Learning   right: Avoiding perfect structure of chaos.

In her article Darren Crovitz offers interesting approach to the error analysis. Her method allows errors into the classroom, and it offers thorough explanations to each and every one of them based on the logical deduction. Stiff rules of grammar don’t provide students with enough understanding of the language, and they take their confidence away. The most important task for any teacher is to make students to understand why this rule of spelling or punctuation works one way or another. Without proper understanding all efforts to teach or learn grammar are in vain. Students need to care for the grammar rules, and this is not coming from a dry grammar drill. Their participation is the key to learning. As it is mentioned by Crovitz, the students might struggle through every day’s DOL, and still make mistakes during the tests. The turning point in this situation is to remove chaos of perfectly structured grammar, mess it up a bit, and make it more approachable for the student.

It doesn’t take much to create chaos. Speaking scientism, this is the nature of our Universe. Second law of thermodynamics states that chaos always increases over time. Of course, there is a theory of the multiple Universes, where our laws of physics simply don’t apply. Well, we didn’t get there yet. In our Universe chaos and confusion always find their way in. This stuff is so cool that now scientists can tell if life on this or that distant planet may or may not exist simply by measuring…the level of chaos in its atmosphere. Back to the topic now. The rules without proper interpretation will be just rules. Perfect chaos has impeccable, predictable, and expected structure. Same with the grammar rules – it is not possible to learn them sufficiently without proper knowledge and understanding. Stiff rules, dry formulas and fear of a bad grade can easily create chaos in student’s understanding of the language. It is like trying to find life on Mars: all components are there, but it just doesn’t seem to work.  One genius in 1960s already proved that there is no life on the Red Planet, because its atmosphere is too organized, too structured, and perfectly dead. Nothing like Earth. Yet, they keep spending billions of dollars on this. An unending attempt to prove him wrong ever since. In the same way teachers provide students with the dead grammar and wonder why they seem to struggle to make it work.

In the classroom it is clear that just stuffing student’s heads with perfectly organized rules doesn’t really work. It brings chaos to the knowledge and understanding that they had before. Some of them are going to be supported only by a thought that this horror of grammar will be over. Sooner or later. Grammar must be alive, if the students in a classroom are going to make sense out of it. According to Crovitz, errors have their own living structure, and this structure needs to be analyzed and connected with grammar. The sentences in Daily Oral Lessons in the average school doesn’t come from student’s writing. Those sentences are lifeless in their eyes. The life comes into grammar together with the involvement of the students. And it doesn’t really matter what language you speak – dry grammar rules are horror in any culture. I was lucky enough to “get” Russian and become a straight “A” student, but the rest of my family never had anything higher than “B” or even “C”. Russian is a truly difficult language. Especially written Russian. Even for the native speakers. I remember my mom saying that she always knew the rules, but never could pass a test or a dictation without significant amount of errors. Perfect chaos of grammatical structures in her mind never came to life. And she still does same errors until this day. Looking back, I realize that I turned out definitely because I was lucky to have a teacher, who explained not just perfect structure of grammar rules, but the reasons behind them. After that grammar drills stopped being an inevitable torture, and they started to make sense. Over time, they actually became a refuge. What happened in my life is that the teacher removed the pressure, created the environment for discussing errors in the classroom, and showed how to make sense first out of my own omissions. After this the grammar came to life, and it started to be a support. This is what Crovitz discusses in her article – students will learn only by making and by understanding their own mistakes.

During the activity for our group in class, we are going to offer four different concepts for everyone in a class to construct sentences, appropriate for the different occasions. In this mini lesson we would like to show how same concept can sound different, and it may carry different emotions. An offered concept in the article - You're fired - has different emotions in every sentence of the example: 
1. We regret to inform you that your professional services are no longer required.
2. Sorry, Bob, but with the poor economy we have to let you go.
3. Get out now and don't come back!
4. I'm breaking up with you.

All four sentences carry pretty much same core information, but the first one is official and informal. It doesn't contain any emotion. The second sentence carries regret and care. Third one carries anger. But the forth sentence carries personal decision to end things. All four are appropriate for their own situation. 

P.S.: Patterns of the week are highlighted in bold inside of the post.

Learning with humiliation.

As I have read both texts, I have realized that they talk about same topic, but in a little bit different manner. When Grammar Alive! – as it might be expected of the text book of any sort – talks about all goals of teaching grammar in equal capacity, the Christensen’s article advocates more for the Goal C. As any convincing paper, the article uses combination of the three modes of persuasion: ethos, pathos and logos. For those that are not familiar with the Aristotle’s appeals, ethos stands for credibility and authority, pathos stands for emotional appeal, and logos stands for the facts provided in the writing to support the point or claim.  The Grammar Alive! also uses all three appeals. The leading appeal in the text book is logos; leading appeal in the Christensen’s article is pathos. The difference between the two texts is in a different appeal.

It is clear that both of the texts aimed towards same audience – group of academic peers and teachers of grammar. But they address different aspects of the grammar teaching: when Grammar Alive! in the well-paced and balanced language advocates for the equality of each approach to teaching English grammar (Haussamen 3), Christensen’s article spices up the text by the personal examples of how prevalence only of the Goal A in the teaching had negative impact on the lives of the author and other students (Christensen 101). In my opinion, both of the approaches are equally important. When such topic is approached, all types of opinions must be voiced. This allows reader to form their own opinion on the subjects, and to decide which opinion is more close to their own situation, background and experience.

 In my own process of learning English, I happened to encounter a person, who was very strict and set in the ways of teaching Standard English. It happened in the first couple of years since my arrival in the USA. As I was set to learn English and excel in it as much as possible, this person was very criticizing about my way of writing and speaking. As it was clear afterwards, when I started to write first, I was making same six mistakes thought all of my compositions. Only while reading Grammar Alive! this semester, I realized that my own pattern at the time was fitting the definition of the language variety. Of course, I am not saying that I wrote in perfect Standard English, but I shouldn’t have been criticized about my mistakes as much as I have been. At that time, because of the constant negative feedback, I started to lose my confidence and faith that I can come to mastering Standard English one day. My example fits very well into the line of stories presented by Christensen – herself with teacher Mrs. Delaney, a woman with Puerto-Rican and Hawaiian background... They all felt insignificant and not important because of what they had to say was not a standard way of saying or for that matter writing things. (Christensen 102). I can relate to this feeling.

The phrase in Christensen’s article – “Learning the “Standard” without humiliation” (Christensen 103) – grabbed my attention. This is what I am still interested in – improving my skills and extending my knowledge without someone constantly trying to show me my lower status due to the fact that English is not my first language. “It took me years to undo what Mrs. Delaney did to me. Years to discover that what I said was more important than how I said it.” (Christensen 104). In my life the negative influence was not as long, and it started to wear off as soon as I was brave enough to take first English class at WSU. But still, it took me about one more year to regain my confidence, even though the instructor in a very first course that I took at the University was impressed with skills. All Goals presented in Grammar Alive! are equally important, but none of them should dominate over the other. Only balanced approach and goodhearted encouragement can breathe life into otherwise disconnected rules of grammar.