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.
