The Power of Grammar A Phenomenological Approach
Proceedings of a Colloquium of Waldorf Teachers by Anne Greer
Research Project #10
The Power of Grammar A Phenomenological Approach Proceedings of a Colloquium of Waldorf Teachers by Anne Greer
Colloquium sponsored by the
Waldorf High School Research Project of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education
Also Available from AWSNA Publications: Research Project #1: Survey Report (Portfolios, College Alternatives, Scholarship Websites, Social Emotional Skills) Research Project #2: Proceedings of the Chemistry Colloquium Research Project #3: Proceedings of the Mathematics Colloquium Research Project #4: Proceedings of the Colloquium on the Computer and Informational Technology Research Project #5: Proceedings of the Colloquium on Life Sciences and Environmental Studies Research Project #6: The Andover Proceedings: Tapping the Wellsprings of Health in Adolescence Research Project #7: Proceedings of the World History Colloquium Research Project #8: Proceedings of the Colloquium on United States History Research Project #9: Proceedings of the English Colloquium Research Project #10: Proceedings of the Grammar Colloquium
Printed through the support of the Waldorf Educational Foundation and the Waldorf Curriculum Fund
Title: The Power of Grammar: A Phenomenological Approach © AWSNA Publications and the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, 2008 Compiled by Anne Greer Copyeditor: Douglas Gerwin Editor and layout: David Mitchell Proofreader: Ann Erwin Photographs: Virginia Buhr Colloquium Participants: Wendy Bruneau (High Mowing School), Virginia Buhr (High Mowing School), Pam Colgate (Santa Fe Waldorf School), Meg Gorman (San Francisco Waldorf High School), Anne Greer (retired, Toronto Waldorf School), Jason Gross (Kimberton Waldorf School), Barbara Huckabay (Chicago Waldorf School), Cheryl Latuner (The Hartsbrook School), Christine Meyer (Highland Hall Waldorf School), Patrice Pinette (High Mowing School), David Sloan (Merriconeag Waldorf School), Mary Ann Wells (Waldorf High School of Massachusetts Bay), Jane Wulsin (Green Meadow Waldorf School), John Wulsin (Green Meadow Waldorf School)
Table of Contents Waldorf High School Research Project Description . ........................................... 7 WHSRP Mission Statement................................................................................. 8 Colloquium on Grammar Schedule .................................................................... 9 “Languages” by Carl Sandburg ............................................................................ 10 Overview . ........................................................................................................... 11 Part I: Background Research Introduction: A Practitioner Reflects ................................................................... 15 The Current Situation in North American Waldorf Schools . .............................. 18 The Current Situation in North American Public Schools
(and How It Got That Way) ......................................................................... 22
What Does Rudolf Steiner Say about Teaching Grammar? .................................. 27 What’s Wrong with What We’re Already Doing? ................................................. 34 The Linguistic Revolution and the Teaching of Grammar ................................... 38 Mythrules . .......................................................................................................... 43 “Correcting” Student Errors ................................................................................ 46 What’s Useful in the New Approach to Grammar? .............................................. 53 What Is Standard English? .................................................................................. 59 What Might Work in a Waldorf High School ..................................................... 63 Part II: Additional Contributions Meg Gorman: Bringing Traditional Grammar to Life . ........................................ 77 Wendy Bruneau: Using Image Grammar in the Classroom ................................. 79 Jason Gross: Seeing Grammar.............................................................................. 80
Serious Fun with Commas .............................................................. 82
Patrice Pinette: Grammar and Poetry .................................................................. 84 Jane Wulsin: Study of Man . ................................................................................ 92 Works Cited and of Interest ................................................................................ 93
Appendices I. Survey: Teaching of English Grammar in Waldorf High Schools . .................. 97 II. Some Questions and Answers about Grammar
NCTE’s Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar................................ 110
Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading . ............................................... 115
III. Response from the Assembly of Teachers of Grammar to the NCTE ............. 117
Position on Standard English ......................................................................... 119
IV. Rudolf Steiner on Grammar .......................................................................... 121
AWSNA Waldorf High School Research Project
Description of Project Since its inception in the summer of 1998, the Waldorf High School Research Project has focused on three areas of research related to Waldorf high schools and the teenagers of today. The Project is asking: What is different about today’s teenagers? What changes are needed in Waldorf high schools today? • First, the Project invited leading teachers and international experts in Waldorf education to take part in three-day colloquia around the country on the Waldorf high school curriculum, specifically on the teaching of chemistry, history, mathematics, and movement (eurythmy and spacial dynamics), environmental sciences, and computer science. Further colloquia are planned in literature and the arts. Proceedings from these colloquia are being published so as to benefit the broadest possible range of Waldorf high school teachers. • Some 30 veteran teachers from across North America have undertaken original research in topics related to Waldorf high school issues and the needs of teenagers today. • The Project sponsored a large-scale research conference in Andover Massachusetts, October 18–22, 2001, on the theme of adolescent development and the Waldorf high school program. • The Committee planned the North American Waldorf Teachers Conference in Kimberton, Pennsylvania, June 2002 on the theme “Ascending the Developmental Staircase,” covering kindergarten through high school. Over four hundred teachers attended. A publication of the lectures has been printed. • The WHSRP merged with the Research Institute for Waldorf Education in 2004.
