Delpit, The Skin That We Speak (Intro-ch.1)
Burke, ch. 6 & 18
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God ch.1-3
Redd & Schuster, AAE: What a Writing Teacher Should Know (Intro-ch.2)

Ugh. Grammar. There's a scary thought: I gotta teach grammar. Over the past year, I've read article after article about how to make grammar relevant, meaningful, contextualized, and every other positively-spun adjective you can dream up. Yet I don’t feel prepared. I don't feel prepared because I remember learning grammar. I remember teachers trying to make it relevant, trying to make it fun, trying to make it this, that, the other thing… and I remember very distinctly that not once did I find it relevant, not once did I find it interesting, and not once did I make it through a grammar lesson without my head doing that devastatingly obvious jerk forward, telling the rest of the class that I was struggling to stay awake.

Not until college, when I took a descriptive grammar course, and read an article by McWhorter that changed my life. Ok, I lie -- it didn’t change my life. But it changed my viewpoints on grammar. My favorite quote about grammar went something like this:

"The preservation of whom is akin to a whale who insists upon spending an agonizing five minutes on land every day simply because his ancestors were terrestrial" (McWhorter).

Burke says that he’s heard people say "if only [he] could get 'those teachers' to teach kids how to use 'proper English,' [he] would be doing the country a great service" (124). My grandmother has said the same thing to me; "you better teach your students good grammar!" I always roll my eyes. I detest prescriptive grammar. I agree with Burke that using grammar in order to "understand how to read and write better" is a far more productive way of approaching grammar than forcing rules down students' throats that are both arbitrary and unrelated to their lives (132). It's incredibly important that students realize, when they claim not to know grammar or "have good grammar," that teachers make sure they realize that they DO know grammar… it’s built-in. Those of us who don’t know grammar just don’t know the terms that scholars have attached to our parts of speech and sentence structures. What always drove me nuts as a student learning grammar was that I knew I had decent grammar, because my writing was coherent -- but whenever we studied grammar in class I always left feeling stupid. The "Jabberwocky" poem Burke references (133) is an excellent way of letting students in on the secret of grammar – we're already experts, we just need to understand how to manipulate the rules we already unconsciously follow. Even for students who use different rules for things like verb conjugation -- say an African American student says "Mary be here soon" instead of "Mary will be here" -- that student is still following an unconsciously learned grammar rule, which the teacher should point out to students, helping them understand that the language they grew up with has grammar built in.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent
Burke, Ch 8-9 and 19-20

Chapter 9 – time to add to the toolbox. Most of what I drew from this chapter was ideas to use in my classroom, so I’m just going to list them, it’s easier:

• Debates (like what we did in class)
• Arguments: ask students to “reach unanimous consent” about an issue (knowing full well that if the issue is a controversial one, they probably won’t be able to)
• Puzzle game: have students arrange strips of names/themes/objects/places in a text in such a way that the relationships between the things are representative of how they relate to each other in the text.
• Unmagnetic Poetry: cut a text into just its words and have the students build poems from the words to help them understand how language works and what certain arrangements mean.

• Examine their own text: have students underline/highlight items they want to share in a group or discussion.
• Written conversation (like what we did in class)
• Small discussion groups

• GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS!
• Masks: have students make masks that illustrate themes, ideas, characters, and/or themselves and have them write an explanation.
• Clusters/brainstorms/idea mapping: let students do messing thinking or use it yourself on the board (remember Ms. Z)
• Life Graph: see book. Great way to do small, short writing; “take one of the moments from your life graph and write that story”
• Time Lines!: I like these. They help with confusing narratives/plots.
• Graphic novel: big fan.
• Vocab Pictures: have students draw pix of vocab words, because it will help them remember the word and its meaning.
• The Neighborhood: draw a map of their own neighborhood or the neighborhood of the story they are reading and use the map as a tool for describing and thinking about the different aspects that make up a neighborhood (or community).
• Visual Text: use artwork as a text, asking students to write a story from a picture or painting, or interpret paintings in conjunction with a text being read in class.

And YES! The Bible does have a place in the English classroom. So does the Koran, or any other religious text on which people base their lives, their morals, their ethics. In my AP English class, we were assigned the book of Genesis as part of our summer reading, which we then referenced for the remainder of the school year, and informed our analysis of everything from poetry to plays. And on the topic of AP, I liked Burke’s chapter about teaching AP and advanced classes; as I was reading, I tried to think of how I could apply some of the challenging principles of AP and advanced courses to other English courses -- i.e. regular and remedial classes. In our lengthy discussion about teaching last night, Mom and I touched on this topic as well (I need someone to replace our stimulating CI 403 discussions, so Mom's become my sounding board). We talked about how students need to be challenged, because they'll rise to the challenge if what is expected of them is increased. Here's what we came up with:

_______ -- if you raise your expectations to this level
_______ -- and they meet you here
_______ -- and you had them at this level to begin with (and they were meeting you here)

One trait of such a class and its teachers is that students are pushed harder to do better; a culture of challenge pervades the class. The challenge should be intellectual as opposed to quantitative. The standards in such a class – both performance and content standards – should be clearly articulated so as to inculcate in students the highest standards for writing, reading, and thinking. (400)