Grinding the Grammar Mill

I still think that teaching grammar effectively is one of the hardest things we have to do as English teachers. In class, Faith asked about what to do when a paper is so littered with grammatical errors that it’s actually unreadable. Now, I understand that as you get used to grading, you become more seasoned at seeing through, in a sense, grammatical problems in order to unearth the content of a paper. But there are papers that are so problematic that it is nearly impossible to make sense out of them – I’ve received papers like that from high school students. When I was a first-year teacher, I laboriously attempted to grade the atrocious papers, marking the major problems, writing suggestions, etc. By the time I was finished, the paper had more of my writing on it than it had of the student’s – and I had spent a LOT of time doing it. Had I been a more seasoned teacher, I probably would’ve handed the paper back to the student and told him to “clean it up” so that I can actually focus on what the paper was saying, offering my one-on-one help before or after school.

But really – what is the best way to teach grammar? Because I’ve tried lots of methods: mini lessons, using real examples from my student papers, teaching in context, etc., and yet it seemed hard to gauge whether anything was really working. I mean, I spent a good five minutes emphasizing the difference between “where” and “were” (a tricky difference for some students in western Illinois), making a big deal about how since “where” has the word “here” in it, than that’s the one to use when you’re talking about location. And then I’d get papers with sentences that read, “We where the best of friends.” No matter what type of grammar instruction I tried, I’d still receive grammatically appalling papers and I’d receive flawless ones. Do some students just shut down when a teacher says “semicolon” or “clause”? Perhaps.

I think I’ll look through the student papers I’ve saved to see if I have any interesting examples to share. I’ll let you know.