Stumping Miz Grammar

If anyone would have ever told me that one day I would be teaching grammar to a micro-class of 8th graders in a remote one-room schoolhouse in an isolated community that is only accessible by boat or floatplane, I would laughed. Maybe even scoffed and said, “Yeah, right.”

But this very opportunity became mine, and I grabbed it. My life at the time was what some would call a little unstable and a lot wobbly. I was going through a divorce, flailing between jobs, and desperately needing work.

When asked if I would be interested in taking over the class from a woman who, quite simply, had given up on imparting any grammar lore to the reluctant students, I didn’t even think about it. “Yes!” was my immediate reply. The thoughts of how crazy I was didn’t come until the first day that I was standing before my small group of students.

The lifestyle of this wild and pristine community invited the outdoors into your soul. Weekends for the students involved navigating the trails of the high country, floating the rivers, jumping in the glacier-fed lake, and tearing up and down the dirt roads on their bicycles.

It was a land of no cell phones, video games, television, or Facebook. It was a place of isolated enchantment that could not – and would not – be fully appreciated until these students grew older, moved away, and worked in cities that involved the many technological trappings now associated with modern living.

It would be in these crazy-busy-city moments when they would look back and breathe out an audible sigh as they thought back on their idyllic and uncomplicated childhoods.

What I quickly learned is that the students did not feel even a remote passion for this grammar class – my predecessor having resorted to dry lectures, long homework assignments, and tests requiring rote memorization. Grammar was boring. Why do we have to know this stuff? It was my job to take over and to zhuzh some interest into their fertile minds regarding the subject.

Being a grammar nerd myself, I wasn’t prepared for the level of apathy that the students expressed. I remember telling the students on the first day of class that I loved the subject of words and grammar so much, I took grammar workbooks and Miller Analogy Test practice books with me on vacation, just so I could relax and enjoy the fun of language.

They rolled their eyes and thought I was weird, maybe a little insane . . . but that was all good because I was committed to understanding why they weren’t more interested in the foundational components of their native language. After all, this is grammar and language that we are talking about?! This is good stuff!

We started the class by getting to know each other a little better. Every Monday, we would each recount stories from the weekend while I grabbed key words from their retelling. I would then write these words into “the eight parts of speech” grid that I had graphed out on the board. Then we would play The Synonym Game and erase the word on the board with a different word that might convey the story’s meaning a little more vividly.

They began to see how word choice mattered – how the adjective great could be amplified by using the word fabulous or resplendent or fantastic instead. It was a small step, but it made sense to take what they knew – their experiences – and translate them into Grammar Stew on the board that they shared. I knew that we were growing stalwart Grammar Cadets when one student used the adjective ebullient in his re-telling of how happy he was that his grandma had come to visit. Wow! Ebullient! It made me feel positively ebullient to see this student stretching.

For homework, each student was to bring one question each day to stump me – Miz Grammar (their chosen name for me). I wanted to demonstrate how remarkable the grammar of our language is . . . that no one has all the answers – not even Miz Grammar. I wanted them to see how one’s commitment to language is an evolving work in progress. Just ask the Apostrophe Protection Society! We can’t stop language!

The biggest advantage in Stumping Miz Grammar was that this was a rural school and there was zero access to Google or the internet. This meant that the students had to use their textbooks to find the questions and answers to stump me.

I don’t know how I managed to stay ahead of the students’ questions, but it quickly became apparent that it was going to be tricky to do so. The students would see me at the post office on mail day and ask, “Miz Grammar, what is a gerund?” “What is a dangling preposition?” “What is an antecedent?” They were becoming a team of grammar experts without them even knowing it. And how could they know if I knew the correct answer if they hadn’t done the proper research and found the correct answer themselves?

I recorded all their questions and, at the end of the school year, the students compiled the questions into categories and organized a community-wide, grammar-themed game show. Parents were invited to be the contestants, and prizes were donated. To alleviate any grammar anxiety – which was prevalent, I might add, what with their children having become grammar experts by this time – the parents wore costumes and adopted various personalities as game show contestants. It was a bonding experience for the community, and it was a source of great fun and pride for the students as they led the community down the road of grammar enlightenment.

It is funny how one little crazy idea can grow into something larger than imagined possible. Language had morphed into something other than language. It was alive. One of the students went on to become a published poet. Another student majored in journalism and was the acting editor of a Chicago university’s newspaper during his years as a student. Another student went on to become a freelance writer. The pleasure that these students took in dissecting language into its most primitive parts gave me great joy as a teacher and as a grammar lover.

Learning objectives are important. They are the brass ring on the carousel, the t-shirt at the end of the marathon, the cake from the cakewalk. But what I had intuited as necessary at the beginning of this grammar journey proved to be true:

You must build a learning community before learning can happen.

These amazing students created a Culture of Grammar. They built a team first and then, without realizing it in the process, mastered the actual objectives of the course . . . and had fun while doing so.

Am I proud of these students? Yes. Very very very proud. It is our goal as educators to infuse a love of learning while learning. Let’s call it meta-learning. Like metacognition, or meta-anything for that matter, it’s all about being within the moment while being in the moment.

My students taught me far more about life than I ever taught them about grammar. They taught me about community and to trust myself when faced with a challenging and seemingly impossible teaching situation . . . and to also trust myself within my current personal problems: I was learning to parse out my problems like a good grammarian does to a sentence. I was learning that I could pick things apart into their smaller parts and learn what I needed to learn to put them back together in a way that followed life’s version of morphology and syntax rules.

I learned that I could figure things out just by asking the questions and finding the answers.

It’s good to know that we don’t know everything. We are refreshed and invigorated when we enter the unknown territories in which we find ourselves and embrace the evolution of learning and growing. Just ask Miz Grammar. She knows.

13 steps to take when you don’t know something that you’re expected to know as an “expert”:

1. Admit what you don't know. Just say it.

2. Research. Find your answer.

3. Look for new sources and ask experts.

4. Lean on your community.

5. Learn more than you started out wanting to know.

6. Share your knowledge.

7. Share your passion for knowledge.

8. Offer your knowledge and experience to someone else.

9. Become a mentor.

10. Laugh a lot.

11. Don't give up. There is likely an answer available.

12. If you can't find the answer, be innovative. Build and create one based on all of the above.

13. Trust yourself. Always trust youself. The answers will be made clear.