week three: no catchy title idea

This week we started talking about how a sentence is framed. In class we went over the sentence “Seth uses.” This would normally be viewed as an incomplete sentence to most. But thanks to our generation of slang, it can be viewed as a real sentence to mean something like Seth uses drugs of some sort. This last sentence I used also shows another thing that we went over this week in class. The starting of sentences with words such as “butt, and, because” is usually viewed as doing the wrong thing. But as we learned, it is perfectly fine to use.

My question is, if I am teaching a high school English class, how can I convince students that it is perfectly fine to start sentences using those words, even though they have been taught all their lives that it is incorrect?

the list sentence

Through week two of grammar class, we started to look more at punctuation and grammar structure. One thing that I learned this week was that when there is an “and” sentence, it is still correct to have a comma before the and and after the and. What I mean by this is sentences such as “I LIKE TO PLAY BASEBALL, BASKETBALL, PING PONG, AND RUN,” and “I LIKE TO PLAY BASEBALL, BASKETBALL, PING PONG AND RUN.” I was always taught that if you didn’t put a comma, it was incorrect. It is one of those rules that I don’t understand why there are multiple ways of teaching it. I believe there should only be one. What I want to know from people is, which way do you think is more correct more often?