Reply To: Calling all teachers!!! I need some help!

midwesterner…you clearly have never read anything i’ve written (other than my posts here on the forum)

lol that too aussie 😛

basically what i did yesterday was a few writing exercises. i wrote four words, skateboard, meter, melon, pen (or whatever) on a piece of paper and asked the guy to tell me what it meant. so he spun some tale about those four objects and i told him “well, you couldnt do much with those four nouns on their own, but once you added verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, and punctuation, it made perfect sense and told an interesting story”

so then i did another related word exercise where you take five objects in the room, write them down on paper, and write three sentences which include all five objects. so he did that, and then i did it, and the point was to show him how a random assortment of words with nor order, rhyme, or reason is worthless, but when structured–when you understand the rules and structure to writing and how sentences are constructed–you are given infinite possibilities. the freedom perceived when disregarding grammar is actually limiting because there is very little you can express without understanding language, structure, and grammar, but once you “confine” yourself within specific grammatical boundaries, there is no end to what you can say.

and then i kind of drew the parallel to the real world, that a life without structure, without guidelines, may seem free when in actuality it is severely limiting because you don’t know and cannot know what to do with yourself. but add some structure, add some guidelines, and there is no telling what you can accomplish in life.

the next exercise was reading Jabberwocky by Lewis Carrol. the idea being that Jabberwocky is meaningless, but because of its structure, the meaning is implied by the context. thus it is the structure which gives it meaning, not simply the juxtaposition of random words. and then i had him swap all the meaningless words in Jabberwocky with actual words and had him read it again, and then we did that again, and the point came across that by understanding structure you can express absolutely anything.

then, just for fun and because it follows a similar idea, we did some mad libs 😀

it was all mamash siyata d’shmaya because i had no idea what i was doing and i had been planning to do GED prep, but we got sidetracked and i had to wing it 😛 baruch hashem it worked out very well 😀