Grappling with Grammar: A Grammar Gallimaufry

a general English teaching comment...
i do not want to be a dry crusty teacher who teaches from behind the desk.
i visited an English classroom the other day and chatted with a very excited teacher. she was so excited about a book she was about to teach (and incidentally taught every year) and she laughed (evilly i imagined) when she told me how much the students hate it. hello?
i just hope that in a couple years we all remember we are teaching for the students, not to satisfy our own agendas. i understand, we do need to teach some classics that students will surely hate, but that is why we are learning how to make learning fun and interesting in all of our BYU classes!
it's teachers like her that make students hate English. sad.

I found this idea of Power and dialect very interesting. I always viewed my speech patterns as appropriate until I interacted with individuals outside the state of Idaho. It was interesting to have someone tell me I spoke like a "spud." Exactly how does a spud speak? I was unsure of exactly what the person was trying to say and chalked it up to the quirkiness of that individual. Sadly, having someone tell me I speak like a spud ended up not being an isolated incident. I would ask them to clarify exactly what a spud says and what exactly spud speech is was met with a derision and the comment that I simply wouldn't understand.

I began to tell people I was from California (where I served my mission) and didn't hear one more comment about talking like a spud. I had joined the larger community of power speakers. I eventually stopped telling people I was from California and resorted back to my plain simple speech of spudness.

Hey guys and gals- I found an article online at nytimes.com, about semicolon usage on a sign in a subway train. I have included what I found to be an entertaining excerpt. Interestingly, the excerpt states that semicolons are to be taught in the 3rd grade (I have a hunch that this isn't happening). If you are interested in seeing the whole article, including the actual sentence that contains the semicolon click here. Enjoy

Excerpt:

"Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

'When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,' Kurt Vonnegut once said. 'Old age is more like a semicolon.'

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a 'New York sentence.' In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.

Being the nerd that I am, I was thinking the other day about how coordinating conjunctions can change the meaning of sentences. It made me think of a student-made video that I watched in a class in high school.

One of the students asked other students around the school about the upcoming presidential election. One of the girls on the video said, "My parents are republicans, but I'm going to vote for Bush!" Oops!

Poor girl--we all laughed when we heard that. You would think that by high school, people would figure out the difference between "and" and "but".

My husband and I manage an apartment complex, and we are rarely in the office at the same time. Every time I come into or out of the office, I flip over the sign that rests on the windowsill. On one side, it says "Open"; on the other, "Closed. Please call again."

Seeing that sign makes me think about how the usage of the word "call" has changed. Obviously, in this context, it means "come." But nowadays, we usually only use the word "call" in the sense of a telephone, or maybe even to mean yelling or calling out to someone. If we ever said, "I'm going to go call on my friend," to mean "I'm going to go visit my friend," we would probably be laughed at. The only time I ever hear the word "call" in that sense is when I watch Jane Austen movies. It's kind of interesting how words change.

I found a great article on Eliot's use of "you and I" instead of "you and me" in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. . . Sounds maybe a little...ridiculous. haha. Like...who thought to write about that!? But...being in this grammar class, I thought it was interesting. Grammar means so much!

Read it here!

I wanted to respond to yesterday's class. Professor Ostenson was so excited about what he was presenting it increased my interest in learning. I think this is an important concept to remember as teachers. Students are not going to all be excited about learning, but our attitudes as teachers, and our excitement, will certainly set the tone for the class. I hope that I can always approach teaching with a certain level of excitement.

I really loved today's articles for discussions on engaging students in reading the classics with a focus on understanding the grammar. I now wonder if that is why I didn't like classic literature in high school, I didn't understand it. I have always loved reading - still do! But, my enjoyment of classics didn't come until college. Perhaps if a teacher had approached classics from a grammar standpoint, I would have been engaged in learning the classics we studied. As I work on ideas to engage my future students in the learning, I am excited to be able to connect grammar to what we are reading and how it affects the reader...which directly translates into writing - student writing. While these articles didn't mention having students write to practice any grammar they were discussing, it seems that this would be part of the logical process. Just like we have discussed in class: using good models before having the students eventually practice on their own. Thus, this way of teaching grammar as a part of reading seems to flow naturally into continuing the process into writing with the grammar just learned!