AWSNA Waldorf High School Research Project
Mission Statement Formed in August 1998, the Waldorf High School Research Project is charged with strengthening the Waldorf high school movement by creating an updated picture of adolescents today and stimulating curriculum development within the Waldorf high schools. As a designated committee of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), the Planning Group of this project is specifically responsible for:
a) identifying and articulating changes in the needs of North American teenagers, b) formulating research questions concerning adolescence; commissioning qualified educators and other professionals to undertake research into these questions, c) sponsoring subject colloquia as well as conferences on adolescent development and needs for those working in Waldorf high schools, d) preparing North American conferences for those working in Waldorf high schools to share and deepen research; to stimulate dialogue; to activate meaningful change for youth in the 21st century, e) developing publications and other media resources to assist those working in Waldorf high schools, f ) stimulating Waldorf high school educators to examine and strengthen their programs, and g) seeking funds to support the commissioned research, colloquia, publications, conferences, and follow-up initiatives in the Waldorf high schools in coordination with AWSNA Development in line with the overall AWSNA priorities.
Colloquium on Grammar High Mowing School, Wilton, New Hampshire 14–16 March 2008 Schedule FRIDAY – March 14 6:00 p. m. Dinner 7:00–7:30 Drama (David Sloan) 7:30–9:00 Small Group Discussions/ Full Group Discussion What is grammar and how much are we now teaching? What methods do we use? What works particularly well? What does not? What questions do we carry?
SATURDAY – March 15 8:45 a. m Drama (David Sloan) 9:00–9:45 Grammar Research Report Introduction: What Did Rudolf Steiner Mean? (Anne Greer) 9:45–10:30 Sharing Lessons (Meg Gorman) 10:30–11:00 — Break — 11:00–11:30 Questions, Comments, Conversation 11:30–12:30 Using Harry Noden’s Image Grammar (Wendy Bruneau) 12:30–2:00 — Lunch and Break — 2:00–2:45 Research Report: What Is the “New Grammar”? (Anne Greer) 2:45–3:00 Sharing Lessons (Jason Gross, inspired by Jane Wulsin) 3:00–4:00 — Break — 4:00–4:30 Tag Questions: A Grammar Game (Anne Greer) 4:30–5:00 Research Report: What Is Standard English? (Anne Greer)
SUNDAY – March 16 8:45 a. m. Drama (David Sloan) 9:00–9:30 Research Report: “Correcting’student Language (Anne Greer) 9:30–10:30 Poetry and Grammar (Patrice Pinette) 10:30–11:00 — Break — 11:00–1:00 Closing Conversation: Whither from Here? 1:00 p. m. — Farewell Lunch —
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Languages
There are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language, Once in a thousand years Breaking a new course Changing its way to the ocean. It is mountain effluvia Moving to valleys And from nation to nation Crossing borders and mixing. Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped round your tongue today And broken to shape of thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now. Sing – and singing – remember Your song dies and changes And is not here tomorrow Any more than the wind Blowing ten thousand years ago. – Carl Sandburg Chicago Poems
Overview Our purpose is not to teach them grammar in a pedantic way but to raise something to consciousness that otherwise takes place unconsciously. – Rudolf Steiner Practical Advice to Teachers When the opportunity arose to engage in research through the Waldorf High School Research Project, the teaching of grammar was not my immediate choice. I had several other projects in mind. Douglas Gerwin adroitly eliminated all of these and gave me a gentle push toward a question that had been a back-of-the-mind torment for more than thirty-five years: How should we teach English grammar to native speakers? Semi-retirement has allowed me to spend time exploring language research and acquiring the dim beginnings of an understanding of the linguistic revolution that has been occurring and accelerating over the past century. Tentative answers to my central question are emerging, but, as with the best questions, these answers bring further questions. When I began this research, I wanted to find out: 1. What currently is happening in North American Waldorf high schools in the teaching or non-teaching of English grammar? 2. What currently is happening in North American public high schools in the teaching or non-teaching of English grammar? 3. What did Rudolf Steiner say about teaching the grammar of the native tongue? 4. Which pedagogical principles have emerged from the study of language acquisition and linguistics that could inform a new approach to grammar teaching? 5. Is there a way to teach grammar that is more in keeping with Steiner’s basic tenet that teaching should lead from phenomena to concept? I have come to the conclusion that teaching grammar is the least conscious subject in Waldorf pedagogy. My own teaching experience and observations based on visits to other Waldorf classrooms have convinced me that in teaching English grammar we generally resort to dead concepts and to unexplored, outmoded prescriptive “rules.” Much grammar teaching, particularly in our high schools, relies heavily on dusty sets of handbooks and workbooks.
