On teaching grammar

Let me just preface this post with a disclaimer that the following thought processes are not polished pieces and thus by no means a sample of my ability to construct grammatically impeccable prose.  Let me further add that I wrote the following after an insomnia-stricken night of reading Tina Fey's Bosseypants and anxiety-driven nightmares about next year's curriculum.

So once again I am faced with the struggle of putting together a meaningful and effective way of teaching grammar in the English classroom, and it continues to be one of the most difficult tasks I have faced in my career.

Examples of DOLS

Here is a breakdown of my pedagogical history with grammar:

In graduate school, I learned that 10-20 minute mini-lessons in grammar are probably best.  You know, the good ol' D.O.L.s where you throw up a sentence with a comma splice as a warm up and have the kids correct.  Then go over with the class.  The best part about all this is that my professor ended the whole discussion on grammar with a wonderful little anecdote about some huge study that was performed where three groups of kids were administered a grammar test as freshmen then taught grammar differently:

• Group A were taught traditional grammar (parts of speech, parts of sentence, strunk n white, etc.)
• Group B were taught grammar mini lessons and modern grammar (like sentence diagramming trees, etc.)
• Group C were taught no grammar at all

 At the end of four years all three groups were tested again.  The result?  No difference.  None.  And with that encouraging note, our lesson on teaching grammar was dubiously concluded.

My first teaching job at a local public high school, I stuck pretty hard to the advice given in grad school.  I used the old school overhead projector and a bunch of rainbow colored fat sharpies.  On one film of transparency, I made up three sentences with an issue I found either in the grammar text book or their writing.  When the kids walked in they would take out paper, copy the thing, and correct on their own.  Then I would correct together with the class using a thinner, water washable marker.  Spray, wash, repeat for the next block.  

The advantage to this (in addition to the fact that a darkened classroom calmed the kids down after a rowdy lunch) was that it was quick, easy, and mostly painless for both me and the kids.  

The disadvantage was that for most of the kids, it amounted to little more than busy work.  The less ambitious would just copy the sentence and wait for us to correct as a class.  I saw little change in their writing and they had difficulty applying the concepts to situations outside of the example I gave them.

Sorry grammar,
I'd rather teach alliteration

The next job I had, I landed a department head position at a start-up foreign boarding school.  I was basically given carte blanche on curriculum, so I did what a lot of English teachers would love to do:  I gave up teaching it altogether.  

Well, not completely.  Mainly I would simply list out a bunch of "no no"s like "don't start a sentence with 'but'" and take off big points when the rules were broken.  True to my professor's anecdote, I saw about as much improvement in their writing as my first job with the DOLs.

Filled with all sorts of antiquey goodness

Skipping ahead to my first U.S. private school job, I was tasked with teaching a very hard line traditional style of grammar.  

The kids were in hell  It was worksheet Hades with a cherry on top.  It was like teaching math problems that had answers you couldn't understand for 20 minutes every day.  

The benefits?  There were actually a small population of kids that "got it".  They were usually the ones that had rocked it in middle school and were merely validating the chops they earned back then.  There was a larger group of kids that "sorta" got it, and a group of kids at the bottom that wished the room were suddenly attacked by rabid polar bears.

The worst part about it though was that it killed any sense of creativity, imagination, or personal voice in their writing.  The kids who were good at the grammar started having panic attacks because they couldn't figure out how to put together their own style of sentence.  Kinda like when I was a kid, I played Moonlight Sonata until my family wanted to burn the piano.  I was sooo good at it, but then ask me to figure out how to play my own version of "happy birthday" and I'd only be able to do so with one finger...and it would definitely suck.  And the kids at the bottom were stuck there.  No amount of tutoring and coaxing seemed to help.  

The next year, I decided to go with the style of teaching that really helped me as a student back when I was taking linguistics classes as an undergrad: Sentence diagramming

I found a fantastic textbook gathering dust in a back closet in the basement of the school and build a years worth of lessons off of it.  I felt confident that I had finally found the solution.  Diagramming made so much more sense than labeling and correcting from worksheet hell.  I was wrong.

Pin the label on the sentence part, kids!

It turns out that diagramming REALLY works for some kids...a lot of kids...but for the kids at the bottom, it was even worse than the traditional instruction style.  It was certified torture particularly for students who were dyslexic.  Which makes sense, since diagramming asks you to visualize the relationship between sentence parts in an organized manner.  If word order is constantly dancing around in front of your eyes, you would go nuts trying to pin stuff down in nice little trees.

