Grammar

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July 1, 2015


The little girl next door doesn’t look very happy. When we wish her “Happy Summer!” she shrugs. Then I remember, last September, as school was about to begin, we asked her if she was regretting the end of freedom, and she said, “I like school.” She has more company in that than we might think. School, for the successful, is a pretty good place, loaded with praise from adults and social time with friends. Different story for those who struggle with the rigours of too much sitting still and keeping quiet, with brain-twisting math, and with all those stupid grammar rules.

I have a pass-time that I keep pretty quiet about: I am a gamer. Have been since about 1980, when I mastered Pac Man and Centipede in the arcades – but that’s another story. Anyhow, my current time-suck is SimCity on my iPad. Part of the game is to visit other player’s “cities.” (Not going to explain; it’s irrelevant, and, I'm already sick of it.) Players name their cities. Yesterday, I visited a city called Queen’s land. Just like that, no upper case “l”. I thought, great, but the Queen would never make that error.

Sorry, that’s how teachers think.

Then I thought about the princes, William and Harry, undoubtedly masters now of the, um, Queen’s English, going to school and suffering through the grammar lessons year after year, knowing that they, of all people, would never get away with laziness when it came to language. So many better things to do, like playing polo or shooting fox! But no, they, too would have been required to sit still and keep quiet, and start every sentence with a capital and end it with a period.

For me, the rules have always been a joy. Even as a kid, I remember focussing on the rules, loving the order, the predictability, the logic. I see (correction: have seen) that in plenty of kids: the perfection of their writing says they love it, too. And just recently, after a grammar test (these things are rare in my classroom, which has been more about creative ideas and free writing) in which the kids performed dismally, I hauled out some old-school worksheets, a gazillion of them, for those that needed the practice, pages and pages on capital letters, and pages and pages on commas. What followed was astounding: those kids devoured those worksheets! They worked through page by page, checked in with me after each one, and were visibly delighted as they finally started to get it! One girl in particular, a hard-working, excellent student whose writing was always inexplicably filled with errors, approached me several times for each page on capital letters. As she began to see how it worked, she was so relieved. She’d been aware of her confusion all along, and simply hadn’t known the questions to ask in order to learn how to do it right. She was practically jumping out of her skin, she was so happy to finally understand.

I suppose this says something about how we teach language these days. Or maybe it says something about how the expectations for higher-order thinking has taken precedence over the basics. I don’t know about that. I do know that, if I were to continue teaching, I would do the grammar test at the beginning of the year. I also know that it might not make any difference if I did.

Most kids learn to sit still and keep quiet, at least for short periods of time. Many kids, while sitting still and keeping quiet, actually listen and process what they are hearing. A lot of kids love school, more than folk wisdom would have us believe.

The little girl next door is twelve now, going into Grade 7, my grade. While she adjusts to the summer, hanging out the family laundry over the back yard, cartwheeling on the lawn out front, I think I will be imagining what’s going on in her head. I want to have her over to share the best of what I did with my students (no, not the grammar!) When she goes back to school in September, I will be living that heady time with her, the fresh start to a new year, her final year in elementary school, cozy in the predictability of the rules, the logic and the order.