Grammar

.

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.

Musings on Retiring from Teaching

June 28, 1015.

Retirement. Well, almost. Tomorrow, the required “admin day,” beginning with the year-end staff breakfast, followed by a meeting I plan not to attend, and emptying, completely emptying, my classroom.

John and I were talking today about this:

Being a teacher infuses one’s entire identity. Every child out in public, we assess for classroom behaviour. Every movie, every article, every YouTube video we watch, we’re thinking, could this be useful, how could we build a lesson, a unit, a year around the theme. We collect things: drums and bells and little wooden frog sound-makers from a street vendor in Avignon; picture books and young-adult novels; bookmarks and bubble-wrap (they love that stuff as “gotcha” prizes.) We research constantly, learning curriculum well beyond what students need to know, so that we can answer the question: “How do we know that?”

So what do you do when you can stop, have to stop, doing all that? Everything you’ve been doing has had relevance; when you did something, the kids responded, the parents responded, your colleagues or the administration responded. You’ve been in the public eye, and though that’s been a tremendous strain, sleep-depriving stress, you’ve also thrived on it, it drove you. It’s been decades of incredible creative output, a constant turn on of the imagination, and now, well, you don’t have to do that any more.

The blessing and the curse of teaching is that you make a difference, probably a smaller one that we like to think, but a difference, nevertheless. How many careers afford that gift – the one wish of any caring human being?

John says he feels irrelevant. That’s the curse part. But I said, you’re not irrelevant to me, you’re not irrelevant to Kieran. You are the world to your grandson!

And that’s it, I suppose. Retirement from teaching is a shift from the larger public acknowledgement of skill to the smaller family appreciation of love and care and connectedness. Who can say which makes the bigger difference, after all?

When I was teaching music, I had it down. I knew, after 17 years, exactly what I needed to do to get the result I wanted. Every day was a gruelling five-hour performance, but after my five hours, there wasn’t a lot of extra work to do. That’s when my writing flourished and my creativity blossomed. Once I moved into the classroom eight years ago, every ounce of my creativity went into teaching, not for five hours a day, but for eight, nine, ten hours a day, plus several hours on weekends. I loved it, but my writing died, and my fledging attempts at watercolour ceased. That was alright with me, because I took so much pleasure in the creation of lessons, units, themes, and in the spontaneous nature of the work that would take me and my thirty students off into wonderful, passionate tangents.

But now, I won’t have that. I will have time. I will have energy (I am so tired!) I can’t wait to see what emerges!

I have promised myself to create every day, whether it’s some words like this on the page, a poem, some knitting, a drawing or painting, or a special meal. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make music! And planting a garden counts! The raging river of creativity that has been the daily necessity of my life will continue still. This will be my time to blossom, not for the public, not for acknowledgement, but for myself, for those that love me, for the fulfillment of my lifelong dreams.

Let it begin!