I also learned that diagramming has become the pet pedagogy of many English middle school teachers, and that a number of the students I had struggling with it in 10th grade had fruitlessly labored through it in middle school.    

It wasn't as soul-sucking as the traditional grammar in terms of voice and creativity in writing.  But it still did sap the energy out of their writing and there still were around 30% of the kids just not getting it.  Over all, not worth it.

Finally, I've come to Private School #2 whose current English curriculum is headed in a direction 180 degrees in opposition to Private School #1.  In this school, voice is king.  Creativity fostered, nurtured, treasured.  Strunk and White are dirty words.  

Thus I started the year reveling in reading and writing mostly creatively.  But I noticed issues in the writiing that were screaming out to be addressed.  Paragraphs plagued with run-ons, pronouns with missing antecedents, and sentences missing subjects or verbs entirely.  So that winter, I put on my thinking cap and came up with the following:

Five grammar units based exclusively on the five grammatical issues that most affected clarity in student writing that year.

Each unit involved: 

• An assigned paragraph-long writing assignment due in electronic form
• two or three in-class 20 minute lessons on the issue involving class practice
• A thick homework packet of practice worksheets exclusively on that issue
• A print out of a word document containing every student's initial paragraph which we go over and correct on the smartboard. (missing names of course)
• One or two paragraph-long writing assignments by which that ONE issue only is graded.
• Another printout of a student writing for them to correct on their own.
• A quiz on that concept consisting of a paragraph that I composed which mimicked manner in which the problem occurred in student writing.

A final test of all five concepts in the form of a paragraph that I composed which mimicked their own writing.

The result?  The best improvement and retention I had ever seen.  Even struggling students showed gains in ability.  

In this weird metaphor, the godzilla is my unit and the train my precious  instructional time

The problem?  It took a huge amount of time to implement.  HUGE.  The monster units ate a giant chunk of instruction time, reading, time, and grades.  Also, I ended up having to explain to people who see grammar instruction as a voice-killer why I decided to prioritize this instruction over more creativity nurturing endeavors.  

It was really hard.  Tears were shed.  I regret the tears but not the time or the units.  It was the first time I actually felt GOOD about teaching grammar, and I didn't want to let go of it just yet.  

I ended up limping through the remainder of the year and shelfing the last two units I had planned.  So now it's summer and I'm back working on this problem.  7 years in the works and still working.  Ideas?  Suggestions? 

Teacher villains

It's summer break and I've been watching marathon runs of the hit TV series Breaking Bad.  The show has brilliant plot twists, dark savage irony, and deliciously flawed complex characters.  I'm fascinated by the show's main premise of a high school teacher's twisted decent into becoming a villain. Not that I am in the least tempted to become a meth cook or drug dealer of any sort (or am at all capable in the least of doing so), but it brought up questions in my mind about my profession and how it is viewed by society.

It's funny how when you think about teacher villains in the past, you usually imagine the witchy teacher from A Christmas Story (You'll shoot your eye out) or some washed up lame-o who has 0 passion (Bueller...Bueller...)

I wondered why (until Breaking Bad) you don't really see teachers being clandestine criminal masterminds, thieves, serial killers, or drug dealers.  I guess because the thought of it is really scary.  God forbid a person you trust your children with for a good portion of the year would be moral monster at home.   Perhaps it's like finding out that breakfast cereal has been the one and only cause of cancer all this time.  Then what?  It would cause a panic.  You'd be up all night counting the bowls you ate while watching Saturday morning cartoons.  Lying there, calculating the darkness you innocently consumed, and then freaking out about it.

I remember once seeing on the front page of the local newspaper an article about a high school teacher who was arrested for DUI over the weekend.  Out of all the DUI cases the police caught that weekend, it was the teacher who made the front page.  In fact, there weren't any other cases in the paper at all.  Why was this guy's arrest so special?  Because he was a teacher.  The standards we live by in our culture are so high.  It's so important to the community to publicly "out" teachers who have violated the law.  

Not that teachers resent it.  In fact, I would say that most teachers are the strongest believers in very public and strict levels of accountability.  We set very high bars for ourselves.  We are aware that "The Children are Watching" (an assigned reading I had one year from administration).