Grammar in the classroom, initial thoughts (ENGL 338)

When I was reading this article, a Douglas Adams quote popped into my head. "Isn't is enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Now, of course, Adams is not talking about grammar, but I think there's sort of a parallel here. Do we have to understand grammar in order to write well or understand a text? The answer, as the article shows over and over again is no. 

Picture posted solely because of the
Douglas Adams quote. 

I believed grammar to be important, but the article got me thinking about my own educational experiences. I did not have a formal grammar class until last spring. Last January was the first time I ever diagrammed a sentence. However, we understand what grammar is, and how English should operate in its standard form just by interacting with the world. Textbooks are written grammatically, newspapers and books follow these rules. The rules of grammar and language can be, it seems, learned by osmosis. We may need to clear up some points, and offer guidance, but I don't know that we need to have students work tirelessly at grammar. 

I would hesitate to say though that teaching grammar is not important at all. There are some students who will struggle with grammar, but I think the key is not overload them with the subject. Instead of seeing grammar as the foundation to good writing, perhaps we should look at it as insulation. It is important, but it isn't the biggest concern. Good grammar can help to make a good paper a great one, because good grammar won't distract from the paper's ideas like bad grammar will. However, as teachers (as was mentioned in class) it should be more important to focus on how a paper is organized and how its ideas are articulated rather than comma placement.

I think that another important thing to take into consideration is that no matter what your stance is on grammar, whether you believe it is important or not, as teachers we must be unafraid to teach grammar. Students will ask questions about how sentences are constructed and why we use I in some cases and me in others. We should be able to engage in these discussions. Grammar is a tool to use to write better and communicate better, and we should be able to help students with their grammar. At the same time, we must realize that grammar is not the only tool to be used to accomplish those goals and that each student may need something different.

Bedtime stories (ENGL 338)

So, I'm late to this discussion (sinus infections are just the worst for productivity) but I've been thinking about not necessarily my own reading experiences with my parents, but the ones that I have with my nephews who are probably my favorite people in the world.

Getting to read to my nephews is something I look forward to whenever I see them. I don't exactly know what it is about reading to them, but it is something special. But, reading to a child is so much more than just reading the words on the page. You use different voices to make characters come alive, different inflections to express mood, but most importantly you use the pictures to help the story become more interactive.

Many books that I've read to my nephews ask the reader to find something. Maybe its a mouse hidden on the page or trying to find 9 oranges. Or, you can pose the question yourself, "What is this?" you might ask, pointing to a dog. "What color is it?" The child will (hopefully) answer "a dog" and "brown". It is something so simple, but it is education at its most basic level. The child shows that they know what a dog is or what the color brown looks like and can relay that to you. (This becomes not so fun when you read them a book that they've seen 30 times and have pointed to the mouse before you can say, "do you see a mouse?")

So, while it is true as was said in class that nobody's family talks like a textbook, simply reading to a child helps facilitate the educational process. The child knows what to look for and how to answer a question, and that can give them a head start when they enter a classroom for the first time.

Reflection on Hinglish project (ENGL 338)

I felt the project and presentation went very well. It can be difficult with group projects (especially with six people) to find time to meet up and work through it. I thought we did well with the time we had.

That said, I'm a bit skeptical to the relevance of all of this. I'm not sure if there was anyone in the class that was unaware of dialects before this project started and our discussions on AAVE should have cleared up any misconceptions regarding grammatical rules in these dialects. Perhaps soon this will all come together as something that can be used in the classroom, but right now I don't feel that it is anything more than a warning of something to look out for. "The students exist, so be prepared!"

Book Review: The Postmortal

The last time I did one of these book reviews, I added that I would write up my review of The Postmortal the next day. Then school had to start and there went all of my free time, even though these things don't take all that long to bang out.

Anyways....The Postmortal.

