Before beginning the lesson, I handed out an evaluation of Lesson 1 to the students. I took this idea from the previous intern at LaGCC who took it from another theorist. The point of this evaluation was to see if the students who were in class last time and are here today, possibly remember what we discussed last time and be comfortable to share with me what they did or didn't like about the lesson. The responses that I got from the students showed that most students in the class remembered exactly what happened last time. The last question I asked them was what they did not find helpful or that I did not clarify for them in my lesson. Most students wrote that they understood everything and a "thank you" as well but only one or two students actually wrote what they did not find helpful. One student wrote that she was still confused about doing conclusions, which was not the focus of my lesson of course.
For this lesson, I prepared three hand-outs. The first hand-out includes 10 examples of run-on sentences. I went over the first three questions and asked the class to work on the rest in groups of 2-3 as I mentioned in my lesson plan. I found these examples from different sources from the LaGCC Writing Center. The second hand-out I gave to the students is a chart that describes the four ways of "fixing" run-on sentences. I took this out of a grammar website and cited it on the page itself.
The third hand-out , I must admit was the hardest one for me to figure out. As I discussed it with the teacher beforehand, I was trying to find two paragraphs from a sample essay and have run-on errors in it to demonstrate to the class how they can fix run-ons in their own essays by learning how to proofread by reading out loud to themselves. As I mentioned in my lesson plan, I asked the students to pay attention to what I do and then presented the hand-out on the board and read it out loud. Of course I exaggerated my process of fixing the run-on errors in the first paragraph but the point of it was so that students can understand how they can do this on their own. After working on the first paragraph, I asked the students to do the same on their own, working individually, on the second paragraph. The difficulty for me was finding the two paragraphs itself. At first I found something online literature-related and Linda told me that it would be too difficult for the students to understand in the first place. The content instead, has to be on a very simple topic so that students don't get stuck on the content when the concentration is really about fixing the run-ons. Thus, after much research, I found a sample essay online about rock bands, which I thought would be so much more interesting for the students and not at all hard.
My overall reaction to doing the lesson was as I expected; it took a lot out of me! I was worried about my time while doing the work and also worried that I was giving the students too much information at a small amount of time. For this reason, I asked everybody if they had questions virtually every time I finished one activity or finished going over each concept and aspect of run-ons.
I was intrigued when I received some of the students' questions as I taught. One student who was paying very close attention to my explanation of fixing run-ons, asked me what the difference between putting comma before "because" and before "and" was. I tried to explain it as best as I could but Linda jumped in to save me and said to the student that in fact, English is just a very difficult and growing language. Rules in the English language seem to always change. For this reason, one does not have absolute answers to grammar in this language knowing that there are many exceptions to many rules.
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