Watch Tuel in his first start against the Ducks!

I thought Barbara’s lesson on FANBOYS was extremely helpful. I have a really good way of remembering things when a tool such as this is used. I hope throughout the semester there are different ways of remembering these ideas, where I can just see the abbreviation and instantly know what is being talked about.
This week I was writing a paper for one of my classes and I found myself using it’s and its in the wrong places. Even though I know when its and it’s should be used, I kept forgetting to put the apostrophe, s in some of the places where it needed to be inserted. I thought this was really weird, but I guess this happens sometimes. It’s weird because sometime I will also misspell words that I know how to spell, but because it looks weird, I second guess myself. Maybe my mind is going crazy this week, who knows.
I was glad that there were some other people who felt a little angry toward the piece we read this week. I thought the text was way too long, and that she could have summed up her thoughts in two pages, not 10. I think the most important part of that piece was the idea of the two third-grade classrooms and how the class who was writing understood punctuation more than the class who was doing drills and more instruction based work. Maybe some people can learn through drill and constant critique of what is being said, but I think it’s important to learn by mistake, writing and practicing over and over again.
Barbara posed a question at the end of class, asking how and when we know to use punctuation. At first I thought this question would be really easy to answer, but then I thought about it and it’s kind of hard to explain. I guess this stuff has just become second nature to me, that I just realize when a period or comma is needed. However, there are sometimes when I think a semi-colon can be used, but then I decide against it because I feel that I don’t know the usage of semi-colons enough to try and fit them in a paper. So other than that, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on when to use a comma, and period and exclamation!
I was happy with the Socratic Seminar again this week, but I felt that it was kind of lacking the enthusiasm we had the last time. Maybe because this piece was a little dull and straight arrowed it didn’t generate much conversation, but I think maybe we should save the Socratic Seminars for topics that are can be more open-ended with opinion.

My question for the week: Okay, so Barbara talked about lie, lay, laid…and I feel like it was pretty brief with explanation, and I think I was doing something else. Can somebody tell me when to use each, and what the difference is? I think I even heard her say, lain? Is that right? Explanation would be great!