Last Thursday as I sat eating my frozen vegetarian dinner, she came into the English workroom with a multiple choice test in her hand. “I have a question Kelly,” she said as she shoved the test over my shoulder, pointing at one of the questions. “Is this correct, ‘could’ here?” The part of the sentence she was pointing to was not part of the possible answers on the question of the test, which are usually underlined; it was just part of the sentence. “My students always ask about this kind of thing.” A statement I doubted but refrained from commenting on.
“You’re asking the wrong person,” I said taking a last bite of my lunch, “I’m not a grammarian.’
“Aren’t you an English teacher? How do you get to pick and choose what you teach?” she asked pursuing me as I stood up from the table.
“I’m a composition and reading teacher,” I said throwing the remains of my frozen dinner in the trash.
“How do you teach them the rules if you don’t teach grammar?”
“Every study since nineteen hundred has had one thing in common: there is no connection between the teaching of grammar and the improvement of writing,” a piece of trivia I picked up at a National Writing Project site in 1987.
At that point I felt as if a pit bull had latched onto my arm. My colleague latched onto the argument I had not been involved in, or rather avoided as futile, for at least ten years: Why is the teaching of grammar irrelevant?
I have been teaching for seventeen years. Before I hired on to my first teaching job, I attended the Hill Country Writing Project. The first year I taught, what I had learned in the writing project provided me with a curriculum: my students wrote, and wrote and wrote. They still do. If students are to learn to write, they must write; if they are to learn to read, they must read, not drilled on the subjunctive or read to either by the teacher or round robin as a class. The students must do what you want them to do in order for them to learn how to do it. As in the old Nike slogan, “Just do it.” Maurine Stuart writing about zen said, “The practice is what you throw yourself into. Unconditionally. The practice is the teacher. Your practice is your teacher.” The real teacher for the students is through the reading and writing the students do on their own. The teacher, the trained adult in the room, should be the facilitator to the student, providing the opportunities and the help the students need as they read and write. Lucy Caulkin wrote that we are teaching the writer not the writing. Teachers who still focus on grammar and the “correct” way to write, speak, and interpret what is read are not focusing on the child in the room; they do not need students to teach what they teach, for even in an empty room the lessons would be the same.
So it goes.
subtext 