I don't know how this happened. It definitely was not intentional. It was a by-product but a very interesting and lovely by-product. My daughter will be excited to learn that today (March 4, 2009) is National Grammar Day. She loves language and revels in it when it is done well. She cringes and huffs when it is not. She dislikes text-speak: lol, omg, bff, etc. When we text each other on our phones all the words are spelled out and there is punctuation. She loves to write stories. She has a knack for it. When I ask her to write an essay I know that not only will she go deep with her thoughts but will say it intelligently. She wrote an essay for a friend who has been guiding her in the study of WWII. This wonderful woman responded to the essay by saying she thought it was so good that if she taught her in school she would want to be her best friend and go to coffee shops together and discuss great literature.
Where did this start? I tried to remember what we did together. I should say that I love language,too, but I don't take a particularly strident view of how its used. I didn't sit down with her and do a detailed study of grammar. When she was younger we would fill empty time in the car or doing dishes discussing the way words were interesting and worked together. I think I recall sharing examples of regular verbs vs irregular verbs. How verbs are sometimes transformed into nouns and what that looked like in a sentence. Or a similar transformation that can occur with adjectives. It wasn't intended to be "school" it was just conversation that was interesting to both of us.
Then last year she asked to study Latin. I looked into it and found that a homeschooling mom I know had the same request from her son and before they jumped into Latin they studied grammar to prepare for it. It is easier to study another language if you can easily identify parts of speech. She pointed to a sentence diagramming book that wasn't in print any more. I searched for it and found it anyway. We sat down together and worked through the exercises. It was amazingly fun. This was what I got out of my linguistics classes in college, the ones I loved so much. We were uncovering the structure of our language, we were mapping the consistent form we use as English speakers. It was great.
Still, the simple knack for "getting it" seems to me to be a product of observation and internalization of the written word. Before my daughter would read to herself I was reading plenty to her. I reveled in the well-written books and scoffed at the poor ones. I grabbed old texts from the 19th and 20th centuries and read them to her. I read current works but bristled at the too simple sentences and the artless prose. The last two books of the Harry Potter series were sour-tasting indeed. They felt hacked out to finish the series with none of the finesse of the first few books. Enough reviewing. See, it doesn't take much.
Nonetheless, all this seeped into her without my even being aware of it. And yet I knew it had because it was revealed one fun evening with a group of people who were playing a game. The game involved guessing how a family member would answer a question. A question was asked and I knew exactly how my daughter would answer it, but it would be an odd answer.
The question was, "What is your biggest pet peeve?" I knew immediately: bad grammar! However we got here, it's nice to know that we have.
Beautiful update. I was glowing as I read it.
love
Posted by: Mike | March 06, 2009 at 11:56 AM