Grammar Blog #4

So ends another week of school, and of two meetings of English 326. I am enjoying the pace that the class is going so far, but I feel that harder times and larger workloads (from this class and others) are just around the corner. This week’s work load was very moderate, with only a few readings, but the two classes were both important.

On Monday we went over prepositional phrases and transitive and intransitive verbs. Prepositional phrases have always been easy for me, as I feel they are for most people, because it only requires looking for a key word such as: out, over, behind, etc. Intransitive and transitive verbs are still giving me a few problems, because they don’t always follow the examples that we have on our sheets. I feel like I can get them right about 75% of the time, but I think I understand them more and more every day.

The Socratic Circle was more important event of the week as we are trying to figure out what works best. Last week we tried the two circles where one circle still couldn’t talk, and this week we tried one big circle with open discussion. I found this to be an improvement over the two circles because it forced me to pay attention most of the time, but I still had several problems with it. My first problem was that although we are supposed to be having a conversation with the whole class I felt it was generally half the class talking and half listening and only making one or two comments. I know this because I was one of the students only making one or two comments, and yes, I did have more to say. I feel that students like me like to wait until they can speak without being interrupted, but this can be very difficult to do with big groups.

Another issue that makes the whole class discussion difficult is the long pauses after someone speaks. These pauses are caused because students feel they have something to say, but they also know that at least five other students want to speak, so they wait, awkwardly, not sure if they should speak.

The last problem I had with the discussion was that although Professor Monore was not speaking she sat in the front of the classroom with no students around her. Now, this is not a criticism towards Professor Monore, I am only mentioning it because I noticed this completely changed the way I went about saying things. When I commented I wanted to say things that would make the professor happy, and I also noticed I was looking directly at Professor Monore when I spoke, and I failed to look around the room. I doubt this was a problem with other students, but it did cause me to act differently.

I like discussions of any sort, even big group discussions as they are so much better than many of my other classes where the teacher lectures about the most irrelevant topics. The big group discussion does work, it does allow everyone to talk and allows everyone to listen and understand each other as a group.