My poor college professor.
I really feel for her having to manage my "chip-on-my-shoulder for not being a traditional school district teacher self" in class.
I know she recognizes the psychological self-imposed "drama" of me already having a MAT, having gone through the state internship program, having classroom experience under my belt, and taking a class with people who do not. She knows I feel a bit like an 8th grader in a class of 4th grade students.
On the positive side, I am certainly learning a lot as a result of the text: The English Teacher's Companion by Jim Burke.
I ran headfirst into my weakness as a teacher, which is that I suck at grammar. I can write well, but don't ask me to define an appositive, an adverbial clause, or to succinctly explain when and why to use a colon over a semicolon.
My professor gave us a list of grammar terms and asked us to rank them in terms of how well we understood them. I gave a "1" for everything, which basically means I've heard this term but could not explain it to you or anyone else.
And I felt compelled (because I cannot shut my big mouth) to say out loud that while I do understand the importance of "doing grammar," I do not necessarily agree with the importance of expecting students to be able to explicitly name an adverbial clause or a gerund.
A classmate (who happens to also be middle-aged and has a freelance background) responded to me that I (actually, she said "you," but I don't know if she meant "you as in me" or "you as in the general you") will never be a great writer without understanding the rules of grammar. I understood her comment, but I'm not sure I agree (and I think I also might be a little insulted that she suggested I could never be a great writer, even though I know this is true).
I'm not sure I believe that Hemingway or Steinbeck or Bronte or Austen or Garcia Marquez or Roth wrote or writes from a place of analyzing whether this gerund clause works better than this other gerund phrase in those direct, explicit, scientific and clinical terms. Maybe they do? Who knows?
I think that to be a great editor, a person probably needs to know the rules of grammar really well. And I realize now, as the editor of my students, that I am lacking in that department. Although, I think there are probably a lot of editors who can't recite all the rules of grammar.
Maybe this is why I've never aspired to write the Great American Novel?
But I don't think so.
I think it is because I have nothing of fictional merit to say....
I think it is because I have no great imaginative spirit that drives me to write in that way....
I think it is because I don't want to put the time into writing like that....
I don't think it is because I couldn't define a compound complex sentence if I tried.
Maybe the stick up my butt is because I subbed 3 days this week with a class of MMD students and worked with them on writing narratives? Maybe it is because even if I explained to these kids what is a subject and a predicate and called them by their official grammatical names, these kids cannot write a sentence better than what my 2nd grader can?
Maybe it is because I only see my students at the cottage school one day a week and think the value of having a class discussion about a text and analyzing it together is WAY more critical than spending that 65 minutes discussing how to write a sentence with an appositive in it and specifically bashing them over the head that it is an appositive.
I suspect I may have come across as a bit of an asshole, but I fully recognize that this was in large part because I recognized in myself my glaring weakness as a teacher: the grammar thing. I have never been able to understand the grammar thing, although I certainly understand it better now as an adult than I ever did as a kid. I could not diagram a sentence to save my life as a kid. As an adult, I can do it just slightly better than "meh."
And I guess a part of me is also going off the chain right now because what follows are the instructions to the class for next week's homework:
Read Chapter 8. Type 3 text-dependent questions about grading that you encountered in the reading and include page number.
As a writer and a teacher AND A STUDENT AT THE MOMENT, I am confused by this question. What is she asking exactly? Is she asking me to type 3 questions I had in my head about grading as I was reading or is she asking me to type 3 questions that the author asked about grading that I "encountered" as I read and, thereafter, reflected upon. Is she asking me to type his questions or my reflections??? Or both?
That "encountered" is a tricky word, I think. When I think of encountering something, I think of meeting it in a dark alley. It brings itself forward to me, which suggests it would be a question someone else asked that I met in a dark alley....or in this chapter. I mean I even looked up the stinking definition of the word "encounter" to try to figure it out.
So I emailed her and asked.
Sometimes it is hard not to be an asshole, and I try to remember that when I think about students who sometimes are asked to do things that just seem so confusing or tedious.
