Language and Life

Ok..if you are not an English teacher or Linguist, you may want to skip this posting...

Actually, I DARE you to stay and read it. I wonder if you will get even a glimmer of the same "AHA" moments I have in my classroom when I teach grammar. Let me have a go at it here...

I've been teaching the 8 parts of speech to my 7th graders. I tell them at the beginning that NO ONE will ever get a better job, a promotion, or out of a speeding ticket for being able to list the 8 parts of speech! Being an expert in the structure of language is not about anything immediately practical! Rather, it is about the invisible layer of life. Abstract realities that are absolutely necessary. I get absolutely PUMPED UP when I talk about/think about/explain how the structure of language gives us a window into how we experience the world around us.

Are you still with me????

Here's what I hope will be my condensed version of a 9 week grammar unit:

Look at the world around you...we experience it all and desperately need a way to express our experiences. If you sit still and look around at the immediate world around you you will notice that everything of the world is either a thing or energy.

Those things in our world are nouns/pronouns. So I sit here in my classroom and I can name things. Naming things is an important part of our need to experience the world around us. I see a computer screen, chairs, carpet, dirt, etc.

Once you notice these things around you and name them, you notice that they are either moving or are simply being. We need some category to express the movement of things, action verbs. And we need a way to express that some things are not moving, but simply exist--state of being verbs/linking verbs.

Now let's admit that we really do prefer a world with color rather than a "forever Ansel Adams experience" of black and white existence. We have words that are responsible for the dimension of "color" in our language--the adjective and adverb.

And what about those pesky prepositional phrases??? They help us express the presence of space/three dimensions in our world. The squirrel doesn't just run now, it runs up a tree. Now we have our desperate need to understand direction taken care of!!! I mean we all like to know where we are going, right?

So now we have a world that has things, movement, color, and space/direction. There are still a couple of things missing. Fortunately, we are no longer cavemen & cavewomen dragging our clubs behind us, struggling to stand up straight just to say, "Me hungry!" Nawww....we have become much more sophisticated! In fact, we like the idea of multi-tasking. I can walk, talk, and chew gum. I'm rather evolved! Because we are able to consider and do more than one thing at a time, we need a type of word that is like glue. What is word glue? The conjunction. We love and hate the complexity of life. I mean how many people really love to become conjunction experts---dying to communicate about a series of things so that you are forced to figure out where the commas go and where the semicolons go?!

Finally, we have everything we need to express an understanding of the world around us. What's missing now? Ahhh...our favorite! The simplest part of speech to understand because it originates in our heart. We need something to help us express our inner world of emotion. Hip-hip horray for the interjection! No crazy rules, just raw emotion. You can insert an interjection anywhere, and it kind of stands alone, even in the context of a sentence. Hmmm.

Whew! If you are reading this line, I think you now understand how quirky I am! Grammar, language, words, structure...I LOVE it!

PS--I also think it is beyond cool that today is May 5, 2005 (05/05/05).