Grammar: Theory and Practice – Dr. Sean Ruday
This is the class that truly opened my eyes to what’s important of teaching.
This class wasn’t just worksheets and what’s right to write, but how to teach grammar to help student comprehend the material better and understanding there’s more to grammar than just the Standard Grammar rules, and how dialect may seem wrong but can be so important to writing.
The Understanding English Grammar book we read in this class was the first book we looked into, and the authors truly dived into this idea that grammar has layers and is more of a spectrum rather than a right or wrong.
Dr. Ruday was also one of the best professors I had, and he was always finding ways to relate examples with us and make us laugh and enjoy his class, as well as always offering positive reinforcement even when we were wrong. He is understanding and willing to work with students if any special circumstances needed to be applied within assignments and/or classwork.
He was a huge advocate for participation, and he created class activities that required us to all participate, but it was never an issue or a problem for us, as we all enjoyed interacting with the material he provided. He liked to hear from us about our examples and relation to the material.
When we were working from home, our big way of participation would be a Google document he would have us put examples in for the topic we were covering in class. One of my favorite activities we did with this was a grammar meme project, in which we put in pictures of a grammar meme we made or thought was funny, then respond to each other’s memes. Here is what my class had put together!