What’s with Me, Commas?
It looks like I have a thing of using commas in substitution of “and.” My Language Arts Co-teacher would know what that particular use of a comma is called. So would Google, if I took the 1.7 seconds to search for it.
My examples include this very blog (Education, Stading Style) and perhaps my class blog for Journalism: The World, A Click Away. (Not much on that right now, but that should change when I return from FMLA this week.)
Introducing another of my comma-titled websites: Knowledge, Created. This is my graduate portfolio for my M.Ed degree in Early Childhood Education. I started the degree in 2000 or so, going for an Alaska Teacher Certificate. When it came to decision time about turning that certificate work into a Master’s Degree, I opted against it: I was almost finished with a Special Education Master’s and really, who needs two Master’s?
Well, me…though it took me a few years to decide that, a decision made even easier when the director of the program told me I would only need nine more credits to obtain the degree. Cool. I could do that, even with two young kids at home and a full-time teaching job.
It wasn’t the easiest finish of a degree; it came complete with plenty of late Friday nights, interrupted web classes, and some no-you-were-told-wrong-you-can’t-finish-like-this drama. It hasn’t meant much for the pay scale or my current teaching assignment, but what’s another step on the pay scale anyway. I finished something I started. I’m three-fifths of the way to catching my dad and his college degrees (a Bachelor’s, three Master’s and a Doctorate). There are some bragging rights to holding dual graduate degrees, though more from my husband than myself. (He likes having an educated wife.)
I think the most important reason for this M.Ed, though, is that it models continued learning to my students, my colleagues, and my own children and family. I decided to build the portfolio as a Google Site with embedded Google Documents, with which I had limited experience. Reviewing it, I still see editing mistakes and the pages are a bit wordy. But that is okay. That is who I was as an educator in the past years. It will not be who I am as an educator in the coming years.
Me, learning.
(According to Google, that’s a newspaper headline thing, to use the comma instead of “and”…though I think I’m setting off some sort of clause with these commas. Strunk and White’s non-restrictive clauses, perhaps?)
