Grammar nerds: It’s all about you today
March 4 is National Grammar Day, and two Vacaville High English teachers describe the challenges they face in teaching the toolbox of the English language
Grammar nerds: It’s your day, National Grammar Day, all day Thursday.
For those of us who struggled in high school, groaning if the English teacher mentioned the word “essay,” take heart.
It is almost certain no one is going to ask you today to explain the subjunctive mood or reflexive pronouns, but it might be a good time to make sure you’re not making the common grammar mistakes that made and otherwise A paper into a B+ one or if your smartphone is still making them for you in 2021 with the sometimes maddening autocorrect function.
Be that as it may, plenty of kids, say two Vacaville Unified English teachers, are still struggling with grammar.
Vacaville High’s Corey Penrose, who is teaching groups of freshmen this year, said, “Cellphone shorthand has done a number on proper grammar, punctuation and syntax,” or the placement of words and the inner structure of sentences.
He asserted that “grammar is a tricky thing to teach” because there’s more than one school of grammar, and it is a subject of debate among English teachers.
One of the schools is “descriptive grammar,” which objectively analyzes parts of speech, doesn’t declare “right or wrong” rules, and doesn’t make a great effort to standardize language.
“Prescriptive grammar,” on the other hand, is the grammar some of us may remember if we had a hardnosed teacher who graded on knowledge of language rules, ability to analyze a part of speech, and so forth. If you’ve ever been docked a few points for using the word “ain’t,” that’s prescriptive grammar. And we all have lost some points for misspelled words.
“I’m of the school that students need a model to follow,” said Penrose, who seemed to be an advocate for descriptive grammar. “Something in context. Study a good piece of writing and how it is built. Finding a good piece of writing is a good way to teach grammar rather than a bunch of disconnected rules.”
“Teach in-context or outof-context — that’s the question,” he added. “It’s an English teacher debate.”
Of his students, Penrose said some of them “are very polished ” and get good grammar.
“Obvious grammatical errors in the age of typing everything on a computer is a sign of laziness,” he asserted, adding, “Slow down and edit your stuff. Good writing is rewriting.”
Much good writing, which depends on good usage, syntax, expressiveness of an idea, “comes down to will,” or personal effort, said Penrose, a University of California, Davis, graduate. “It’s not so much about talent. You can make a good piece of writing by caring.”
Of the common grammar mistakes that his students make, he noted they include they’re/their/there; your/ you’re; who/whom; its/it’s, which reflect recent survey results of 1,700 students by the online grammar source Brainly.
That online source and others, said longtime Vacaville High English teacher Launda Thompson, means that today’s students can have their writing corrected in real time.
But are they retaining knowledge of grammatical rules?
“No,” Thompson, who teaches 11th-graders, replied quickly, adding, “They think their writing is correct and they don’t seem to understand why the apostrophe changes the meaning of the word and why a capital (letter) is important.”
They will ask her, she added, why some first letters of a word have to be capitalized.
“I tell them the letter ‘m’ or ‘i” means nothing by itself, but once it’s capitalized, it changes its meaning,” said Thompson, who earned a master’s degree in education at National University.
Despite some of her students’ struggles with grammar, she called her group of juniors “terrific,” with many “taking great pride” in learning some of its rules.
“This sounds very cliche, but I see the light go on when they understand how to use words effectively,” said Thompson. “I think there’s hope with this generation with grammar.”
Still, she was unsure what made her particular cohort of students so willing to study, learn and retain her English lessons.
“They participate in the learning process,” said Thompson. “Even with distance learning, they’ve truly stepped up to the plate. They have to communicate so much through the written word.”
But she has made it a point never to use the word “essay” in class.
“If I ask them to write an ‘essay,’ they panic,” said Thompson, who used to teach journalism at the West Monte Vista Avenue campus, as adviser to the school newspaper, The Bark. “So I ask them to prepare a well-written reading ‘response.’ I tell them just to write, just write your opinion.”
For a textbook, she uses the Springboard series, which is largely a collection of nonfiction pieces, sometimes excerpts, by well-known authors and some less so.
“The best way to become a good writer is to read,” said Thompson, adding that her students just finished a section on Transcendentalism, the 19th-century American literary, philosophical, religious and political movement centered around the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In two weeks, however, she and her students will read and study 20th-century American playwright Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” the 1953 play that is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the 1692-93 Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
For National Grammar Day, the Brainly survey also surveyed the top five “most shocking grammar-related learnings”: 1) Roughly 53 percent of single U.S. students said that bad grammar is a dating deal-breaker; 2) Nationwide, 66 percent of students said they prefer a writing style that uses the Oxford comma; 3) Nearly 8 percent of students said they think their grammar is better than their English teacher’s; 4) 36 percent of students said writing essays causes more stress than other types of homework; and 5) About 43 percent of students said their most common grammar mistake is not knowing when to use a comma or not.
On National Grammar Day, it may be useful to reflect on using good grammar, which can, ultimately, lead us to read, write and understand language more deeply and to unlock, perhaps, more abstract forms of communication, like poetry.