Drawing the Short Straw

Once again, there are a couple things that have been learned this past week, even though I, MYSELF, was not present for half of our class-week. Completely separate from things learned in class, I realize once again that:

I believe that meme is befitting of how I felt for the majority of the week (and some of the week before).

Moving on, I've also come to realize that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing when it comes to parts of a sentence. BETWEEN YOU AND ME, it's something that, if I managed to learn the parts in the past, I don't remember now. During class on Thursday I couldn't even get through the first page of the newspaper when we were set free to work on our own. That's just sad. Seriously.

I'm hoping to improve my knowledge and be able to distinguish the different parts of a sentence some day. It's something that I will need to focus on and work toward over the next few years as I come closer to becoming a teacher. I want to be able to recognize where students are going wrong and explain to them why. That's very important: being able to explain why. It's easy to point out mistakes to someone, especially mistakes in their writing, but it's often hard to tell them why it's wrong. It's hard to be able to tell them how to fix it and why that way is correct while the other one is wrong. I want to have that knowledge so I can have a stockpile of ways to explain things to future students. Only saying something is wrong doesn't help them.

I'll admit that it's hard to come up with new things to say that weren't said in my blog last week. That being the case, I'm going to leave you with an excerpt from something I had read for my English 370 class that still seeps into my mind. I don't find it beautiful for it's mood, but rather it's ownership.

"Full of grief, I make this poem about myself, my own fate. I have the right to say what miseries I have endured since I grew up, new or old--never greater than now. Endlessly I have suffered the wretchedness of exile." -The Wife's Lament