Gr-apples to Gr-apples

This year has gone by quickly--I can hardly believe that all the students are gone for summer break. Work is bound to slow down now that all the professors are finishing up grading and are leaving campus in the next couple of weeks. But, even as I'm fervently trying to finish my own grading and am completing administrative tasks for other profs, I've had a chance to think about all the growing experiences I've had this year.

One such experience is teaching: I taught one section of English composition this year. I remember that, when I first stood up in front of the classroom last semester, I thought I would be petrified to be in charge of 20 students for an entire semester. What I soon found was that I really enjoyed it. I had a kind mentor who allowed me to borrow some of her lesson plan ideas, and I had support from my co-workers, family, friends, and boyfriend. When I stood at the front of the classroom, I found an energy that I didn't know I possessed. It was fun.

It wasn't always easy, though: teaching is tough, and I found that out first semester especially. I did not know much about teaching, so it quickly became a semester of trial and error. I spent many extra hours working on lesson plans that flopped (what teacher can say that he or she hasn't experienced this, though?), and at times I was so stressed that I could hardly sleep. Yet, I still enjoyed in-class discussions and lesson plan invention.

With the second semester of teaching, I took my knowledge of "what works and what doesn't work" and tried to plan fun yet stimulating lessons. I wanted my new batch of students to see why developing English writing skills is so important and how that knowledge transcends the bounds of college. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.

Here's one example of a lesson plan that seemed to work:

"Can we play 'Apples to Apples' in class sometime?" asked one of my students. "The other English teacher let her class play. I think we should play too."

I laughed. "On the last day of class," I said. "Maybe. No guarantees, OK?"

For the next two months of class, he asked me every day if we could play. By the end of the semester, the other students were confused. "Why does he always ask to play 'Apples to Apples'?" asked one guy.

"I have the game if you ever want to use it in class," said one girl.

On the last day of class, I came up with a plan: I wanted to play my own version of "Apples to Apples." Thus began "Gr-apples to Gr-apples," a grammar review version of "Apples to Apples." Cheesy? Yes. Fun? I thought it would be. A learning experience? Most certainly. And, just because it was the last day of class, I threw in a bunch of candy too.

Did you know there's many ways to play "Gr-apples to Gr-apples"? You can play "Bad Gr-apple," which is where you have to cut out the wordiness and jargon from a sentence. There is "Gr-apple Turnover," where you must identify the grammar mistake in a sentence and then correct a sentence. There is "Lonely Gr-apple," where you must make one sentence subordinate to another. Also, "Passive/Active Gr-apple" (I think that's pretty self-explanatory).

This exercise allowed most of the students to voice any questions they had about nominalizations, subordinations, and even wordiness/jargon. When they took their grammar finals a few days later, they seemed to have a better grasp of the terms than they did when they took the grammar pre-test. Plus, we all laughed a lot together.

The spring semester is over now, and no one stood up on their desks at the end of the semester and said, "Oh captain my captain." None of the students "rose up and called me 'blessed,'" and I didn't expect them to. English composition is a course that almost all students despise. Even those who enjoy writing would much rather write poetry or short stories instead of research reports or critical analyses.

But, now that I can look back on it, I am glad that I tried out teaching English composition for two semesters. Teaching at the college level has always been a goal of mine, and to have the experience at such a young age was exhilarating.

Leap year, baby.

It is strange to not be celebrating my birthday today. For the last three years, I've made this day (February 28) the "big day": I wear a new dress, I eat cake, I go out to eat, I'm all smiles for no other reason than that it's my day.

But, today isn't my day anymore. Because, as a leap year baby, I finally get my real birthday tomorrow.

For some reason, the concept of having been born on February 29 is more weird this year than it has ever been before. Perhaps I've lived my odd life without really considering the fact that it isn't normal. The average person has a birthday every year on the same day, whereas I am a birthday gypsy, wandering from February 28 to February 29 to March 1 and back again.

Now that I'm older and am more contemplative about the nature of Leap Year, I feel bad for my parents. Who wouldn't? Their daughter was born on a non-day, which meant that they spent three out of four years trying to make February 28 special. Then, once February 29 came along, their daughter often asked to celebrate over the course of two days. And we don't do simple birthdays in my family. I imagine it must have been a bit of a burden at times.

Or, how do you explain to a third grade girl why she received a binky as a gift at her birthday party? I had tears streaming down my face as Mom tried to explain to me the concept of a gag gift. I was a sensitive child, that's for sure.

I've since grown to appreciate the quirkiness of my birthday. It makes for interesting small-talk conversation, too.

