My two daughters and I had an interesting conversation this afternoon about reasons why we should study the grammar of the English language.
We'd been through a review of the verbs of being, helping verbs, verb phrases, and the whole complete subject/complete predicate gig.
At that point, my 8-year-old said to me, "Mama, why DO we study this stuff? I know we're supposed to study it, but WHY?"
Good question.
I thought for a minute and then remembered a little booklet I picked up at the San Antonio homeschool convention this past weekend. Published by the Texas-based Wallbuilders, it contains the entire text of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and George Washington's Farewell Address.
Why Washington's Farewell Address, you might ask?
If you've never read it, I strongly encourage you to look it up online. Read it carefully, savor every word, every thought, and then let the light dawn on you the way it did on me after I read it for the first time late last year. Washington was a prophet and this speech foretells with alarming accuracy the difficulties our country is now experiencing. I'd always know Washington was a great general, but I never knew he possessed a working crystal ball.
Anyway, I opened the booklet to Washington's speech and said to my girls, "When you take time to study English grammar and to understand the different parts of speech and how they work, you begin to collect a set of tools that help you to dig out the truths and great ideas hidden in very complicated language."
They looked at me quizzically as I continued. "Here's a speech by our first president, George Washington. It's important enough that I think all Americans ought to read it, study it, pick it apart, and see how it still applies to our lives today. But it's written in language that most of us cannot easily understand because most of us did not get an education that gave us the tools to understand it."
And then I picked a sentence at random and read it out loud.
"Huh?" one of my daughters said. "What does THAT mean?"
I read the sentence again and explained it in layman's terms. I understood the sentence well enough to do this. (Despite my own pathetic public school experience beginning in about 6th grade, I did manage to read enough to pick up a fairly strong vocabulary. Oh, and I also used the dictionary a lot when I was in college.)
Then I explained that the only reason I was able to understand what I'd read and then explain it in language the girls could understand was because I'd studied lots and lots of English grammar. Knowing the roles of the various words helped me to figure out how I should regard them.
"This speech is a lot like any other important document," I said. "It's like the Declaration of Independence or the Bible or a great play by William Shakespeare. It's got big words, long sentences, and lots of truth that is hard to see unless you read into it deeply, and you can't read or dig in deeply if you don't have a good handle on grammar and the meanings of words."
My older daughter spoke up. "It's like a treasure map that takes you to the gold and jewels so you read the map to find the treasure!"
They get it, don't they? On some level don't they get that grammar and vocabulary and reading and spelling and mathematics are all the means to an end, the very tools required to decipher and profit from the great truths of the human experience?
If they do, then a big part of my job as their teacher is already done. If they don't, then I know I've got a whole lot more work to do.
And by the way, I never read or was exposed to George Washington's farewell speech during my entire TWELVE years of public school and FOUR AND A HALF years of state university.
Why?
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