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12 We should know better. After all, Waldorf high school teachers share a deeply held belief that our task is to awaken students to life-long questions: How do I know what I know? How can I be a conscious participant in my own experience? We ask such questions and together with our students struggle toward answers through language. How then do we come to understand language and its role in what we know and how we know what we know? What is the metalanguage with which we can talk about language? Language is living phenomena. Waldorf methodology is premised on the understanding that students and teachers are engaged in a process of genuine discovery. The teacher should present phenomena, ask students to observe carefully, and, increasingly during high school years, to observe, as well, themselves as observers. Together, teachers and students work toward becoming increasingly articulate about their observations. This rarely happens in a grammar lesson. Simply put, the metalanguage used to describe English between the 17th and mid-20th centuries was based on Latin, a language long dead. The resulting concepts, now hardened, if not atrophied, have limited ability to capture living, evolving English syntax. During the 20th century, the study of linguistics was revolutionized. By the 1960s, exciting advances were being made in teaching approaches that incorporated linguistic discoveries; such approaches began to be offered in many schools. Perhaps the resulting complexity was one of the reasons for the end of English grammar teaching in public education in North America, Great Britain, and Australia. Because end it did, although not in Waldorf schools, where teaching grammar has never stopped. Unfortunately, those of us who have been taught grammar generally teach it as we were taught. And those who have never been taught grammar muddle through with a mix of bewilderment and apprehension about not speaking and writing “proper English.” Living language is best served by a descriptive openness. Rudolf Steiner had a keen interest in language. He found it most alive in speech, particularly in dialect. He admired the transformative properties of living language including the genius of inventing words, of changing nouns into verbs, and of embracing words from other languages. He deplored “abstract instruction,” asserting that there is “no better method of pushing children into materialism.” (The Genius of Language 94) When he spoke about grammar teaching, he was frequently negative: … You may be sinning against the healthy condition of the child if you occupy him for an hour with what is usually called grammar. If the children have to occupy themselves distinguishing between what one calls subject, object, attribute, indicative, subjunctive, etc.—all things in which they have only a half-hearted interest—then they are put into a state where their breakfasts are boiling in their organisms quite uninfluenced by their soul lives…. Enteric illnesses are often caused by grammar lessons…. If I may
13 speak plainly, the grammar lessons are just horrible. All the stuff that you find printed in books ought to be burnt. Something living must enter.… (Stockmeyer 21) Steiner recognized, as has modern linguistics, “that all grammar already exists in the human organism.” Our task as teachers is to raise grammar to consciousness “in a living way” and, by so doing, to “work on an I-consciousness in the child.” (The Renewal of Education 111–112) What is this “living way”? This publication includes background material shared with 13 colleagues at High Mowing School in March 2008 as well as brief descriptions of the contributions of others at that colloquium. Meg Gorman (San Francisco) delighted us all with a lesson on verbals liberally illustrated with stick figure personalities, bringing traditional terminology to life. Jason Gross (Kimberton) introduced transformational grammar in an exercise that necessitated key questions: Should we invite students to find their own descriptions of language? If we label something, are we teaching only concept? Wendy Bruneau (High Mowing) invited us to take part in a writing exercise from Image Grammar by Harry Noden, an approach she uses with her classes. Patrice Pinette (High Mowing) shared examples of how language awareness enhances her creative writing classes, particularly in poetry. Descriptions of these contributions, included in this publication, are based on transcription notes taken on her laptop by Christine Meyers, who has my heartfelt thanks for her generous work. David Sloan (Merriconeag) brought us warm-up exercises and movement explorations which he aptly named “Drammar.” Jane Wulsin was our lower school touchstone; she brought a clear picture of willing, feeling, and thinking as it works in body and soul during the three phases of child development. We recognized this as an invitation to the next stage of our work: to develop an understanding of how to awaken consciousness in appropriate ways at appropriate times, phenomenologically. Thanks, once again, to High Mowing School for its welcome, especially for Virginia Buhr’s warm care and the seemingly endless sustenance from the best of all kitchens. We were delighted to be invited to the opening concert in the beautifully renovated High Mowing “Big Room.” Henry Lewers’ senior project of show tunes presented by Henry and other High Mowing students under his direction enthralled us all. Thank you, always, to Douglas Gerwin who not only challenges and cajoles, prods and pushes, and generally inspires so many of us, but who also brings idea into reality in the most practical of ways. We were happy that he was able to be appropriately present for the final session of our time together. He was able to have a small experience of what he described as the “palpable excitement” that our time
14 together generated. The work of Douglas with David Mitchell on the Waldorf High School Research project strengthens our high schools on a daily basis. Without their dedication, this colloquium, and others like it, would not be possible. And, finally, to those colleagues who willingly gave up a precious weekend to come together to “turn hearts and minds to the spirit and soul of the Word,” my deepest gratitude. – Anne Greer October 2008
