Many voices- plus Codeiro

-How Cordeiro connects to Anderson

"Dora's teacher talked and listened to children's explanations of their children's explanations of their own thinking," writes Cordeiro. Bringing us back to Anderson's pseudo-concepts, Cordeiro agrees that children have reasons for what they thing and that their reasons should be considered and addressed.


-How Cordeiro and Keil connect.

Keil and Cordeiro have similar viewpoints: Kiel argued that kids learn from exposure to language and Cordeiro argued that kids learn from experience with language, specifically writing. Neither advocate a lot of direct teaching.


-Cordeiro and Jennifer

Cordeiro sheds a lot of light on why fragments are such a complex problem is student writing. She shows how discerning where a period goes, and what compromises a clause are not cut-and-dry concepts. Who knew that defining a sentence could be so hard?


-And Colleen's thoughts

There seems to be a lot of exploratory learning going on is Dora's classroom. Would kids really discuss what they are learning and how to do it properly? Maybe it's because I was homeschooled, but I find the idea of students having period pow-wows odd and idealized. I don't know...

Dora's teacher seems to let her try and hypothesize instead of showing her the way periods work. There are good arguments for teaching this way, but I've never been entirely comfortable with it.

I was extremely frustrated by Codeiro's summary of a situation where young writers are using fragments. She focuses on the fact that the erroneous punctuation enhances the meaning of the sentences. That's a valid point. However, these writers didn't intentionally break the rules: they were lucky. The sentences, in fact, are grammatically incorrect-the writers were incapable of following the rules. Instead of pointing out how the fragments are happily effective, Codeiro should be teaching these students. Young writers are not aided by being left with an incomplete understanding of English. This haphazard teaching is like praising the fact that a swimmer is fast and not addressing the fact that her form sucks. In the long run, she will suffer from the neglect. Rules may be meant to be broken, but first a writer has to know the rules. Besides...it's more fun that way.


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So...It took me forever to change this up and play with sentence variety. First I edited and it ended up being more concise-not what I wanted. I finally looked up dashes and colons again and discovered that they are used to add emphasis: that was useful in those last paragraphs. I switched the order of a few sentences, such as, "The sentences, in fact, are grammatically incorrect-the writers were incapable of following the rules." I'm finding that as I try to add colons, dashes, and sentence variety other devices such as questions, italics, and ellipses are sneaking into my writing. Maybe this is because I already know how to use them. Colons and dashes are still a pain. They feel unnatural. They are hard to fit into my writing rhythm (which is also being changed). I feel a bit punctuation claustrophobic right now, to tell the truth.