Back in the Act

                It has been a week without blogs, and I can say with confidence that I think this week we are in need for some blogging. From the past week I gathered quite a bit of information and still am somewhat unsure if I’m using it properly.  Starting out with the clauses and phrases, when it comes to phrases I feel like they are pretty straight forwards, it’s the clauses I’m more worried about.

I know that a clause includes a subject-verb and following the subject you have a sentence and an independent clause. Yet when following the verb and a dependent clause you’re using AAAWWUBBIS.  On a side note of AAAWWUBBIS’s I feel like once again I don’t remember learning them in elementary school. Back to dependent clauses though, I understand that you put a comma in if the relative pronoun in nonrestrictive but you don’t use a comma when the relative pronoun is relative. My only concern for these two rules knows when something is relative or nonrestrictive.  For example “People [that] screamed at the concert drove me crazy”. Here I can see that the meaning is not needed, therefore there is no comma.

                The next thing we learned was the [sent, EXTRA, ence], where the AAAWWUBIS’s introduce a clause.  In class we also discussed when something is broad we don’t need the AAAWUBIS or the comma, yet when the subject is not broad “or specific” we do use the comma. In our examples in class I understood when something was too broad of a reference or not. It was when my peers and I got down to reviewing our own work we started to second guess whether everything was broad or not.  I think this specific concept will take time to fully grasp.

                On Thursday we switched things around and had more of a discussion based class, which I really enjoyed.  I found that many of us were in the same boat, that we didn’t remember learning how to write, it just clicked. I didn’t really think about it until our discussion, but I thought I remembered learning how, but I don’t I just remember the worksheets of “Capitol letters touching both solid lines, and lower case letters touching the dashed lines”. Yet, on the subject of Dora I’d have to say that my way of learning in the home and in school was much different. I really don’t think if I had taken home what Dora did, my parents wouldn’t just read it and say good job, I think they would have been worried and worked more with me.  Also, I feel my teachers were never like Dora’s and never let me get tired of writing and had me approach it another way. AFTER LOOKING BACK ON OUR DISCUSSION, I THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT PRACTICE FOR BECOMING A TEACHER, BECAUSE WE ALL SHOULD BE DISCUSSING WHATS WORKING IN OUR CLASSROOMS AND WHATS NOT, IN ORDER TO HELP EACH OTHER.

Question of the week: How do we define what is broad, and what is not? Can it be debatable?