Day 11

It's confession time: I'm an English teacher, but I don't love to teach grammar. Sorry, but I'm much more interested in getting my kids to enjoy reading and writing. I realize they need to be able to write correctly in order to be understood; it's just tough in a forty-five minute class to deliver relevant and authentic grammar lessons when there's so much more to teach. I'm certainly not alone in this, but the approach I've taken is to take it one rule at at a time when the kids can apply it in their own writing pieces. I cover less than if I were to attack the language workbook chapter by chapter, but I like to believe that taking this route, the concepts have a little more stick.

Yesterday, I wrote about what fun the drabble was in class, and happily, my kiddos brought that same energy back to class only to be lulled into a stupor by a series of Powerpoint slides that reminded kids about capitalization, subject-verb agreement, and comma rules. Understandably, my student-teacher feels quite righteous about the mistakes she finds in our students' writing. Like me, she is enamored with the charm of their creativity, but as she is fresh on the sixth grade scene, she's wishing for a quick fix of all grammatical deficiencies. So there we sat for a good twenty minutes or more, chatting about all of the errors that have been showing up in recent assignments. She made valid points. The problem was that it was just too many valid points for one sitting.

How did I make today's grammar boot camp palatable (at least for me)? I jumped in with my "voices". For the last few years, I've taken to giving personalities to punctuation marks. To demonstrate the danger of the comma splice, a distressed comma calls out in squeaky, even whiny, desperation, "Help me! There's just no way I can hold these two complete sentences together!" We all know that the comma is overextended already. I mean, does he have to do everything?

Here comes the period, strong and final to proclaim, "I'll save you!" The deep-voiced period shoves comma out of the way, not at all interested in the comma's ego.

There's that slick and stylish semi-colon in her power suit and heels. "Slide over and take a break, friend. I can give you a hand." She can handle the extra weight because she's not nearly as busy as the comma.

These are all good solutions, I said to the class, but the comma is not easily satisfied. "Hey, I like this sentence. Can't I stay? Can't I just phone a friend for a little help?" The friendly conjunctions cuddle up to comma, ready to stand by their buddy in his time of need.

Next time, maybe I'll teach subject-verb agreement with finger puppets.