I really feel for her having to manage my "chip-on-my-shoulder for not being a traditional school district teacher self" in class.
I know she recognizes the psychological self-imposed "drama" of me already having a MAT, having gone through the state internship program, having classroom experience under my belt, and taking a class with people who do not. She knows I feel a bit like an 8th grader in a class of 4th grade students.
On the positive side, I am certainly learning a lot as a result of the text: The English Teacher's Companion by Jim Burke.
I ran headfirst into my weakness as a teacher, which is that I suck at grammar. I can write well, but don't ask me to define an appositive, an adverbial clause, or to succinctly explain when and why to use a colon over a semicolon.
My professor gave us a list of grammar terms and asked us to rank them in terms of how well we understood them. I gave a "1" for everything, which basically means I've heard this term but could not explain it to you or anyone else.
And I felt compelled (because I cannot shut my big mouth) to say out loud that while I do understand the importance of "doing grammar," I do not necessarily agree with the importance of expecting students to be able to explicitly name an adverbial clause or a gerund.
A classmate (who happens to also be middle-aged and has a freelance background) responded to me that I (actually, she said "you," but I don't know if she meant "you as in me" or "you as in the general you") will never be a great writer without understanding the rules of grammar. I understood her comment, but I'm not sure I agree (and I think I also might be a little insulted that she suggested I could never be a great writer, even though I know this is true).
I'm not sure I believe that Hemingway or Steinbeck or Bronte or Austen or Garcia Marquez or Roth wrote or writes from a place of analyzing whether this gerund clause works better than this other gerund phrase in those direct, explicit, scientific and clinical terms. Maybe they do? Who knows?
I think that to be a great editor, a person probably needs to know the rules of grammar really well. And I realize now, as the editor of my students, that I am lacking in that department. Although, I think there are probably a lot of editors who can't recite all the rules of grammar.
Maybe this is why I've never aspired to write the Great American Novel?
But I don't think so.
I think it is because I have nothing of fictional merit to say....
I think it is because I have no great imaginative spirit that drives me to write in that way....
I think it is because I don't want to put the time into writing like that....
I don't think it is because I couldn't define a compound complex sentence if I tried.
Maybe the stick up my butt is because I subbed 3 days this week with a class of MMD students and worked with them on writing narratives? Maybe it is because even if I explained to these kids what is a subject and a predicate and called them by their official grammatical names, these kids cannot write a sentence better than what my 2nd grader can?
Maybe it is because I only see my students at the cottage school one day a week and think the value of having a class discussion about a text and analyzing it together is WAY more critical than spending that 65 minutes discussing how to write a sentence with an appositive in it and specifically bashing them over the head that it is an appositive.
I suspect I may have come across as a bit of an asshole, but I fully recognize that this was in large part because I recognized in myself my glaring weakness as a teacher: the grammar thing. I have never been able to understand the grammar thing, although I certainly understand it better now as an adult than I ever did as a kid. I could not diagram a sentence to save my life as a kid. As an adult, I can do it just slightly better than "meh."
And I guess a part of me is also going off the chain right now because what follows are the instructions to the class for next week's homework:
Read Chapter 8. Type 3 text-dependent questions about grading that you encountered in the reading and include page number.
As a writer and a teacher AND A STUDENT AT THE MOMENT, I am confused by this question. What is she asking exactly? Is she asking me to type 3 questions I had in my head about grading as I was reading or is she asking me to type 3 questions that the author asked about grading that I "encountered" as I read and, thereafter, reflected upon. Is she asking me to type his questions or my reflections??? Or both?
That "encountered" is a tricky word, I think. When I think of encountering something, I think of meeting it in a dark alley. It brings itself forward to me, which suggests it would be a question someone else asked that I met in a dark alley....or in this chapter. I mean I even looked up the stinking definition of the word "encounter" to try to figure it out.
So I emailed her and asked.
Sometimes it is hard not to be an asshole, and I try to remember that when I think about students who sometimes are asked to do things that just seem so confusing or tedious.
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