Fig. 1 – Left to right, around Anne Greer: Pam Colgate, Patrice Pinette, John Wulsin, and Jane Wulsin
PART I: BACKGROUND RESEARCH
Introduction: A Practitioner Reflects Thirty-five years ago, attending my first Open House as a parent new to Waldorf education, I was amused, and a little distressed, to discover a display of student work showing how English grammar was being taught through the lower school grades. Although my child was in kindergarten at the time, I had been an English teacher in public secondary schools for seven years––long enough to have incorporated the message that traditional grammar was by then passé. The children’s work was impressive: brightly colored and delightfully illustrated. It was clear that they had enjoyed their lessons. Yet I wondered how their otherwise impressive teachers could be so misdirected. I had enjoyed learning grammar during my own high school years, taking special delight in diagramming sentences. But I have a vivid memory of the day that my beloved English teacher attempted to teach me the distinction between “will” and “shall.” I didn’t get it. My sense of logic was offended and my sense of self even more so. Most of the people I knew, including my family, did not make this “will/shall” distinction. My teacher kept insisting, “This is the rule.” I was a “pleaser” by nature and desperately wanted to understand and use this “rule,” but it simply did not make sense. Clearly, I did not have an enquiring mind; it never occurred to me to ask where the rule had come from. Much as I had loved learning grammar, as a new public school teacher I was not comfortable teaching it. I had certainly never been taught how to teach it. As many teachers do, I fell back on the textbook and the methods through which I had been taught. Common in Canada at that time was Mastering Effective English. This book was a heavy tome covering seemingly everything: a history of the language, advertising propaganda devices, public speaking and debate, logical argument, creative writing of all types, and expository writing for a variety of purposes. It included a handbook of spelling, grammar, and poetic forms. It seemed impossible to teach all that the book indicated should be taught in only two or three short periods a week. Like most teachers, I tended to rely heavily on the creative writing sections, paying lip service to grammar now and then. Many of us teaching in the sixties and early seventies were somewhat relieved by the news from the linguistic front that traditional grammar was an invention that served no useful purpose. Like others, I accepted the research secondhand without really understanding much about it. Nevertheless, I continued to spout the handy rhetoric: teaching grammar has no positive influence on student writing and may, in fact, have a negative effect. Like most of my colleagues, I stopped trying to teach grammar.
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16 I don’t know exactly when or how my return to the grammar fold occurred. Perhaps it was watching my own children taking delight in learning grammar in grades 3, 4, and 5. Perhaps it was joining the high school faculty of a Waldorf school where I was granted the freedom to create my own curriculum. Perhaps it was remembrance of my early joy in learning about language. Above all, it was a feeling of nostalgia, or even rebellion, as the teaching of English grammar continued to disappear and was then disallowed in public schools throughout North America. Whatever the combination of reasons, for most of my eighteen years as English teacher at the Toronto Waldorf School I regularly taught grammar, albeit with varying periods of success. Increasingly, indeed, I loved teaching grammar; some students loved learning it, although others resisted mightily. In spite of my best efforts, it was clear that most of those who loved grammar were the students who already were the best writers and readers. As for the others, there were moments when their responses caused the chasm of despair to gape. During a creative writing exercise one day, I asked a Grade 12 class to begin by writing down two words, one a noun and one an adjective. Several students looked puzzled, and finally one boy said, “What’s a noun?” Another added, “Yeah, and what’s an adjective?” These boys and several puzzled others had been in the Toronto Waldorf School since Grade 1, and they had been my students since Grade 9. At times like those, I was sharply reminded that whatever I thought I was doing wasn’t working. I believe that there is value in teaching English grammar. Waldorf schools in North America are in a unique position to develop a way of teaching grammar from Kindergarten through Grade 12 based on the pedagogical insights of Rudolf Steiner. We remain free of state interference in what we teach and how we teach it. We have reflective practitioners in our schools willing to engage honestly in the art of teaching and to share experiences of what works and what doesn’t. We have the template of a method to approach any exploration. A few excellent published descriptions of what to teach and how to engage students in our lower schools help us introduce the concepts we want to build upon in our high schools. But we have a generation or more of younger teachers who, frankly, are bewildered by English grammar and very nervous about not getting things right. And, if my experience and my observations based on visits to a few schools can be extended to general practice, from about Grade 5 upwards, we are not clear about what we are doing and generally resort to dead concepts and to unexplored, outmoded “rules.” I have come to consider that the teaching of grammar is essential, and I am thankful that it has never lost its place in Waldorf schools, but I am also convinced that beyond Grade 5 or 6, in many Waldorf schools, the teaching of grammar tends toward drudgework and does more harm than good.