This book is about as opposite as Drew Magary's first book: Men With Balls, which is a how-to guide of being a professional athlete. It is full of the humor that one would be used to from reading his posts at "Deadspin" or elsewhere on the Internet. And yet, there's nary a poop joke or dick joke to be found in The Postmortal, at least none that I can remember since I read the book two months ago.

This novel deals with a hypothetical, and a major one at that. What if science could make you more or less immortal. You take a shot and never age. Old age cannot kill you. Your body won't break down. Other things can kill you, but never your own body. "The Cure" as it is called is highly controversial, and even after it is legalized many fight against its use. Magary takes political imagry of today and puts it into his fictional story, adding a bit of realism to the story that sometimes falls flat. (Things get a bit too coincidental for me at times in the book).

One review I read took up a point that Magary briefly addresses the effect such technology would have on sports records. The passage the reviewer references is a one-sentence blip in a "links round up" (the book reads as if it was someone's blog) about the baseball home run record falling. This, complains the reviewer, is expected. Magary is a sports guy, why wouldn't he throw in this little bit? (Never mind that anyone who reads Kissing Suzy Kolber knows that Magary does not care for baseball in the least).

I actually think that this little blip added a bit of world-building to the novel. Due to its nature, the story doesn't really allow for much more than glimpses into the rest of the world. There are the wars in Russia and a crisis or two mentioned, but nothing is ever truly flushed out.

If the world of the Postmortal is something Magary wants to return to for a future book, taking the sports aspect could be a fun way to go. Maybe he wished to avoid it, given all the controversy surrounding steroids, but a sports science fiction book, something that blends Magary's first two novels together, could be a fun read.

Question on bidialectism in the classroom (ENGL 338)

Is there a way to promote code-switching, or teach code-switching skills? My take from reading the article was that no one wanted to just promote SAE and no one wanted to ignore AAE, so how can we improve upon both? I don't think that SAE is a tool of white supremacy and I doubt that many English teachers use it as such (if there are any, then they really shouldn't be teachers, now should they?).

What becomes tricky to me is that while it is apparent that AAE has a place in education and if it were used in the classroom could benefit its speakers, SAE is dominant. We can criticize society all we want for being (or at least pretending to be) dependent on one dialect, but that does not change the fact that SAE is vitally important. I think as educators, we have to make sure that our students are gaining knowledge and that they will be prepared going forward. This is why I think code-switching may be a way to get the best of both worlds. Does the use of AAE alone promote code switching, or are there tips that teachers can use to promote it.

Language barriers in the classroom (ENGL 338)

I might be at a bit of an advantage, as I've read ahead a little in the class. I read through "The Linguistic Features of the Language of Schooling" and will be using some of that text in my reflection.

The question posed is how do we, as English teachers (or any teachers, for that matter) over come language barriers, such as dialects, in our classroom. Given the controversy over the use of AAVE in Oakland, this is an important conversation to have.

The first thing to consider is that the language used in education is much more lexically dense than the language students use on an every day basis. While this is partly because of the academic content in education, there are gramatical differences. These differences, in some ways, make education less accessible than it could be. A text book might be to hard to read or might be written in a way that does not engage the student. I don't feel that this is a student-specific problem. I think everyone has read a text book or essay and just wanted to get to the end because it was dense. This problem is amplified if the students engage in a dialect such as AAVE. If the language used in academics is already denser than what "standard English" would be, then these texts and lectures could be all the more dis-engaging to students fluent in a dialect of English.

What I thought was very important in the discussion of the Oakland AAVE classes is that teachers that engaged in AAVE and worked with it, as opposed to those who suppressed it, saw reading and writing skills improve. That essay also points to work done in Norway, where regional dialects are used in classrooms, but students are gradually taught a standardized Norwegian.

I think one way to do this in an English classroom is to not instantly say that something is wrong (doing so might make a student shy in the future), but instead use it as a way to show that language is alive and changing. It could make for an interesting side lesson on how AAVE functions grammatically. In addition, if students are able to see how AAVE (or their dialect) functions grammatically, and that there are "rules" to their style of speaking, than they may pick up on the rules of what we consider "standardized English".

