading together—“Yes, Ma’am” by Langston Hughs and “Funeral” by Ralph Fletcher.)

Why am I so excited about students reading? I haven’t committed as heavily to independent reading before (10 minutes the majority of class periods in the 3 weeks we’ve been meeting in person after distance learning due to Covid-19). But we’re heading into our final week of class before we finally hit summer break here in Japan. And if most of them have had a couple of engaging experiences before then, they’ll keep reading through that time. 

Why is it important for them to keep developing as readers? In addition to all the academic advantages it confers (vocabulary knowledge, writing prowess), it sets them up for a lifetime of growing in their knowledge of the world and their empathy for others. That’s knowledge of the amazing, interconnected, broken world God has entrusted to us, and empathy for our fellow image bearers we’re obligated to love.

That’s what it does for me as a reader. So currently I’m reading the first book in the Ranger’s Apprentice series because it might hook a boy on reading, and I’m reading The New Jim Crow and Me and White Supremacy to keep learning about the racial injustice happening in my home country and around the world, and even in me.

I'm hoping to send my students off to summer vacation next Friday with some books to read that will keep them from summer slide, but also keep them engaged with God’s world and with their neighbors’ lives in ways that will broaden their minds, deepen their hearts, and give them a desire to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.