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Giving Students a Chance
I scored 126th out of 126 students. When I was a junior in high school, our class took a test for a possible college-level English curriculum in our senior year. Having been told the results, I sat sobbing on my bedroom floor. For some reason, grammatical prowess in my mother tongue eluded me. Syntax seemed like “sin tax” to me.
And grammar was the first of three levels in the senior curriculum. I had to pass out of one level to get to the next two: essay writing, then free writing. I had been behind the door when grammar was taught in middle school. Somewhere, somehow, I missed lessons on prepositional phrases, split infinitives, and hanging gerunds. I tried and tried to pass through to the next level. No amount of tutelage helped. I languished in the wasteland of grammatical incoherence.
But the thing was, I could write. I knew instinctively what sounded right. I heard the words even if I didn’t understand how they fit together. And Roy Honeywell knew it.
Roy Honeywell had been my junior English teacher. He knew what I could do. “I would like to read a paper from someone in the class whose writing could be an example to others. He shall remain nameless,” Mr. Honeywell intoned as he read my papers during 11th grade not once, not twice, but three times.
Now Roy Honeywell was the dual-credit, college-prep teacher in my senior year. He agonized with me as he tried to fill my grammatical knowledge gaps. I took and failed test after test. We were a month into the senior year. Everyone else had matriculated to levels two and three. I was the only one who could not pass the grammar section of the program.
The overwhelming feelings of failure touch me even today. I can feel now, what I felt then. The emotional slough I wallowed in then is the swamp I see before me every day.
But the feeling of clandestine secrecy from what happened next lies just beyond the swamp. Roy Honeywell knew what I could do. He knew I could write. So, one day he came to my desk and told me that I did not have to pass the grammar exam. I could proceed to level two.
“This is just between me and you,” he stated in firm, hushed tones. “You show me that you can write like I know you can, and the grammatical understanding will follow. I have faith in you.” And he walked away.
I did not know what would happen next, but he did. After scoring 126 out of 126, it was not long before my writing scores ranked at the top of the class. I knew I was doing well when Mr. Honeywell began to anonymously read my papers before the class again. I will never forget when he cast a quick, smiling glance in my direction before he began to read my writing.
“I have faith in you.” The words still inspire me today. Roy Honeywell gave me a chance. I have been giving students, like you, a chance, ever since. For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, president of the Comenius Institute, personally grateful for second chances.
[First published here.]
Published in General
That is a wonderful story. And it’s important for parents and teachers.
I spent a lot of time with my own kids and their friends encouraging them to keep going in pursuing their interests, even when testing or teachers or others made them question their ability. I would say, “There’s some really good reason you feel drawn to this pursuit. Don’t give it up.”
My favorite story to tell them was about Rush Limbaugh. Rush flunked out of radio school after one year. Flunked out! :-) He took a time slot that no one in the industry took seriously: 12 to 3 in the afternoon. The talk radio stations were logically pursuing the commuter audience. Rush saw something no one else did. This fact really jumped out at me one day when I was in my garden and I noticed our mail carrier listening to Rush. A high percentage of Rush’s audience consisted of people who were largely by themselves during the day. Entrepreneurs, small business owners, and others who enjoyed some measure of intellectual freedom during the day and resisted the powerful central control of the government.
By the end of his career, he had something like 15 million listeners.
Schools can test only the past, not the future.
I never understood most of the rules of grammar, and I never learned them. I’ve always known what sounded good. I wish now that I had learned more. I never thought those rules were important but as time goes by I see how wrong I was.
The rules seem less important if doing it right just comes naturally, no matter how. It’s people who think “reeseev” is okay because it sounds right, who need the rules most.
Also people who think it’s “intensive purposes.”
What bothers me is the people who find it so easy to tow the line that they take it for granite.
Or perhaps even worse, people who cowtow.
Wait for it…
Curious.
I would like to know more about the correlates of grammar ability. For example, your anomaly–excellent writing skill, very poor grammar skill. There is I am sure a profound connection between grammar ability and other in-built thinking methods, patterns, and abilities. Surely some connection with non-language thinking (math and logic, philosophy, economics, music, poetry…). Right?
It seems like you may be missing a big part of the point. The claim seems to be that the grammar comes out correctly even without being conscious of the rules involved and deliberately following them.
Unless that’s what you meant and it just came across wrong. But “very poor grammar skill” at least to me sounds like you think the writing has a lot of errors but apparently it doesn’t, it’s just not because of knowingly following specific rules.
Hm. Good point!
They are two very different skills.
But thinking about that makes me even more curious to know what is going on in the mind and also in the brain, and how the various skills are correlated and why. Clearly Mark’s pattern indicates that he is actually excellent at grammar—he truly “knows” grammar well, but then what is going on that he can’t easily apply that how-to knowledge to building a set of rules? A model or “theory” that describes what he is doing when he writes correctly.
Maybe it’s an oral/verbal skill that doesn’t match up well with writing/reading in the usual sense, for some people. As in, “hearing” what the words “sound like” and then writing them the correct way. It seems rather similar to me at times, for example I couldn’t tell you if “there” or “their” or “they’re” is the subjunctive conjugation or whatever, but I know which one to use in appropriate situations and it’s automatic. I see people having problems with those words every day, maybe because they also just “hear” the word and don’t realize that the correct form/spelling is important, not just how it “sounds.”
There is also the problem of time travel.
Unfortunately, Dr. Streetmentioner’s large book is our only source of good grammar for time travelers, since none of us have been properly immersed from childhood in good grammar for time travelers as spoken by well-spoken time travelers.
You and I are thinking along exactly the same lines!
You’d learn when to use “there”, “their” and “they’re” by just reading a lot (and by having, at 13, a parent who convinced you to create and write down for her 5 sentences for each word, and then one or two sentences in which all three words were used properly. For instance: “They’re going swimming there in their new bathing suits.”
How well you write depends on what, and how much, you read (and on how nuts your spelling or usage mistakes are driving your mother.)
Uh oh!
Yeah. I know.
Weird.