Evan TS#14 (Bruce)

        Bruce had recently taken a quiz and was confused about what a "gerund" was. He was required to form sentences using a few select verbs in combination with a gerund. This was helpful as it made me realize how impactful gerunds are, and how strange they are. I think Bruce is still struggling with the concept of nouns, so a gerund really threw him through a loop. He understood however, that a gerund refers to the whole activity. I used my favorite example sentence, "do you mind my asking?". This works well because people understand the activity of asking a question. In addition, it works because people identify with being imposing. One thing he did have trouble with was realizing that a gerund is not just simply a verb with -ing on the end. The aforementioned noun confusion did not help, I don't think. We went over a few examples, and he seemed to understand better at that point. I then asked that he complete the activity from his quiz. His first sentence, he simply used one of the verbs from the list and added -ing. This means two things, either he did not understand the question of gerunds, but I think it was a bit of both. He did not realize that  one uses gerunds in addition to verbs. I described some of the verbs and gave some oral examples using some verbs, like "quitting smoking". He attempted again and nailed it, both tense and gerund. We did one more example and he got it again. Feeling confident he understood, we ended the lesson there.

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