Evolving Ideas

Reading these two additional grammar articles and reflecting on my high school experience has allowed me to realize some significant differences in my education and the type of teacher I want to be. I think the reason I'm having a hard time letting go of teaching grammar by itself is because I was taught it and forced to have near perfect grammar in so many of the papers I wrote in high school. I was in honors language arts classes and almost all of our writing assignments were formal papers; we rarely explored other, more creative genres. I'm realizing now, that I'm not going to want to teach in the same way.

"Why Revitalize Grammar?" clarifies the important fact that perfect grammar is not the key to economic success and not all students are college-bound and will need to communicate in perfect standardized english. All students do need to learn to communicate effectively and to do so, they must know how to communicate in a way that their audience will understand. I'm really looking forward to developing my students Textual Intelligence by looking at different genres and writing in different genres. I believe that there is a place for "proper" grammar and my students should know to use it in their formal essays or research papers. However, they will also learn that there are types of writing in which the content will be more accurately understood by the audience if grammar rules (and other writing "rules") are broken. While reading these articles, I thought of so many lesson plans - it was great!