BEDA Entry 26: Grammar Shmammer
Today's entry sadly won't be my Montgomery entry either, because my best friend is going to be calling me soon for help on an English paper that he (unexpectedly) found out is due tomorrow. He was supposed to take it to his university's Writing Center to get it fixed and asked me to look at it first. I barely sent it to him today thinking he had until late next week to turn it in. To my credit, he didn't know it was due tomorrow either. Hopefully my experience will be helpful enough since I'm technically an employee at a writing center. I'm not as familiar with the format he's using, but I have handbooks that shall help.
This makes me wonder---I know two people that may read this that work in writing labs/centers. How do your centers work? What qualifications/credentials do you need? How did you get hired at your writing lab? I'm just curious. To be perfectly honest, the teacher that oversees the writing lab at my university hired me without question. I've taken a few classes with her and when I expressed interest in it, she just said, "Oh, you're good. Just take your application to the business office." That was that. Everything else has been hands-on, and I've learned how much I DIDN'T know about grammar, style, and citations. I still have work to do, and I plan to read some grammar books this summer to help me before I start my TA position at Auburn.
These questions are for everyone:
How did you learn "proper grammar?" Did you have specific classes that taught you grammar? Do you think teaching grammar is important?
I'll be the first to admit that I didn't learn anything about grammar in middle school or high school with just two exceptions. In taking AP English courses and "gifted" classes, I guess my teachers assumed we already knew it. Before I got placed in a "gifted" class in seventh grade, I took the "regular" seventh grade English class. At first, I remember being completely lost as the other kids did this little chant thing to identify the parts of speech in a sentence. Before I knew it, I was doing it as well. This only lasted a couple of months until I started the "gifted" class. In the "gifted" class, we did projects and other things instead of learning grammar.
In high school, I had three different English teachers. One teacher was on the verge of retiring (she retired the next year), and she was the only teacher to ever go over grammar with us. I remember reading the boring grammar book and absolutely hating it. Years later, I am so grateful she did that with us. Though I hadn't learned it all, her assignments taught me more than I ever would have realized. My other two teachers were much younger and did not believe in going over grammar. I never knew what I was missing.
Even in college, I have not been required to take a grammar course. English majors who are minoring in certification are required to take a "Grammar for Teachers" course, but straight English majors aren't required to take anything like that. I feel like I've missed out. It makes me feel like I might be writing this very blog and am completely unaware that I'm ending sentences with prepositional phrases (Honest to goodness, I did not know of this rule until last semester). Maybe I'm breaking some other rule that I had no idea I was breaking.
Anyway, I'm rambling. I don't intend these blogs to be perfect, but my point is that I think that teaching grammar is highly underrated. Though I realize it is not the MOST important thing to teach students, and our need for some it is questionable (but that could be a whole other blog in itself), I still feel I've been cheated. We need to know our grammar.
This makes me wonder---I know two people that may read this that work in writing labs/centers. How do your centers work? What qualifications/credentials do you need? How did you get hired at your writing lab? I'm just curious. To be perfectly honest, the teacher that oversees the writing lab at my university hired me without question. I've taken a few classes with her and when I expressed interest in it, she just said, "Oh, you're good. Just take your application to the business office." That was that. Everything else has been hands-on, and I've learned how much I DIDN'T know about grammar, style, and citations. I still have work to do, and I plan to read some grammar books this summer to help me before I start my TA position at Auburn.
These questions are for everyone:
How did you learn "proper grammar?" Did you have specific classes that taught you grammar? Do you think teaching grammar is important?
I'll be the first to admit that I didn't learn anything about grammar in middle school or high school with just two exceptions. In taking AP English courses and "gifted" classes, I guess my teachers assumed we already knew it. Before I got placed in a "gifted" class in seventh grade, I took the "regular" seventh grade English class. At first, I remember being completely lost as the other kids did this little chant thing to identify the parts of speech in a sentence. Before I knew it, I was doing it as well. This only lasted a couple of months until I started the "gifted" class. In the "gifted" class, we did projects and other things instead of learning grammar.
In high school, I had three different English teachers. One teacher was on the verge of retiring (she retired the next year), and she was the only teacher to ever go over grammar with us. I remember reading the boring grammar book and absolutely hating it. Years later, I am so grateful she did that with us. Though I hadn't learned it all, her assignments taught me more than I ever would have realized. My other two teachers were much younger and did not believe in going over grammar. I never knew what I was missing.
Even in college, I have not been required to take a grammar course. English majors who are minoring in certification are required to take a "Grammar for Teachers" course, but straight English majors aren't required to take anything like that. I feel like I've missed out. It makes me feel like I might be writing this very blog and am completely unaware that I'm ending sentences with prepositional phrases (Honest to goodness, I did not know of this rule until last semester). Maybe I'm breaking some other rule that I had no idea I was breaking.
Anyway, I'm rambling. I don't intend these blogs to be perfect, but my point is that I think that teaching grammar is highly underrated. Though I realize it is not the MOST important thing to teach students, and our need for some it is questionable (but that could be a whole other blog in itself), I still feel I've been cheated. We need to know our grammar.