Beyond the Worksheet: A Writing Teacher Makes Peace with Grammar
During my early years of teaching high school English, a more senior colleague in another department eagerly approached me in the school lunch line with news that he had a friend who he believed could be my newest buddy. “He is an attorney,” he announced, “who loves to spell. He is really into spelling. And because you are an English teacher, I know that y’all would get along well and have so much to talk about. You are a spelling teacher, and he loves to talk about spelling!”
I wish a different version of myself—a stronger, more self-assured version—was there at that moment, but it wasn’t. I just smiled, and, in a mildly passive aggressive voice said, “Oh sure, I love thinking about words. But, uh, we don’t really talk about spelling in high school English. We, um, have the spell check function in Word, ya know?”
To be fair, I actually do like spelling, and I am grateful to Mrs. McGee, Mrs. White, and the entire crew of saintly teachers at Arapaho Elementary who fostered my love of reading and writing–and spelling. But I know that they too would have been offended by my colleague’s comment because it reduced both their vocation and mine to a sliver of its role.
Let me give you another version of that story, one that, when it happened, felt less condescending but nevertheless still seemed to misrepresent my profession.
The sister of a good friend is a hospital administrator who, when she learned I was an English teacher, immediately told me that I needed to focus on teaching students that they cannot end a sentence with a preposition. In her role at the hospital, she receives countless applications, and, as she emphasized, she tosses out all cover letters that have a sentence ending in a preposition. “If someone doesn’t know that basic rule,” she declared, “then how am I to trust that they can do their actual job?!”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had probably overlooked some pretty great candidates because of this rather draconian rule—and that sometimes, well, we have rhetorical reasons for wanting to end with that preposition. I mean, sometimes I don’t want to vomit, I just want to throw up. Or, sometimes I don’t want to know from where that grammar rule came but instead where that grammar rule came from. The context of our writing, including our purpose and our audience, determines the shape and voice of what we write, so my colleagues and I often discuss grammar as a style or rhetorical choice, rather than a prescriptive measure.
The context of our writing, including our purpose and our audience, determines the shape and voice of what we write, so my colleagues and I often discuss grammar as a style or rhetorical choice, rather than a prescriptive measure.
But maybe she’s right—when in doubt about your audience, just follow the rules, as strange as they may sometimes seem.
I have plenty more of these kinds of stories. Most comments are innocuous and come from a place of genuine interest, sometimes leading to rather rich conversations about the function of, let’s say, passive voice as a tool to remove someone’s agency. (See this 2015 New York Times article on passive voice for how some history textbooks use passive voice when discussing slavery.)
The single story of the English teacher is often, in my experience, that we are all grammar nags, ready to pounce on the first split infinitive or incorrect use of “who/whom” that comes out of someone’s mouth. That grammar is—or should be—our top priority. That our definition of a successful writer is—or, again, should be—the grammatically perfect one. And here’s the deal with single stories, as beautifully articulated by writer and speaker Chimamanda Adichie: “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
So yes, grammar is inherently a necessary part of teaching English, but it is certainly not the only part. Or even—do I dare type it here for all to see?—the most important one. When I say that I want my students to grow in sophistication as writers, their grammar is a piece of the puzzle, but so too is their structure, their logic, their vocabulary, their ability to incorporate effective evidence and then to analyze that evidence in focused, meaningful ways. Their ability to adjust their writing for different purposes and for different audiences is also essential; sometimes writing needs to be playful but sometimes formality is required. Being able to calibrate one’s voice to the rhetorical situation—the context, purpose, and audience—is a lifelong skill that even adults struggle with or outright fail at times, including myself.
In short, I have read some pretty boring, regurgitative essays in my life that were grammatically perfect, and the student’s perfect grammar did not necessarily make me feel like I had done a successful job in developing her as a complete, confident writer.
But nevertheless, grammar—how best to teach it, when to teach it, and how much of it to teach at any given time—has followed me throughout my career, haunting me like some nebulous phantom. I have never felt like I have gotten the teaching of it right, despite years of research and practical experience. In graduate school, for example, my Historiography of Writing class explored the ways writing has been taught in American schools since the Colonial Era, my Theories of Composition class focused on the philosophy of different kinds of grammar instruction (keeping in mind how it has been used as a tool of upholding certain systems, including racism and classism), and my Teaching Composition Class laid out any number of practical, hands-on approaches to developing writers. I gained lots of knowledge but found no certain answers.
