I Love Grammar

I don't meet too many people who say they love grammar and, like anyone with an obsession, I have to wonder why there are not more aficionados of the practice.

Perhaps the answer lies in contrasting grammar with mathematics. I have a friend who is a brilliant mathematician, and I can see that when he talks about his field, a world opens up. Mathematics takes him below the surface into the magic of the universe. For me, math was always difficult and I could not understand why one needed to know this language beyond the practicalities of arithmetic. But through my association with my friend, I have come to understand that my passion for grammar equates to his for mathematics. For me, grammar opens up language, gives me a sense of power in my fingertips, helps me to express those emotions and ideas that always teeter on the incommunicable.

Interestingly, I think grammar and mathematics are taught similarly in school--it seems to be rare to have a teacher who deeply understands or feels a passion for either. While the passion is important, it is the deep understanding that facilitates teaching. I was fortunate to have been encouraged to write freely in my early years and then later be taught by someone who understood grammar very well. From the beginning, I grasped the fun and the facility that grammar brought to my language play. The same did not happen for me with mathematics.

I have no easy answers for how we might "fix" this as teachers. As someone who has wondered on a Monday morning what to do with a class, I understand the appeal of skill sheets and drills. Is it enough to hope that at least once in your education, you have the privilege to taste the potential and see what lies beneath? I do know as a teacher educator, that it is not enough to provide the evidence to my students through studies or student quotations or my own experience. They have to somehow feel it for themselves. But how that happens best? There is no formula and, as with most teaching, one can never know the reverberations your work will have throughout a student's life.

Further to our discussion in class last week, here is a Grammar Girl (my favourite daily fix) post about "that" as a subordinate conjunction. Grammar Girl