Renovations.
December is a difficult month. Not just as a bereaved mother preparing for Christmas with an aching heart, but as a teacher. All of my sophomore students take their English II End-of-Course assessment, a state mandated exam, before Winter Break. This exam, though an arbitrary measure of "proficiency," is worth 20% of their overall grade, per the state's directive. Because of this, we spend a ton of time reviewing in the weeks leading up to the exam. One of the many skills we further develop and (attempt to) master in my course is the art of defining unknown words based off of what is happening around them (i.e. using context clues to determine the meaning of a term or phrase). One of the ways I teach my students to tackle an unfamiliar word is to use morphemes to "break the word down." As a class, we learn over 100 prefixes, suffixes, and roots, and we practice stringing together the word parts we know to determine the meaning of longer, more complex terms. ...