Language is Everything

I think that it is funny that often the world of education can be reflected in different parts of history. I have seen it again and again, a new study or book comes out and teachers flock to it like so many moths to a flame, only to find later that the study was not an accurate complete. Educators tend to get on this high horse where they cannot be wrong. That is why I enjoyed Deborah Dean’s paper, Shifting Perspectives about Grammar: Changing what and How We Teach. For hundreds of years the worlds brightest minds were certain that he world was flat and that if you went too far you would just fall off the end. Even when all the facts pointed a different direction they refused to change their minds. Teachers, and teachers of Language more specifically, tend to do the same thing. We find a way of doing things and we stick to it, even when it does not work. The paper strikes out against that and shows that when we reevaluate our pedagogy and lessons we can become much more effective at our jobs.

            The article focused on what the authors philosophy for teaching grammar is and I think it is important, to evaluate and start creating my own philosophy for teaching grammar. Growing up I did not have a good grammar teacher. Instead I was taught through worksheets that taught me how to fix grammatical issues in a certain setting, but poorly equipped me to use effective grammar in my own writing. That is the biggest thing I would try to do as a language teacher; to make grammar lessons applicable to the student’s actual writing. Language is everything. [Short sentence for emphasis, It draws the reader in] It is how it we communicate and connect and I want to make sure that the students understand how to use what we are learning in the classroom and incorporate it into their speech and writing. The other thing I would try and push as part of my teaching philosophy is using classroom time as time for discussion. Written word is far less than half of the time that we use grammar on a day to day basis. Far more often we are speaking and I think that incorporating lots of dialogue in my classroom would help students learn how to use grammar in real-life applications. 

Landis, Barbra. "Carlisle Indian Industrial School History." Epix. Last modified 1996. Accessed

     October 24, 2016. http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html.

From the moment Europeans stepped foot on North American soil, the native peoples of this land have been treated without respect, social standing and often have not even given basic human rights. However, this era in particular, delivered the final blow to the North American Natives. Multiple acts of government legislation as well as social and military action in the late 18^th century ended the sovereignty of the Native Americans and forced the Americanization of Natives by taking their land and destroying their customs, religion and way of life.  Native Americans, the first occupants of this great land, deserve so much more. The above source looks at the history of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School and its impact on Native Americans.  The school, which was opened in 1880, had one purpose in mind, “Kill the Indian, Save the man”. That was the motto for the United States domestic affairs with Native Americans for many years. The idea behind what they were practicing was to take Native American babies and children from their parents and homes and to raise them as “normal” American children. The children were often beaten and starved to get any traces of their religion, language, customs, and way of life out of their head. Essentially the United States government committed cultural genocide.

Walker, Richard. "From ‘Encouraged’ to ‘Mandatory’: Schools Must Teach Native History in

     Washington Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/05/12/

     Encouraged mandatory schools must teach native history Washington 160325." Indian    

     Country. Last  modified May 12, 2015. Accessed October 24, 2016

This second source is about senate bill 5433 which makes it mandatory to teach Native American history and governance practices in Washington State public schools.  Perhaps the greatest atrocity that the Native American peoples have faced is that the history of these people and how they have been treated is not known. They are dust in the wind. Not only have these people been disgraced, slaughtered, and dehumanized, but now they are not even remembered. Hopefully this law will change that. This brings up another question that my reaserch paper will address, “How can we teach about Native American history while being, sensitive, culturally aware, and somehow managing to teach the version of Native American history that is not twisted by our society and those that wrote it”. This is important because thousands of years of history have happened before white men ever came to the Americas, in order to have a full understanding of our nation and why we do what we do today, we need to understand those that came before us.

As a student who was in grade school not long ago I related to the article on a personal level. I can remember as a child mistaking one word for another and feeling put down rather than a teacher or parent using that as a tool to teach me something. Corvitz has one main argument, that the way teachers currently approach error analysis is not successful in getting students to understand English. I found his argument that simple grammatical mistakes that students make aren’t for lack of ability to understand or work hard, but because they have a deeper misunderstanding of the concept very convincing. The example of Daily Oral Language (or DOL) exercises was helpful because as far as I know most if not every student has done some form of these in the past. DOLs are unhelpful, uncreative, and detrimental. A writer’s natural creativeness and artistic ability is stifled by the fear of “doing it wrong”.  DOL’s contextualize grammatical errors in ways that students and writers never run in to in real life applications. Corvitz offers alternative ways to achieve the same goals as DOLs while keeping students engaged in the activity and allowing them freedom to experiment with grammar in a more natural setting. Covitz offers the example of “Sentence Dictation Activities”. The teacher reads aloud a sentence from a published author and then the students, without being told how the author punctuated the sentence, copy the sentence and punctuate it themselves. Discussion follows and students and teacher can engage in open discussion about the different and most effective ways to punctuate a certain sentence. They can also discuss any incorrect ways of punctuating the sentence. Novels and poems are great examples because they often offer lots of wacky punctuation to emphasize or draw out different words.  The first paragraph of Moby Dick by Herman Melville is a perfect example.

