Like Bethany, I have been worried that this grammar day would come - and it would be revealed that I barely know the parts of speech, much less feel comfortable really digging into other, more complicated topics. When I think of learning grammar, I think of my grade school textbook - ugly, orange, squashed, pictureless. There were long exercises of dull example sentences: underline the verb once, circle the noun in red, triple-underline the prepositional phrase. What?! What really perplexed me was that I was always a decent writer - and yet I knew nothing of grammar. I knew when things didn't sound right, but I could never explain why.
"To Grammar or Not to Grammar" was a fairly interesting read. It makes so much sense that grammar and writing should be taught together - I wonder why this hasn't really been emphasized before. Obviously, it is very difficult to learn something kind of abstract - like grammar - and then separately apply it in practice. I like the examples of student writing - and I especially like the activity that one of the teachers did on The Giver. I think the writing that the students came up with was really amazing. The end of the article mentioned writer's workshops; and grammar seems like something that is really condusive to mini-lessons. Who can stand an entire class period on it? It makes far more sense to break it up, to make it more manageable.
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