Beautiful Mistakes

When we were discussing “Dora” in our fishbowl discussion, I found myself reassured with the fact that teaching is a delicate process. A good teacher can encourage without putting acknowledgement of mistakes at the forefront. Dora’s teacher gave her the liberty of figuring out mistakes on her own, while encouraging her for the thing she was doing right. I think that this approach has applications to teaching high school as well, to a degree. Students can get scared off by writing if we shove too much at them at once before they have a chance to process it.

While I was thinking about grammar in my free time today (yes, I sometimes even think about English Ed while fishing) and realized that students of all age groups know more than they give themselves credit for. I knew the words, “running, eating, sleeping,” etc. before I knew that the “ing” form of these verbs were called gerunds. I knew “to be, to smile, to concentrate” before I knew that these forms were called infinitives. It just then occurred to me why grammar terminology shouldn’t be forced upon students all at once: they already know all of these words and how they fit into the English language. Students have been speaking them since they were four or five years old. They already have a working understanding of these concepts and when we as teachers come along and label the concepts with frighteningly large polysyllabic words, writing becomes a science, even though they thought they already understood the concept, breeding insecurity and self-doubt. Insecure students sacrifice receptiveness to learning and growing out of fear of making beautiful mistakes.

I don’t think that the educational and developmental aspects of writing are intended to be standardized, because everyone develops at a different rate. I was always the student that sought help from teachers if I didn’t understand something, but usually at the end of a tutoring session I still flat-out didn’t “get it.” So I put some more thought into the problem, whether it was math or whatever, and there came a certain point where understanding just snapped into my brain. It wasn’t in the classroom, it didn’t happen overnight, but through working at it and putting forth some real effort, students can learn on their own and that will stick with them for a long time.

Here’s a broad question that I’m working on wrapping my brain around: for high school students, how do we introduce grammar in a way that sticks with them and really sinks in?

From Abstract Ideas to Dissecting Grammar

Clearly, I still have a lot to learn as a future teacher, but the activities involving word classes last class period and in periods prior helped me dispel some apprehensions I have felt about grammar. It isn’t so much that grammar intimidated me, rather the idea of teaching it was scary. There is definitely a distinction between teaching in a way that promotes active learning instead of presenting students with a mountain of facts and saying, “here you go, learn this!” The technical nature of grammar is something that I believe students can only really pick up with self-motivated initiative aided by classroom projects or discussions.

A teacher can’t force-feed these concepts to students. The newspaper and magnet activities helped me understand that students can’t really absorb English grammatical jargon (and more importantly, understand how to apply it) unless they PRACTICE. Writing my own sentences and then labeling words and phrases was less daunting than looking at someone else’s work and doing the same because by looking at my own work I understood my own formation of sentence structure. Also, I become more conscious with holes and inconsistencies in my work. Going back to the first week of class, Barbara’s story about ending a sentence in a preposition caught me off guard because I didn’t know that there was something wrong with that outside of it feeling awkward. My point is that these concepts are abstract to me (and, I presume, many young grammar students) until I can get my hands around them and really start working with the concepts myself. Practice is much more valuable than just staring at definitions of terms and being able to rattle off what a preposition or a gerund or an adjective are. This kind of passive “knowing” is not enough. Most students, if they’re anything like me, can’t internalize abstract concepts until they apply them, as in the activities we have done in class. They really have to start adverbedly verbing some adjectivish nouns to pick grammar up. That’s part of the challenge for me as a future teacher: NOT teaching the four open word classes, but instead developing activities that will empower students to truly LEARN them in their own way.
Question: When I read things like the course pack handouts or the grammar textbook, I need to rethink what they say in my own way and actively find new ways to think about them to get the concepts to sink in. for example, I noted in the “linking verbs” section that linking verbs often rely on senses, such as “Mary feels…” or “the soup tastes..” Does anyone else have to think like this? Are there any quirky memory tools you’ve created?

Consistency, Parentheses and Cookie Monster

While working on the “House Style” portion of my scrapbook, it occurred to me how important consistency is in any form of writing. There are “grey areas” in defining correctness because there are multiple ways of writing the same thing. I could write possessive “Lukas” as “Lukas’s” or I could omit the last “s.” (I personally prefer the latter so as to keep the “ass” out of my name.) Both of these are stylistically correct and accepted. However, last week it occurred to me that if I don’t consistently use the same form when I’m indicating possession, my writing is more problematic on paper. The same applies for whether or not I drop the last comma preceding “and” when listing items. Aside from just being inconsistent, I would have a more self-assured personalized style of my own if I decide on these little quirks of writing. Having choices can be a liberating or scary thing, depending on how one approaches them. (As a completely unrelated side note, I had to revise those last three words; it had read, “how you approach them,” but I hate being accusatory in my writing just as much as I can’t stand reading writing in the second person, where people dictate my actions.)

Another thing I have gotten into my head in the past week is that with pronouns, and with other word classes, it is helpful to strip down a sentence and see if it still makes sense. I didn’t think about it much, but when “I” vs. “me” were pointed out on page 149 of Nitty Gritty Grammar, I realized that I may be using the wrong words at times. Is it, “Tracy and I ate the cookies,” or “Me and Tracy ate the cookies?” If I strip it down and get rid of Tracy (sorry, Tracy), The sentences become “I ate the cookies” and “me ate the cookies.” Now, unless I’m cookie monster (who I’ve been told *GASP* doesn’t even eat cookies anymore), stripping down the sentence makes it clear which form is grammatically correct, and I definitely see the value of using this meat-and-potatoes approach to sentence analysis when I am teaching in the future.

As another note on the subject of consistency, I find myself putting periods and apostrophes on different sides of parentheses depending on what I want to say. I made a conscious effort to be uniform in even this short blog and I ended up going inside the parenthesis on some and outside on others, with some parentheses enclosed in the previous sentence, and others standing alone. Evidently I still need to work on standardizing my use of parentheses considering their prevalence in my writing.

So, my question for the week is: is there a line between being consistent and taking grammatical issues (like the parenthesis issue) as case-by-case situations? I feel that each way I use parentheses reads a little differently for the most part, but does anyone see any problems with how I have (oh, so abundantly) used them in this blog?