17 Much English grammar teaching in Waldorf high schools continues to be based on a premise that there is a “correct,” “right,” or “proper’standard that requires instruction. Linguistic studies over the past half-century have eroded this understanding. Much of our teaching relies heavily on outmoded handbooks and workbooks. Grammar is the subject to which the least consciousness has been brought. Prescriptive language teaching must give way to descriptive language teaching. This is particularly important in Waldorf pedagogy with its emphasis on accurate observation of phenomena and aliveness in all learning. Waldorf education invites a deepening of the question: How do I know what I know? Waldorf methodology insists that students and teachers are involved in a process of genuine discovery. This consists of presenting phenomena and asking students to experience, to observe carefully, and to be increasingly articulate in describing these observations. The essential task in high school is to help students learn to base their judgments on interactions with the world and not just on their own [or our] predilections. The flexibility of thought we exercise in complex thinking is a prerequisite to understand living phenomena. – Craig Holdredge The English language is living phenomena. Let us liberate our teaching so that we can accurately describe and delight in the fullness and complexity of this constantly changing and evolving miracle.
Grammar is the subject to which the least consciousness has been brought. Prescriptive language teaching must give way to descriptive language teaching This is particularly important in Waldorf pedagogy with its emphasis on accurate observation of phenomena and aliveness in all learning.
The Current Situation in North American Waldorf Schools At the beginning of my research, I sent a series of questions to English teachers in twenty-four Waldorf high schools. Sixteen teachers responded, enough to give me what I consider to be a general picture of what is being done and which questions are being held. I also visited English classes in several high schools. I am confident that the responses I received and the lessons I observed are generally indicative of current approaches to the teaching of grammar in North American Waldorf high schools [see Appendix I for full responses]. Throughout, there was a strong commitment to teaching grammar. All respondents considered it important, and many were aware that Steiner saw the teaching of grammar as necessary for the development of the Ego. All felt that knowledge of grammar aided in clarity of writing, and several made a connection between understanding grammar and achieving clarity in speech and thinking. There is little evidence of any communication between high school teachers and lower school teachers on the subject of grammar, neither concerning what is taught nor how it is taught, with some notable exceptions. Like most educators, the respondents to my survey tend to blame lack of knowledge on teachers below them in the system. Most felt that students coming from Waldorf lower schools had an inadequate understanding of grammar, although perceived mastery varied from class teacher to class teacher. A few schools either had initiated discussions with upper elementary school colleagues or were considering this. Similarly, there was little connection with teachers of other languages in the development of common terminology for grammatical constructions. Several high schools include grammar lessons as a regular part of track classes, particularly in Grades 9 and 10. Most teachers use “the mini-lesson as needed” approach within composition classes, commonly referred to as “teaching grammar in context.” Few schools have a common policy with regard to standards of writing and editing, even within English departments of more than one teacher. Although most respondents felt supported by colleagues in other subjects, clarity in writing was clearly seen as the responsibility of the English teacher(s). Respondents reported using a variety of techniques in the teaching of grammar, usually relating rules to context. This was done generally through using student writing as examples or modeling from good literature. Several teachers reported successful techniques that they are willing to share. Teaching with humor is considered a critical
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19 component. Generally, error detection and correction in written work is the focus. The chief impediment to teaching grammar was perceived to be lack of time, with lack of knowledge closely following. There was a widespread desire for a systematic curriculum, a listing of what is considered appropriate standards of knowledge for each grade, e.g., by the end of 9th grade, what should the students know, by the end of 10th, what should they know, etc. Several teachers longed for what one described as a “clear, nicely laid-out book with a number of practice exercises offering a cumulative or developmental approach to essential grammar.” Another said, “If someone laid out a year-by-year curriculum for grammar with both general objectives and specific examples of exercises, this would be manna.” Almost none of the teachers who responded knew Dorothy Harrar’s An English Manual. A few were aware of Rudolf Schmid’s An English Grammar: The Language before Babel and used it as a resource, rather than in any systematic way. The texts most often mentioned were Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and Diane Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference. Most teachers reported creating their own exercises, although in my visits to classrooms I observed only photocopied exercises or reliance on a class set of