When I was department chair at my current high school, one of my favorite questions to ask prospective hires was, “How do you teach grammar,” mainly because I just wanted them to give me the answer I have yet to find.
Here, though, is what I do know. When it comes to teaching grammar, drill and skill doesn’t work. Worksheets that teach concepts in isolation—and only in isolation—may look like rigor but are in reality more like busy work. They are also likely doing more harm than good, training a young generation of writers to believe that writing is really about grammar—that the two are equivalent— and as such, if they can’t master grammatical concepts, they aren’t, and never can be, writers. An exclusive focus on grammar also doesn’t offer room for students to play with and develop their own writing voices, testing out structures and ideas and organizational patterns that give way to a stronger sense of their own writing agency. As a result, I have had far too many writers enter my classroom thinking that all writing is a strict, unwavering template that they will never master.
Here’s an analogy that comes to mind—and I am going to veer into the world of soccer, so just bear with me for a moment. Many moons ago, a soccer parent new to the sport came up to me after one of my kid’s practices, and she was livid: “How come the coach doesn’t just run drills? I mean, he is asking my daughter to play as a forward, but she doesn’t know where to go or what to do. He should be running designed plays or at least have them run the same drill over and over again so that she can get it right.”
In grammar and writing terms, this mom wanted the drill and skill worksheet method, followed by a writing template. Teach my kid subordinating clauses (or insert another grammar or soccer skill here) over and over and over again, and then give her an eight-sentence paragraph template that tells her exactly what to say for every single sentence (insert coach-designed play here).
This method isn’t all that successful in soccer, just as it isn’t going to be terribly effective in writing. I’ve seen soccer players with incredible juggling skills (keeping the ball afloat with their just their feet or knees for upwards of 100 counts or more) fall apart in a game because they have poor passing skills, cannot be flexible, don’t know how to adjust quickly, fail to look up the field, refuse to call for the ball, struggle to release the ball in time, or otherwise resist being a team player. My friend’s daughter, in other words, could run drills and be taught coach-designed plays all day long, but in an actual game, those isolated skills would only take her so far. Soccer is too much of a flexible game that relies on constant, fluid, and largely unpredictable movement. So, too, is writing.
Ok, if teaching grammar skills in isolation isn’t really the solution, then what is? One of my English Department colleagues spent the last year working on an innovation time grant that focused on this very question. The takeaway she shared was a three-headed approach to grammar: yes, we can teach grammar in isolation but we also need to teach it through literature (via mentor sentences) and through teacher feedback on student writing. The clarity and simplicity of her takeaway is the genius of it all. My hope is that she can share some of her findings in a future post for Her Voice.
The soccer analogy, though, offers an additional answer. Games and scrimmages are where the real learning happens; ask any coach and I can all-but-guarantee that he or she will agree. It is why playing time is so precious; you want that legitimate learning experience. In the writing world, scrimmages and games are the actual acts of writing: freewriting in the journal, short reader responses, discussion prompts, and creative writing in addition to the more formal timed or out-of-class essays.
I tell my students that every opportunity to write is an opportunity to get better at writing. As such, students need to write. A lot. Formally and informally. In all kinds of genres: literary analysis, narrative writing, research-based argumentation, creatively (poems but also other forms), speeches, to name only a few. And they need to do so with various forms of feedback: self, peer, and teacher. They can write for and with each other, privately for themselves, or more publicly for me and/or their classmates.
It should come as no surprise that in the face of a student population increasingly prone to “texting grammar”–a genre unto itself–this frequent, low-stakes writing also offers a potential antidote. Our daily class writings serve as even the smallest reminders to young people of what writing can do and what it can look like when we take our fingers off the screen and onto the keyboard–or, as often happens in my classroom, onto the pen and paper.
Grammar is a part of my story–and my identity–as a teacher of writing, whether I want it to be or not. And because it is, I know I will continue to encounter people who have misguided or simply just incomplete understandings of what writing teachers do–or should be doing, as was the case with my dear hospital administrator friend. I cannot control them or their perceptions. What I can control, though, is what happens in my classroom and how my students experience writing. I want them to love it–or at the very least know they can do it–and no one ever fell in love with a worksheet.
What I can control, though, is what happens in my classroom and how my students experience writing. I want them to love it–or at the very least know they can do it–and no one ever fell in love with a worksheet.
Megan Griffin is currently reading The Murmur of Bees–and always has The MLA Handbook within arm’s reach.
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