"You're turning six this year!" everyone asks. "How old does that make you?"

The snarky side of me wants to reply, "Well, if you do the math, if I'm turning six, and you multiply it by four, you'll find that I'm twenty-four years old." I never say it. But it is remarkable what facts people forget from their fourth grade math class.

One of the upsides to being born on February 29 is that it's a big deal when I get a real birthday. When I turned 5 (that's 20, in case you're still wondering), my parents whisked my sisters and me away to a bed and breakfast outside of Sioux Falls. I stayed in a bright yellow room with a red comforter and a four-poster bed. How blissful is that?

This year, my wonderful boyfriend and my awesome friends threw me a surprise birthday party. I've never had a surprise birthday party before, so I wasn't exactly sure what to do when everyone jumped out to shout, "SURPRISE!" It was such a fun, unexpected surprise.

My mother recently told me that some parents are now given the option of listing their leap year babies' date of birth on February 28 or March 1 because being born on February 29 can lead to computer data mix-ups. Tsk tsk. Don't be prejudice against leap year babies, parents! We may be different and more difficult at times, but we love our big day.

Being a birthday gypsy is pretty cool, especially since leap year only comes once every four years.

Testing and Evaluating Online Sources.

We all know that technology is changing the way that we think and research. Remember Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid"? It may be a few years old, but it's no less true now than it was when he first penned it: "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words," he says. "Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." He's referring to how technology (specifically the Google search engine) has shortened our attention spans, but he might as well be referring to the online research process of a lot of students today.

Enter English Composition. This semester, I've made it my personal mission to show my students that using any old source found through Google or another search engine isn't the smartest of academic choices. This and last semester, students have submitted articles from super reliable websites like ezinearticles.com and about.com.

These sites aren't always right in academic papers, folks. They are often contaminated with advertisements, surface-level information, and non-expert opinion. Many--like Wikipedia--are good "springboards" into further information, but just as many were begun as a marketing tactic to create links for SEO purposes.

Now, because of the persuasive nature of language and the fact that these sources often pop up on the first page in search engines, students feverishly deem these sources as reliable for use in academic papers and general citation. Yeesh. I think it'll take a lot of work for this and future generations to combat this tendency--who doesn't want to trust without testing?

I'm doing my small part to teach students how to fight the tendency to search for and cite the first source they find in Google.

On Monday, I gave them an exercise that my colleagues recommended: "Look at these websites, and tell me which ones are reliable and which aren't and why," I said.


Here are some of the websites, which I've collected from colleagues and from personal experience:

Shipman, "Living with Snakes"

The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation

"Tips on Insurance Coverage for Students"

"Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus"

My students browsed the links, examining the sites in the context of Faigley's The Brief Penguin Handbook and our in-class discussion about what makes sources reliable. Some laughed, some looked really serious as they realized that they'd almost been duped.


"These websites look real," a student said. "They're published online. So why aren't they reliable?"


"Are people allowed to trick us with these sites?" said another.

"Freedom of speech," replied one student. "They can put whatever they want up on and call it real."

Exactly. It's a funny problem: in a way, we've democratized learning by creating the Internet. Now, any person can share his or her opinion online through blogs, Facebook, post comments, Wikipedia, online articles. However, we still cannot deem any of these sources entirely reliable unless they are backed up by an expert approval or scholarly opinion.

Test and evaluate, test and evaluate. I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but we can't believe anything and everything that's said. I'm hoping that my students will learn that.

(So, which of the above websites are reliable and which aren't? Can you figure it out?)

My new voice.

Somewhere between a fever and a cold, I lost my voice. It's been gone for almost two days now and, although I miss hearing myself speak normally, I can instantly make myself laugh when I try to talk. The high-pitched, scratchy noise makes me giggle every time I say "HI!" to my co-workers, or when I try to answer the phone ("heLlOoOo?"), or when I tried to sing "Happy Birthday" to my mom yesterday.

Also, attempting to sing Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain" on a normal day is ambitious for me, but singing it sans normal voice is even worse. I tried it, and no noise came out of my mouth. What came was akin to a squeak.

Yesterday as I started teaching, I warned my students that my normal voice was not available at the moment. I assured them that I wouldn't talk at them for the entire class; alas, I did exactly the opposite. As students were turning in their homework assignments at the end of class, one girl came up to me. 

"Your voice sounds awesome," she said.

I chuckled and said, "If by awesome, you mean terrible, then yes."  

I still don't know if she was serious or not. Either way, I'm kind of enjoying the change. This abnormal voice of mine keeps me laughing all day long.