Warriner’s, invariably met by student boredom. A few teachers, either in the survey or in private conversation, reported some exciting grammar lessons or approaches. Meg Gorman, for example, has a host of stick figure characters that she draws on the board to help students understand sentence construction. Jason Gross has held open-question sessions on the definition of a sentence. A teacher who has the advantage of a degree in linguistics has had increasing success tying grammar more and more closely to writing, using particular constructions for students to model. I agree with Steiner that grammar lessons could be exciting, and I have taught a few lessons in which this was the case. Unfortunately, most of the lessons I have taught and all that I have observed have been dull and probably useless for most students. One such lesson for which I was an invited observer may serve perhaps as an example. It is particular, but the approach is all too frequent. About ten minutes before the end of a Grade 10 track class during which the principal topic was an upcoming research paper, students were given two photocopied pages titled “Level Three: Phrases.” Although these were obviously from a textbook, there was no indication of the title of the book and no explanation to the class to give any sort of context. The terse text defined four types of phrases, including “verbal phrases” and the difference between phrases and clauses. The teacher instructed the students to begin reading these pages and continue until the lesson ended, to finish reading at home, and to be prepared to work with the concepts the next day. Those students who hadn’t quickly
20 fallen into a stupor or found clever ways to avoid an obviously pointless task may have met this arcane explanation on the second page: A verbal is no longer a verb; it is a verb now used as something else…. Verbals are nouns, adjectives and adverbs made out of verbs. Gerunds, participles, and infinitives are three kinds of verbals. And so on. Then, unintentionally ironic, came a section called “Why verbals are fun.” Verbals are fun because they are so creative and energetic. We begin with verbs, and then we make nouns out of them, we make adjectives out of them, we make adverbs out of them, we saw off their helping verbs, and we ingeniously figure out ways to quickly and powerfully express things that would otherwise take lengthy paragraphs. Verbals are not verbs in sentences, they are ex-verbs. What critical adolescent could take any of this seriously? I sympathize with the beleaguered teacher. Somewhere, he felt he was expected to teach phrases and clauses including verbals. He knew, possibly, that there were several types of verbals but since he had never really understood the concept himself, he decided to rely on a textbook, hoping that students wouldn’t ask any questions. He was safe in that assumption. Students rarely ask questions when teachers present grammar lessons. Why bother? Either the explanation is even more confusing or, worse, the teacher’s insecurity results in frustration for everyone. Even the language used by many Waldorf high school teachers to describe the teaching of grammar is at odds with the usual Waldorf approach. “Students need to be drilled in grammar. We have to get it in there somehow. They need to learn this now so that they will be successful later.” [italics mine] This attitude seems to be the opposite of “education from the inside out” or allowing students to have an “Aha!” moment. On the survey, several teachers added additional comments about the teaching of grammar. Many of these comments had a quality of wistful confusion, perhaps best summarized as “I always loved grammar but students seem to hate it. Is there a way to do this better?” One respondent put it this way: I once thought learning about grammar would help students with their writing. Over the years, I have decided there is very little transfer: students who already write well can understand and appreciate grammar. Those who are poor writers, who make grammatical mistakes, tend to have the most difficulty understanding it and applying it to their writing. I am willing to consider this is my fault and would be open to learning to teach it in a way that would be helpful to struggling students if someone has figured out how to do it.
21 A few schools have attempted or are in the process of attempting to describe a full school first language curriculum, but this almost always tends toward the traditionally prescriptive position by referring to “proper grammar” and “grammatical errors” even in spoken interchanges. This prescriptive, error-based stance is generally the norm in Waldorf schools. A well-experienced lower school teacher articulated it this way in a grammar workshop at an AWSNA conference: Verbal or written grammar is a form of expression that all of us use. It has a lot to do with how one is received in the world. We are often judged by others because of the way we speak. If we have an eloquent way of saying something, people listen. If we stumble over our words or don’t articulate them well, we are often looked upon as being less intelligent. Each one of us, as educators, has our own method of teaching grammar. What we are doing is unlocking the voice as a form of expression. The child’s written and verbal language needs to be clothed in such a way that it is received by society. Once the children have the “proper attire,” they are free to voice themselves. Once they know how to write or speak with good grammar, they are free to break all the rules. Do we honor children’s self-expression by suggesting that it must be “properly attired” before “they are free to voice themselves?” Are we truly conscious of what we are doing?
