Grammar is Hawt

Not going to lie, I have beef with this week's readings. I feel like they are written towards teaching a very specific demographic of students, which is all well and good, except that my previous teaching experiences in rural, impoverished areas, or in states with very low public school standards, do not relate. Moreover, I feel that these two authors presuppose that students already know the "rules"--just not their violations--when in reality, a lot of students have never even been exposed to the regulations of standard English grammar. Williams expresses this declaration when he writes, "At the most basic level, the categories must organize themselves around two variables: Has a rule been violated? And do we respond? Each of these variables has two conditions: A rule is violated or not violated" (159).

I feel like at a school like the University of Missouri, in a freshman composition class, grammar is best taught on a case-by-case basis. Assume the best, prepare for the worst. Students often make a lot of the same mistakes as a group, so if 3/4 the class is having issues with commas or verb tenses, going over that as a class is helpful, rather than honing in on one student's very specific problem. It's also helpful to do hands-on activities instead of simply reviewing the rule. Kavita did a great job of this when I observed her class a few weeks back. She developed a grammar game based on commonly confused words, and she had her students define the difference between the words in a competitive group setting. The students had a lot of fun with this activity, and since they actually cared about it, hopefully that translated to understanding the grammar as well. I definitely plan to use this activity in a few weeks when we do our revision unit in our class.

The passage that I most took issue with in this week's reading, though, was in the Micciche reading on page 718: "Grammar instruction, in short, is decidedly not sexy but school-marmish, not empowering but disempowering, not rhetorical but decontextualized, not progressive but remedial." Ok, yeah, grammar isn't the snazziest thing in the world. But I disagree wholeheartedly that it is not empowering. At Bainbridge College in Bainbridge, Georgia, where I taught last year, my students were adults who had an elementary school reading and writing level. We worked at the sentence level; the most we ever wrote was a paragraph of ten sentences. Something I noticed, though, was that once the students started to learn and really master grammar, their writing confidence increased as well. They started putting more voice into their paragraphs, their writing become funnier, more complicated, more emotional, more expressive. They were learning the tools to help them communicate in the real world. What is more empowering than that?