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?