Candid Beauty

Grammar is such a touchy subject; it’s bizarre really. It’s funny, and actually quite revealing, that Weaver touched on some people linking grammar with religion. I would never have made the connection myself, but some people do have an almost blind faith in how grammar should be taught separate within itself. And to be quit frank, some people I’ve encountered seem to have a misguided and even disturbing motive for wanting to teach children grammar the traditional way.
This motive is that it’s a right of passage, and, “If I did it, they should have to do it.” What’s even more disturbing is at times, perhaps because of mob mentality or perhaps just because it’s an easy frame of mind to slip into, I’ve had the same time of sentiments. While the children are completing worksheets on prepositions we might as well make them run a gauntlet where they’re buttocks are assaulted with wooden, and cap it off with forcing them to swallow goldfish they mislabel a pronoun. All jokes aside though, I think this perverse logic passing something on solely because those before went through it, has no place in education.
But, with that rant being ranted, I do agree with Weaver in that some ground work should be done, if not just to introduce the concept of grammar to children. But after that I am in complete agreement that teaching grammar should be in the context of writing. Two things specifically jumped out at me from Weaver’s article. The first was about writing complete sentences in response to test questions. I remember clearly when being taught this in fourth grade. Well, clearly may be an overstatement. I do remember getting a science test back, and although all of my answers were correct I didn’t receive full credit because my answers weren’t given in a full sentence. The teacher was very frustrated with some of us; apparently we’d gone through this in class quite a few times. But she collected herself without inflicting any harm upon us, and calmly went through the lesson again. For some reason it clicked that time. From that point on whenever a test said, “Please answer the questions in full sentences,” I obliged. This is why I read about the process being slow and different for each child, it really hit home.
The second thing that jumped out was about min-lessons relating to writing that students have done, or are doing. I remember doing this in a high school English class. I also remember these lessons finally solidifying that most punctuation goes inside quotation marks. This grammatical victory is relatively small, but I cannot recall one straight-up grammar lesson in which an applicable grammatical lesson has stuck with me to this day.
To briefly comment on Romano’s article, I really enjoyed it. I think teaching kids to bend/break the rules in order to fully express themselves is a valuable lesson. But unfortunately this is not a perfect world, and we’re not all as respected well known as Romano. If constrained to creative writing, and if the point was made very clear that Grammar B was not to leak over into essays or academic writing, it could be very beneficial. It’s disturbing, because I may be more old fashion than I’d care to admit, because it teaching Grammar B does make me a little nervous.
Last year I taught English as a Foreign Language in Spain, and in preparation took a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification class. Weaver article said many people actually learn grammatical structure while learning a foreign language. I think it may be helpful, and it was certainly helpful for me, to look at some grammatical lessons made for people learning English as a second language. If you’re interested in doing this, check out the sight below. It’s a sight I used to make lesson plans when I was abroad.


Dave’s ESL Cafe