I don't feel though that teaching standardized English in this way would necessarily demean other dialects. The essay on AAVE alludes to a "code switching" of sorts, that speakers of AAVE can also speak in standardized English. Students will be expected to communicate in standardized English in certain situations (such as job interviews) and as English teachers we should give them the tools they need to be able to do so. At the same time though, we cannot be insensitive to their culture and demean their language. Instead, we can show how their dialect works, how it compares to the standard, and have discussions on why the dialect is important to the students.

A less than formal introduction (ENGL 338)

Yes, I do own this tie. Yes, I look awesome in it.

My name is Alan Hoffmann. This is my second go-around for college. I graduated from Southern Illinois University (go Salukis) with a journalism and radio-television news degree. The idea was to use said degree to cover sports for a living. The reality was, I got to attend lots of really, really boring meetings. "My job is to go to public meetings and get bored so the public doesn't have to," I joked.

In between my two radio jobs, I lived at home. I even, just to be as cliche as possible, set up my computer in my parents' basement. I did complete National Novel Writing Month that November, but the best thing I did while hunting for my next job was to be a volunteer cross country coach. I called the head coach before the season started and asked if I could help out. He said yes. Simple as that I became a cross country coach. It was about three weeks into this that I noticed that I really enjoyed being out there. Not just the running aspect (which was also fun) but interacting with the kids, teaching them, seeing them develop their running skills, watching them interact. It was at about this time that another friend of mine (who was coaching football while looking for jobs) and I decided that we needed to do this for a living. We had to teach. Even though both of our fathers (maybe because both of our fathers) were teachers, we never considered the idea. Well, career choice #1 didn't work, but here was something exciting. 

Well, just as I was about to enroll somewhere and work on an English ed degree, I got my second radio job. So, off to Havre I went. I moved there in the winter and the temperature did not get above freezing for a month. I once called a 19-degree day, "nice". The next winter it got to be 40-below. Lest you think it was all bad, I did meet my wife while living there, so there's that. At any rate, I got tired of covering boring meetings and as soon as I was able to get in-state tuition, I moved to Bozeman and enrolled at Montana State. I'm the fifth family member to go to school here, which is more or less why I chose MSU. 

A few other fun facts....

~My wife and I got married this summer in what I called "the longest, shortest day of my life". Seriously, it is exhausting getting married, but it was a blast. Kodi is beautiful, smart and awesome and I couldn't be going to school and work without her.

~I work the night shift at the C'mon Inn. In a related story, caffeine is great.

~I'm a huge Seattle sports fan (well, not UW. They're evil, as I root for Washington State. My sister went to WSU, Go Cougs!) and against better judgement am a diehard Seahawks fan. That team will be the death of me.

~I love to read and write (an English major with those hobbies?). I really like science fiction and fantasy. As for the writing side of things, I do have two unfinished novels (both National Novel Writing Month efforts. I got to 50,000 words but not the end of the story). I have a tentative deadline of "Someday" to finish them.

~I also like to run and I'd like to coach cross country and track when I become a teacher. 

~I spent a semester of College Part One in Australia and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Seriously, if you get a chance to study abroad DO IT. Also, I sometimes slip into Aussie speak and will refer to people as "mate" and say "no worries". I will even refer to things as "dodgey" at times. 

~There were some perks to working as a reporter. I've met 4 U.S. Senators and a handful of U.S. Representatives. That was fun. One time, I called Brian Schweitzer's office for a quote from one of his press people and they said they'd just have the governor call me. Considering my last job was in Illinois, having the governor call me back was really cool. (Ironically enough, the most boring part of the job was school board meetings. Those are the worst.)

I think that's about it. Any questions, just leave 'em in the comments. Or talk to me in person, though a warning: I'll talk your ear off if you give me the chance.

I'll be educated well

Learn about delicacy

I'll be wearing pin-striped suits that say

"Renaissance is me"

Alan

(I will occasionally do lyrical sign-offs)