 “The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and

brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons

and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly

embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations

of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it

somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality”.

The first sentence alone offers up a literary goldmine of punctuation. Students can play with it, punctuate it in their own terms and discuss their punctuation in an academic setting.  This is comprehensive, helpful, complete. Rather than looking at the same sentence on a white board and finding the error, students can experiment with different pieces of punctuation as they would in their own writing. This activity also keeps student engaged and thinking critically about what they are trying to punctuate. The goal in this exercise, as should be in all writing exercises is to help form the student into a better and more effective writer. There are many ways to teach grammar, just as there are many ways to punctuate a sentence. It is not always about right and wrong, rather, what is more effective.

William Cayo

It is intriguing to me how much we use grammar and how little we think about it; I made it through 17 years of schooling without anyone ever explaining it to me.  [ Two sentences that at closely related]. I never knew that there was a difference between the grammar that we grow up with, full of slang and conjunctions, and the proper grammar that we are taught in school. The same way Mrs. Delaney taught in the Christensen article, I was taught that any deviation from proper grammar was a flaw in both my grammar and that in some sense I was a lesser person for speaking and writing the way that I was raised.

Goal C in the “Grammar Alive” textbook says this “Every student will complete school with an understanding of, and appreciation for, the natural variation that occurs across time, social situation, and social situation” (Haussamen, 4). I grew up with a decent understanding of goal A and B but I had no idea that goal C was even something that existed. The Christensen article said this, “However, the biggest problem with Fred’s writing was that he didn’t make mistakes. This piece demonstrates his discomfort with writing. He wasn’t taking any risks…When more attention is paid to the way something is written or said that to what is said, students’ words and thoughts become devalued. Students learn to be silent, to give as few words as possible for criticism” (Christensen, 101). I think that this is something all students from around the globe can relate to on some level. From a young age “bad grammar” is metaphorically beat out of us through bad grades and criticism of our use of language. When you criticize someone for the way that they talk then nine time out of ten the will clam up and stop talking. As teachers and future teachers this should not be our goal, in fact it should be something we strive to avoid. The Christensen article put it like this, “Students must be taught to hold their own voices sacred, to ignore the teachers who have made them feel that what they’ve said is wrong or bad or stupid. Students must be taught how to listen to the knowledge they’ve stored up, but which they are seldom asked to relate (Christensen, 101). The article goes on to talk about how when we are forced to focus on the hard rules of proper English grammar we often don’t make the point that we were trying to get across. In other words, effective communication is a mixture between what we are raised with and the proper grammar that everyone is taught.

Though similar in topic, “Grammar Alive” and the other article were very different in approach. “Grammar alive focused on the goals that as teachers we should set for students while the Christensen article focused on why those articles are important. Both were informative and I would definitely recommend either to any current or prospective teachers.

This Semester there are a few grammatical areas I would like to focus on and experiment with.

1.     1.   As a writer, my whole life I have grappled with making my sentences too long. I want to focus on both making my sentences varying in length as well as shorter in general. I tend to string my words along like a train with no end. An example might look like, “The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought about many radical changes for the American people, reconstruction in the South had ended and the nation was ushered into an era of relative economic prosperity, this prosperity was a product of technological advancements, the consolidation of resources and the rise of social and political movements such as labor unions.” While I feel that the content of my writing is excellent, my delivery is missing the mark. My punctuation may also play a role in this, which leads to the second area of my writing that I would like to mold.

2.     2.   I want to experiment with using more creative punctuation. In class we have talked about dashes and colons and semi colons, and while I have been taught in earlier English classes what all of those are, I don’t really know what they are used for. When I see a sentence that has a dash or a colon in a book that I am reading, it really grabs my eye and makes the writing so much more intriguing for me, (the reader). I want to try and get away from just using simple grammar such as commas and focus on trying to be more elaborate and deliberate with how I punctuate my sentences. Hopefully, by the end of the semester I will have a more fluid style of writing that piques my readers interest through the use of grammatical flourishes.

3.     3.   Lastly, I want to really try and use my pre-existing and vast knowledge of the English vocabulary to make my writing more stimulating. Just in the last three paragraphs I have tried to not use words like “tried” and instead use something such as strained. Not only does it make the thoughts and sentences so much sturdier but it makes the words flow without the use of connector words. I already have a strong understanding of the English language and many of its words are never used because a simpler word will suffice, but why use the word better when describing something when superior or advantageous drastically improves the quality of my writing. I think the reason I haven’t done this in the past even though I already possess the tools to do it, is because I am a lazy writer. I have become complacent and as a result of that the creativity and quality of my writing has declined. My papers have begun to look like I don’t care what I am writing about or who will read it. How can I ask my readers to care about my writing If I don’t?