The Slog

First a quick note to myself: keep this short.  Another, seemingly contradictory note: give details.

A new week and a new cold.  I am sick again and coughing horribly.  Yet I soldier on.

The main problem this week will be playing catch-up.  I am very far back on the book lessons and it will be a problem to get them all done.  Today I rushed through most of the material for English 1 and feel good about it.  It involved a lot of listening, some Q&A in the book and a short grammar lesson on past tense and making past tense questions.  I will have to revisit the PT question part on Wednesday to make sure.  The classes were well engaged and talkative and did well with peer correction and making complete sentences.

English 2 was even further back and less was completed today.  They worked on developing some of there own definitions and shared a lot of information on the theme of "identity theft".  They got through the listening and vocab work, but not the grammar lesson. Because there was a hang up due to a short section on prepositional verbs / idioms I was not able to even get to the main grammar lesson.

Short note:  This relates to the major problem I have with the text - why the hell were prepositional  verbs part of the lesson?  Are they extra vocab?  Are they another grammar lesson?  Should these be distinguished from other verbs that will be used later?  Is this important?

(It turns out the short note is important.  I just received an email regarding sample questions for the standardized final.  It appears that students will be tested on knowledge of the textbook content.  This requires more investigation.)

The other noteworthy event today was that I received student writing today.  Some still seem to be writing a sentence and skipping to the next line.  I've skimmed them and some are really excellent, but many are missing basic things like the student's name.  Freshmen...