My Dog Smells Better Than Me

You could learn to make a chair by trial and error or by watching an older craftsman at work.  The master craftsman could make a sample and communicate what he or she is doing by asking for the ‘spiky, cutting thing’ or describing a mortise and tenon joint as ‘how one piece of wood slots snugly into another usually at an angle of ninety degrees’, but, in a way, this is just a renaming of two commonly-used ideas: saw and mortise and tenon joint.  Teaching carpentry includes naming the tools, techniques and how to avoid embarrassing or dangerous mistakes.  But if it stopped there, it wouldn't be a successful course of study.  A successful teacher would encourage the student to explore how to use his or her imagination in the application of the techniques they've learnt.

 

Those primary teachers of a certain age, who went through the school system at a time when grammar wasn't taught explicitly, have had to resort to the ‘spiky, cutting thing’ technique of teaching the rules of English.  Not knowing the terminology, wary of entering the apparently esoteric world of grammar, or possibly discouraged to do so because it was seen to stifle creativity, they invented their own concepts.  They resorted to other strategies when communicating to pupils, parents and other teachers.

So, instead of conjunctions, relative pronouns and adverbs used in particular cases, teachers coined the term connective.  Adverbial phrases at the start of a sentence are described as openers.  Words may have been described very helpfully in terms of their functions: naming words, doing and being words, describing words in place of nouns, verbs and adjectives, often without progression on to more precise terms.  In practice, this can work reasonably well.  It certainly contains the essential idea that the role of a word in a sentence is important.  But you can see its lack of precision and potential for confusion: verbs are very descriptive, adverbs can describe a verb, an adjective or another adverb. 

Similarly, I've heard many teachers explain the use of a comma in terms of its being a place where you take a breath when reading a sentence.  That’s fine for reading, but that’s not why they’re there, and doesn’t help the writer; for example: “When it saw the dog our – breath – cat Lucy jumped up – breath –  the tree and stayed there for the – breath –  whole day.”

This suggests there is a need for grammar terminology as a shared language in which teacher and student can discuss and evaluate the student’s work.  It isn’t necessary to pile it on to children before they can cope with it, but they do cope well with a range of concepts in other subjects.  They are used to talking, for example, about gravity, evaporation and habitat in science; meander, coastal erosion and magma in geography; pitch, volume and dynamics in music, and so on.  Part and parcel of our teaching any subject is the introduction of relevant concepts as we go along.  Why make an exception for a language about language?  As I said, the grammar that is taught will necessarily have to be tailored to the needs of the children.  It may not be important to teach the difference between, say, dependent and independent clauses, or talk about copular verbs; but it’s useful to know the function of words in sentences and how those functions plus punctuation is essential to meaning. 

This doesn’t mean that the teaching of English has to be dry and humourless.  Including examples of the fun you can have with English help to stop your junior school class using their rulers to saw their rubbers in half.  Getting them to discuss the ambiguities of My dog smells better than me or If you think any of our waiters are rude, you ought to see the manager will introduce the kind of detached playfulness that is part of creative writing.

Wired for Grammar

Our brains are wired for grammar.  We use it to make sense of the world: this is round, that is square; my shoes are blue and made of suede, your slacks are beige and don’t reach down to your sandals; I cried yesterday, I’m smiling now and I’ll be laughing my head off tomorrow; you are not me, it is not them, and we are not her or him; my views are sensible and rational, your prejudices are irrational.  And so on.

Words and their arrangements describe, delineate and order experience and, importantly, give you distance and more control over your situation.  Understanding an experience by giving it words makes you less of a slave to it, though other encumbrances, such as poverty and low status may still bar the way.  Even then, the words will help you pinpoint the problem.

Discussions of grammar and creativity are dragged into the usual Platonic stramash between traditionalists and progressives, the prosaic and the passionate, the precise and the unpredictable.  Such extreme positions, however, are like wallflowers on opposite sides of the dance floor.  On the ground, in the classroom, it is not one or the other.  It’s more a case of starting with some sort of plan then adding improvisation: a combining of knowledge of the structures plus a willingness and desire to explore new pathways.  It has to be this way because, as a teacher, you’re dealing on the spot with children’s different levels of understanding and needs.  Those distant authorities – academic or political – who would like to keep tabs on things either for well-meaning educational or dodgy ideological reasons, may have something to contribute but they are not dealing with a child’s needs on a Monday morning.  Whatever strictures are placed on the content of the classroom and however much it is monitored by Ofsted (or your country’s school inspectors), it will always be more like jazz than either a pianola roll or a cat strolling along the piano keys.

You could say, ‘Well, I can play piano perfectly well without having to read music or knowing what an arpeggio is.’  Of course, you can and your improvisation skills are impressive.  But when it comes to communicating – the medium of education – you’re going to need some words, some terminology.  Have you listened to kids teaching each other how to skateboard?  They describe doing ollies in half-pipes, and goofy-foots performing fakies and McTwists.  I’ve no idea what I just wrote, but they do because it’s part of their linguistic community.  It comes with membership.