Fig. 2 – Left to right: Barbara Huckabay, Jason Gross, Cheryl Latuner, Wendy Bruneau, Pam Colgate, Patrice Pinette, John Wulsin, Jane Wulsin, Meg Gorman, Christine Meyer, plus Anne Greer
The Current Situation in North American Public Schools (and How It Got That Way) To find out about the teaching of grammar in public schools, I went to the website of the National Council of Teachers of English, the North American 60,000-member professional body for English teachers from preschool through university. On the site is the NCTE Guideline paper: “Some Questions and Answers about Grammar” [see Appendix II]. The paper was prepared by an offshoot organization of NCTE, the Assembly of Teachers of English Grammar (ATEG). I signed on to this organization’s listserv and was soon flooded with messages, often as many as twenty a day, from teachers of kindergarten through university level. The most consistent and loquacious participants were professors at teachers’ colleges. A further offshoot of the ATEG, New Public Grammar (NPG), was a listserv formed in 2006 “to promote and develop a new public grammar through the cooperative effort of linguists and English teachers.” I joined this, too. My in-box was flooded daily with fascinating exchanges and passionate outcries. Almost immediately apparent was the tension that exists between the NCTE and the ATEG about the teaching of grammar. From as far back as 1935, attempts had been made within NCTE to teach grammar in the context of writing rather than as “an isolated unit of study.” (Kolln & Hancock 14). However, it was not until 1963 that the NCTE published an “anti-grammar statement” that “continues to inform the profession’s negative grammar philosophy.” (15) In 1985, a resolution was passed at the annual convention of the NCTE: Background: This resolution was prompted by the continuing use of repetitive grammar drills and exercises in the teaching of English in many schools. Proposers pointed out that the ample evidence from fifty years of research has shown the teaching of grammar in isolation does not lead to improvement in students’ speaking and writing, and that, in fact, it hinders development of students’ oral and written language. Resolved, that the NCTE affirm the position that the use of isolated grammar and usage exercises not supported by theory and research is a deterrent to the improvement of students’ speaking and writing and that, in order to improve both of these, class time at all levels must be devoted to opportunities for meaningful listening, speaking, reading, and writing; and that NCTE urge the discontinuance of testing practices that encourage the teaching of grammar rather than English language arts instruction. (qtd. 18)
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23 Martha Kolln (Penn State University) details three contributing factors to the antigrammar position still held by the NCTE: 1. The publication of Research in Written Composition by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Shoer in 1963 based in part on the grammar study by Roland Harris carried out in London over a two-year period. It concluded that grammar teaching had a “harmful effect on the correctness of children’s writing.” (qtd. 18) This led to this conclusion in Braddock, et al.
In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: The teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing. (qtd. 18)
Kolln contends that the Harris report through Braddock, et al., was “by far the strongest influence” on the shelving of grammar instruction: “Two words in fact [harmful effect] set in motion the anti-grammar policy that has dominated American English curriculum for forty years.” (16) 2. The publication of Growth through English by John D. Dixon in 1967. This was a report that came out of a month-long British-American seminar on the teaching of English at Dartmouth College. Its conclusions focused on “learner-centered” education carried forward by educators such as Peter Elbow. “It introduced such concepts as free writing, journal writing and peer review, all of which became part of the writing process.” (16) Kolln quotes Peter Elbow in Writing with Power: Learning grammar is a formidable task that takes crucial energy away from working on your writing, and, worse yet, the process of learning grammar interferes with writing: it heightens your preoccupation with mistakes as you write out each word and phrase, and makes it almost impossible to achieve that undistracted attention to your thoughts and experiences as you write that is so crucial for strong writing (and sanity). For most people, nothing helps their writing so much as learning to ignore grammar. (16) 3. A growing “anti-elitist philosophy”: this coalesced into a resolution by the NCTE in 1968 voicing concerns about the neglect of the language needs of non-standard dialect speakers … [and] the preparation of teachers … to recognize the legitimacy of the home-based dialects in their classrooms. Because traditional school grammar had historically been based on normative rules and the standards of edited English, these traditions, which appeared to promote one “correct” way for every rule and pronunciation, could easily be seen as elitist…. The lingering concept of “linguistic imperialism” remains an impediment in reestablishing grammar in the curriculum. (17)
24 I would add a fourth. The revolution in applied linguistics that became part of the educational scene in the 1950s and 1960s presented to teachers an entirely new, bewildering, and overwhelming description of the structure of English. In fact, there were many educators deeply engaged in finding new approaches to teaching grammar based on structural linguistics. I treasure my copy of Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching published by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in 1966 as an example. But few educators had the time or the resources to be educated or, harder still, re-educated, to integrate the new understanding and use it in the classroom. It was far easier to pay lip service to grammar by dusting off the old texts or allowing oneself to be carried away by the prevailing winds coming from the “anti-grammar” quarter. For most English teachers, focusing on reading and writing was more fulfilling. Whatever the reasons, the elimination of grammar from public education was swift and steady. According to Kolln, at the annual NCTE convention in 1963, there were fifty separate presentations on grammar and, by contrast, in 1993 only one, and that one was titled “Getting beyond Grammar.” (19) In the 1980s and ’90s many school districts removed grammar from the curriculum, leaving several generations of students with no understanding