Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

A confession:

Though my teachers taught me grammar rules in school (I specifically remember 9th grade English, in which we were asked to learn as many rules as possible for the different parts of speech and the test was to list all the rules out--the more we could remember, the higher our score), my real learning was more grass-roots. I read and wrote a lot naturally, so the rules just came into being rather than something I had to consciously work to figure out.

I first had to teach grammar rules when I was a tutor in college. I remember continually going back to the big filing cabinet to get copies of the sheets that explained comma usage and pronoun-antecedent and, particularly for ELL students, the articles a, an, and the. I started to pick up on things as I was helping other students out.

As a teacher, knowing the rules is especially important. I've utilized textbooks over the years to get a grasp on the rules, and then worked on how I could interpret my understanding of them for the students. Basically, I want what's in my brain to get into the students' brains.

The problem with this, of course, is that this assumes that my brain is somehow superior to the student brain, or at least that the way my brain understands things is the same way that other brains should be able to understand things. Hence my research here.

A critical teaching lesson has been occurring to me in the midst of reading Grammar Alive!. The authors are talking about "traditional" grammar and "current" grammar in Chapter 3, "Teaching the Language of Grammar," and I have to say, the current concepts are throwing me off. I am learning new terminology for things I already know, which is exactly what my students are facing in my classroom. I'm going to discuss these concepts further in upcoming posts, but I want to stress (perhaps mostly for myself, to make me feel better) that it's okay if I'm a little thrown by the new information that's coming at me. It'll help keep me humble--I, too, struggle to pick up what's being put down. And that's okay, because, as Stuart Smalley said on Saturday Night Live, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me."

Okay, so conjuring Stuart Smalley might be taking things a bit far. But please...be gentle on me, dear reader, as I'm tripping through the new information.