Who you callin' a grammar fussy?

All English teachers are not like this guy. Personally, I think he deserves what's coming to him. Chill out, man.

I just want to start out by saying that I loved the Lynn reading and also enjoyed his description of the “blessed day” when someone finally says, “Oh, you teach English! What a fascinating job! It must be inspiring to think about all the richness and diversity of language as people use it!” I hate the stereotype of English teachers as “grammar fussies.” I am not one of those teachers, and I don’t sit around correcting all my friends’ grammar in my head as they talk to me (or worse yet, stop them mid-sentence and correct them). When I would tell someone I was an English teacher,  if I didn’t get the reaction of, “I better watch what I say,” then it would be something like, “Oh, you’re very brave.” Well, when reading about those freshmen composition teachers with 250 or more students and 80 students per class, I can understand why people think that it’s brave to be an English teacher. Besides, you would have to be brave to teach kids grammar, right? To listen to their whining and moaning about memorizing rules (that almost always have at least one exception and are “hopelessly ambiguous and problematic”). This leads to Hartwell’s COIK (clear only if known). Yes, students do misunderstand those Grammar 4 rules all the time. I did have students who would tell me time and again that a sentence couldn’t start with “because.” What a shame how many student errors are actually due to instruction in “school grammar” rules!

I also enjoyed much of Hartwell’s article, and I feel it gave me some good ammunition to back up my qualms about how grammar is taught (and from my experience, I think that although many English teachers may tout grammar in context in public, they still revert to the traditional sentence practice and grammar rules in private). I loved how Hartwell starts his article with the Braddock quote: “The teaching of grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing.” Certainly I knew right away that I was reading someone with a likeminded philosophy about grammar. I think Hartwell’s definition of the five meanings of grammar is enlightening. I had only really known about or understood what he defines as Grammar 4, “school grammar.” I never really thought about separating usage and style, and I definitely never considered Grammar 1, the “patterns of a language” that we don’t know we have. I think that Francis Christensen’s analogy from 1962 that “formal grammar study would be ‘to invite a centipede to attend to the sequence of his legs in motion’” seems a strong example of the irrationality in teaching rules of grammar.

Along with grammar, comes style. Again, I enjoyed Lynn, particularly his look at style, and I connected the most with the “Individualist” approach. This does not surprise me because I have connected in other writings with Elbow and other (although I know Elbow doesn’t like to be called one) expressivists. I like Georges de Buffon’s statement: “Style is the man.” I think I could get students on board with that. I know I want to read more about Elbow’s views on ignoring the real audience in the early process of writing. Along with Elbow and friends, I also enjoyed the feminist perspectives, particularly Elizabeth Flynn: “Voice is more than the manifestation of an authentic self; it is in fact essential to developing in women students a strong self.” I want to be a teacher who helps her students find their “own most powerful and unique voice.” Lynn’s article also delved into issues about “goodness” and “correctness” and how this relates to minority populations and dialects. I loved Suzette Haden Elgin’s brave statement: “ONE FORM OF LANGUAGE IS AS GOOD AS ANOTHER. DAMN RIGHT!” I agree that saying one form of language is better than another is stupid and does reinforce the power of the majority. But, unfortunately, we also can’t ignore the fact that we “privilege Standard English” in this country, and that changing the world isn’t easy, although we can try. In the meantime, I think encouraging these students to be “doublevoiced” is a good way to help them adapt and succeed, without abandoning their culture. But, I have to add Genevea Smitherman’s quote: “Saying something correctly, and saying it well, are two entirely different Thangs.” Love it!

What if us Standard English speakers had to stand up for our way of speaking because "Black English" or some other minority dialect was the new accepted standard? Walk a mile in someone else's shoes.

So, as I scan my six pages of typed notes on this week’s readings, I can see not only that there was a lot of information to digest, but also that there was much that I connected with and found valuable and interesting. My view on teaching grammar has been that it is perhaps a necessary evil, but that there must be some way to make it more interesting and pertinent to my students. I do not have happy memories of learning the rules of punctuation, pronoun and antecedent agreement, misplaced and dangling modifiers, etc. So, I always told myself that if I became a teacher, I would make grammar fun. Well, probably needless to say, I didn’t succeed in that goal. I tried daily MUG shot activities and sentence combining along with more traditional methods, but I still didn’t see any concrete evidence that these things were helping improve my students’ writing, and now I know why. “Grammar…cannot be looked upon as a substitute for, or a gauge of, the ability to write. The only test of the power of expression is a test of the power of expression” (Joseph Meyer Rice).