I [HEART] Teaching Grammar
Seemingly endless hours of diagramming sentences on the blackboard may be the reason why I love to teach English grammar and usage. I wouldn't have thought so at the time. I remember fighting afternoon grogginess as I tried to follow a tangle of words and lines sprawled across the board in my fifth grade class. I remember the teacher explaining the differences between a predicate nominative and a predicate adjective, a coordinating conjunction and the proper use of the semicolon. My thoughts at the time must surely have been anywhere but on the fine distinctions of prescriptive English grammar.
But something stuck. Maybe it was the delicate balance of words separated and connected by lines, large and small, dashed and dotted. Maybe it was the beauty of the language displayed under the blinding light of analysis. Just maybe the dissection of sentences did for me what the dissection of frogs did for future medical students. I ended up an English teacher, but not just any English teacher; I became a teacher of English to speakers of other languages. ESL for short.
The teaching times have changed since the good nuns and lay teachers at St. Bartholomew School drilled us in prepositions, but I still never tire of unlocking the mysteries of the English language to students of other cultures. Books like Eats, Shoots, and Leaves thrill me. We no longer diagram sentences in the same way I did forty-odd years ago, but I do use plenty of graphic organizers (that's teacherspeak for diagrams) to help students make sense out of prepositional phrases and the breakdown of verbs. I commandeer boxes and triangles and circles and arrows in the service of clarifying muddy sentences and turns of phrase into something readily understandable to my students. I'll use pantomime, photos from the internet, and controlled conversation to coax my students into their second language. Since effective communication is the goal, I do not stress the grammatical fine points as I do the major things: noun, verb, adjective, subject, predicate. With these, I help my students discover the workings of their new tongue and I continue to derive satisfaction from the asymmetry and quirkiness of my own feisty first language.
But something stuck. Maybe it was the delicate balance of words separated and connected by lines, large and small, dashed and dotted. Maybe it was the beauty of the language displayed under the blinding light of analysis. Just maybe the dissection of sentences did for me what the dissection of frogs did for future medical students. I ended up an English teacher, but not just any English teacher; I became a teacher of English to speakers of other languages. ESL for short.
The teaching times have changed since the good nuns and lay teachers at St. Bartholomew School drilled us in prepositions, but I still never tire of unlocking the mysteries of the English language to students of other cultures. Books like Eats, Shoots, and Leaves thrill me. We no longer diagram sentences in the same way I did forty-odd years ago, but I do use plenty of graphic organizers (that's teacherspeak for diagrams) to help students make sense out of prepositional phrases and the breakdown of verbs. I commandeer boxes and triangles and circles and arrows in the service of clarifying muddy sentences and turns of phrase into something readily understandable to my students. I'll use pantomime, photos from the internet, and controlled conversation to coax my students into their second language. Since effective communication is the goal, I do not stress the grammatical fine points as I do the major things: noun, verb, adjective, subject, predicate. With these, I help my students discover the workings of their new tongue and I continue to derive satisfaction from the asymmetry and quirkiness of my own feisty first language.
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