![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
said all their names three times
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 04:09 am- Thank you so much for the virtual snowflake cookies,
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stealingpennies and geeklite! :D - I have four dreamwidth invites, so if anyone reading this doesn't have an account and would like one, just drop a comment/PM/email, whatevs. They are free to good homes!
- For the last few months I've been volunteering at the local adult literacy center, and I LOVE it. Back in September I went through the twelve-hour tutor training, the ultimate intention of which is usually to match you up one-on-one with a student, but as I was getting in my requisite hours of classroom observation, I found that being in the classroom was what I really loved doing. So I decided not to request a tutee, and instead I've been operating as a de facto teaching assistant (which they are always desperately in need of, as the classes have gotten relatively large, and there are students at all learning levels in attendance).
Since I've got this stupid degree in linguistics, and I'm a natural-born lecturer, the instructor has been asking me from early on to prepare lessons from week to week, which I have been enjoying, but basically winging, since I get no direction. Once she asked me to do "something with phonics", which is basically as helpful as telling me to "teach them to read". I mean, can you vague that up for me? But I have found many resources via the google, and the class title of "Basic Literacy and Spelling" has given me enough leeway to go over things like derivational morphology, the silent "e", and orthographic-phoneme mapping.
Tonight we spent the whole class carving up sentences into phrases (because dividing sentences into phrases is natural and helps increase fluency while reading), and even though I didn't mention the word "constituent" even ONCE, sometimes I thought I was going waaay over their heads, and sometimes I asked them a question that I thought had a really simple answer, but they gave me an answer that seemed UTTERLY RANDOM; but sometimes they just GOT IT, and it was AWESOME. I fucking love language, I love the English language, and even though I thought of a dozen ways to do it better as soon as I was done, tonight was a good night. I think that's all I wanted to say.