Blog #3

Making mistakes is the first step to becoming an expert at a certain craft. In teaching and understanding English, it has been discovered that making mistakes and being able to identify them can play a big role in mastering the craft of written English for students. As well, it is important for teachers to understand this concept as well. Teachers must be self aware of the need to not just simply criticize and correct spelling or sentence errors. Teachers must instead encourage the students art of trying, and guide them to correctness instead of simply stating it. To only correct and come down on students in their writing does not build them to be risk takers, so instead teachers must work to constructively correct. All of these concepts and ideas are what the article "Sudden Possibilities" by Darren Crovitz touches on, and I have to say that I thought the article was a very interesting and enlightening read. Writing to the importance and making and learning from mistakes is very important to me; experiment, go out of your comfort zone, make mistakes. This is what good writing is about. Good writing is not about playing it safe, but instead about going out of your comfort zone in order to become better. Good writing leads to proper learning, and that is the ultimate goal of teaching, however it is accomplished.

The question posed in the article that moved me the most is when the author said, "How can we acknowledge the thinking that might be happening in common kinds of errors while building on this awareness to help students be more self-reflective as they encounter and interpret unfamiliar words and phrases?" (32). To me, this question is the most important that teachers can ask themselves of. As mentioned earlier, teachers must work intensively on the art of not criticizing and demeaning students writing mistakes. Instead, as the question points out, we must encourage students to be self reflective in their writing ambitions rather than ashamed. In order to do so, I believe that a good teacher would focus on the thought process that made the student arrive to an incorrect grammatical/written english conclusion. By understanding a students thought process, a teacher can understand how they learn. To understand how a student learns is to understand how to teach them. Each student learns differently, and applying the same teaching to each student only sets up few for success and many for failure. In order to avoid that, teachers must critically think about the way they critique their students, while still encouraging them to try.

My groups alternative to a typical DOL exercise is exercise 5. My exercise consists of sentence combining, in order to create more sophisticated sentences. I believe that my groups exercise relates very well to the topic of learning through error, as this exercise provides stepping stones to learning. Starting with simple sentences in the hopes of forming complex ones allows students to be able to start small and build upon their knowledge as they practice and learn through error.

Examples of simple sentences that can be formed to make sophisticated sentences:

1. The cat woke up
2. The cat became alert
3. The cat looked behind him
4. The hair on the cats back stood straight up
5. The cat noticed that the dog was intently looking towards him
6. The cat immediately stood to its feet in a desperate gallop from the area