At the end of the 2011-2012 school year, I lost a close friend and mentor to another building assignment. You see, I spent ten years teaching Reading/Literature. I was still an English teacher, but my focus was on comprehension, extending literature to student's lives, literary terms, and decoding words. The LA teacher focused on grammar and writing. I never considered myself too much of a grammarian. There were stellar people in my building who fit that bill much better than me. Then, the curriculum changed and I was teaching writing and reading (yikes!)
As a student, grammar was never a focus of instruction except in 6th and seventh grade. In high school, I found myself in classes with other students who "wrote naturally." They also grew up in households where both parents owned degrees and experienced at least some post baccalaureate studies. In teacher-speak, we all came from literature rich environments, so its probably not true that we wrote naturally or just understood grammar by osmosis. We grew up in homes where mispeaking grammatically, and making writing errors were instantly corrected. --any wonder we were in honors and accelerated English classes?
When I came to South Eastern, I was hired as "Communication Arts" teacher. That meant teaching writing, reading, speaking and listening skills. Fortunately I had Mr. H. as my friend and unofficial mentor to run to with questions about gerunds, participles, infinitives, and other technical bumps in the road. I used to tease him with the dictate that he wasn't allowed to retire until I learned all I could from him. I was kidding, but a far greater part of myself meant that than I would let on.
Well, today I was greeted with an email from a former students who is now at the high school:
Dear Mr. Logan,
Today in English class, we came across a sentence that my teacher and I did not agree on so I was wondering if you could help. In the sentence, "Without any hesitation, Frank stepped to the microphone.", what is "Without any hesitation" modifying? Is it an adjective clause or an adverb clause, and why?
Thanks,
H.H. (identity protected)
I wrote her back:
Good morning,
The clause in question is an adverb clause because it is describing how Frank stepped to the microphone. You made my morning. It is nice to know former students still think of me when they have a grammar conundrum. I hope you are having a great beginning of the school year. Are you a sophomore this year? Am I keeping the years straight in my head?
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Mr. Logan
Robert Burns wrote a poem I fell in love with in Mrs. Dixon's Junior Honors English class, "To A Louse." Funny title, right? Even better was this line from it:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Rough translation: I would like the power as a gift he'd give us [God] to see ourselves as others see us!
The message has become even more poignant to me the further I get in my career and the older I become. My former student did not know that, in order for me to teach grammar to her at such an explicit and discreet level, I had to take the books home and teach myself what I was never taught in school. She did not know that I ran to my mentoring friends for help with understanding enough the future pluperfect tense well enough to explain it to a group of 13 and 14 year olds who, only the year before, were vaguely understanding the difference between nouns and verbs. She saw me as an authority whose learned opinion she trusted. What a powerful responsibility to uphold. That was the first gem of cool stuff to start off my day.
The second piece of cool stuff was today's formative assessment. After writing the journal entries yesterday about Connie and the video, I asked my teams (the class is set up in 6 tables of students consisting of 4-6 students) to brainstorm a skit showing how they believe Mike should have dealt with his friends in drug store. As impromptu skits have the tendency, the results were comical, informative, and insight-provoking. One group had Mike sock his buddy who would not stop harassing Connie. Another group chose to have Mike stop his friends just when they announced their intent to bother her. Still another group had Mike pontificate like a hip-hop Messiah about not being a gang and "That's not who we are!"
The kids had fun with the activity and gave some feedback to the groups that performed. This is the teacher I want to be, one with kids engaged, having fun and while learning in unconventional lesson. It's fun to come back to my roots. We concluded the exercise with talking about how hard it is to go against your friends sometimes. I offered my own thought to linger in their minds--- "If your friends don't repect you enough to listen to you when you disagree, are they really your friends? Adults say friends are the family you choose. Why would you spend time with friends who would bully you into silence?" I didn't script it, the words just came to me. Teaching is awesome.
The third piece of cool stuff? Students learned in an article written shortly after Rosa Parks death in 2005, "Kids on The Bus: The Overlooked Role of Teenagers in the Civil-Rights Era," by Jeffrey Zaslow, that she was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat in Birmingham. The kids learned a new name, Claudette Colvin. She was 15 and she "refused to give up her seat and was arrested" (http://www.sites.si.edu/press/Montgomery%20Bus%20Boycott_Wall%20Street%20Journal.pdf) nine months before Mrs. Rosa Parks. Zaslow told my students that the movement did not rally around Colvin because she was a teen and because she became pregnant. The leaders feared that those who opposed them would attack her moral character and make that the focus, taking away exposure to the injustice of Jim Crow. We talked about the fairness of all of that.
We also talked about the revolutionary nature of being an a young person. The article talked about the civil rights movement being a "story of teenage revolt." When we recounted the video clips of the protestors and others in the Civil Rights Movement, I reminded them how many of those faces belonged to young. We remembered the college students who gave their lives for the cause as martyrs.
The technology boom is this generation's teen revolt. I'm a liberal arts geek and math stopped being a strength academically when I ran into Algebra I, but even though I'm the son of an electrical engineer, the digital clocks on the stove, VCR, and microwave blinked until I came home from college. My parents marvelled at how quickly I could reset the clocks and navigate the layered functions. It just made sense to me and it baffled me that they found something so simple so complex.
Now its my turn. Texting, blogging, social networking, tweeting--- all were Greek to me only about 5 years ago. I asked if students ever had to teach their parents how to upload a video or post a picture online. Many grinning heads nodded at me. I pointed out to them that just like the youth of the 1950s and 1960s changed the racial landscape of the US, they (as a generation) are changing how the world interacts with itself. They loved that message of empowerment--- think I'm overstating?
Could you have read my teachers' daily professional diary entries online in 1981 when I was an 8th grader? As a matter of fact, could you have read my online blog in 1993 when I was a student-teacher, and keeping a diary was a requirement for my ethnological research at UPENN? Who made that possible, ladies and gentleman? The revolution continues and that is some cool stuff.
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