whatsoever of the structure of the language. It is worth quoting in full Kolln’s lament on what occurred: The cost to English education of the NCTE anti-grammar policy is impossible to calculate. The policy has affected more than the K–12 curriculum itself; equally important has been the negative effect on teacher education. The strides that linguistics has made during the past several decades have almost completely eluded the prospective English teacher. Rarely does an English or education major’s program call for more than one or two courses having to do with language—possibly a class that includes the history of English and/or an introduction to linguistics. But many teacher-training programs certify secondary school teachers without the students’ having had a single course in modern grammar. And it’s certainly possible that these teachers had little or no grammar instruction in their own middle-school or high-school experiences…. How [can] teachers with little if any grammar education … be expected to teach reading and writing, let alone discuss the social implications of language in our lives[?] (19) The position on grammar remained unchanged at the national NCTE conference in 2006 in spite of much work done by the ATEG to present proposals for teaching grammar. (A detailed response from ATEG to the NCTE position can be found in Appendix III.) The debate over the teaching of grammar has been intensified by the reliance on high-stakes testing in the public schools including the new SAT writing sample component. Interest in grammar is growing, but the hope that it will have a rebirth in a new form is a voice crying in the wilderness. Attempts are being made within ATEG
25 to bring together a proposed K–12 scope and sequence for teaching a systematic metalanguage, but this project is still in its infancy. Despite what has been learned about language over the last 150 years, not much has changed in the teaching of grammar during the 20th century other than the shift from respect for “grammar as a mental discipline … toward even greater emphasis on grammar as a means of improving writing.” (Weaver 6) In that context, what passes for grammar too commonly focuses on the detection and correction of student errors. John Simon in Paradigms Lost is among the eloquent defenders of the language as it once was. He begins with the premise that language was better before 1965, and he offers clear explanations for what has eroded it. First, the student rebellion of 1968, which, “in essence, meant that students themselves became the arbiters of what subjects they were taught, and grammar … was not one of them.” Second, “the notion that in a democratic society language must accommodate itself to the whims, idiosyncrasies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of underprivileged minorities.” Third, “the introduction by more and more incompetent English teachers, products of the new system … of ever fancier techniques of not teaching English.” Fourth, “television [with its] nonlanguage … of commercials, commentators, sports announcers, athletes, assorted celebrities, and just about everyone on that word-mongering and word-mangling medium that sucks in victims far more perniciously than radio ever did.” (xiv) The demise of prescriptive dictionaries dealt the deathblow, according to Simon, with the publication of “ones that distinguished between the incorrect and correct use of words based on established practice, cultural tradition, the way of good writers; between preferred and suspect, or even unacceptable, pronunciations.” Instead, dictionaries became the tool of descriptive linguistics or structural linguistics, “that statistical, populist, sociological approach, whose adherents claimed to be merely recording and describing the language as it was used by anyone and everyone, without imposing elitist judgments on it.” (xiv) In 1961, with the publication of Webster’s 3rd Edition, “descriptive linguistics had its resounding victory” (xv) and the “equally descriptive” Random House soon followed. Simon quotes a critique by Dwight Macdonald in “The String Untuned” (Against the Grain, New York: Random House, 1962): Scientific revolution has meshed gears with a trend toward permissiveness, in the name of democracy, that is debasing our language by rendering it less precise and thus less effective as literature and less efficient as communication. It is felt that it is snobbish to insist on making discriminations … about usage. And it is assumed that the majority is right. This feeling seems to me sentimental and this assumption unfounded…. The objection is not to recording the facts of actual usage. It is failing to give the information that would enable the reader to decide which usage he wants to adopt. (xv)
26 It seems apparent that most teachers who continued to teach grammar throughout the last three decades of the 20th century did so with the hope of maintaining what they considered to be eroding standards. Few were promoting an open dialogue investigating the changes that continued to occur, as they always had, and what these changes might symptomatically reveal.
Fig. 3: Colloquium participants engaging in dramatic exercises based on grammar
What Does Rudolf Steiner Say about Teaching Grammar? Steiner was after something quite different. He sought the spiritual capacities of human beings to use their thinking, feeling, and willing through their voices to transmit content of consciousness and to use their words as live entities that can eventually elevate us to the status of being co-creators with the spiritual world. – Adam Makkai “Afterword” The Genius of Language (102) Almost everyone who responded to the questions sent to Waldorf high school English teachers knew that Rudolf Steiner saw the teaching of grammar as necessary for the development of the Ego. What do we do when we raise unconscious speech to the grammatical realm, to the knowledge of grammar? Our purpose is not to teach them grammar in a pedantic way but to raise something to consciousness that otherwise takes place unconsciously. Unconsciously or semiconsciously, human beings do indeed use the word as a ladder up which to climb in a manner that corresponds to what we learn in grammar. (Practical Advice to Teachers 55–61) We can certainly assume that all grammar already exists in the human organism. If you take that assumption seriously, you will realize that by making grammar conscious in a living way, you work on an I-consciousness in the child. (The Renewal of Education 111–112) It is clear that Waldorf teachers are to teach grammar, but Steiner’s suggestions as to how we are to teach it are often descriptions of what not to do, as when he reportedly said: Sometimes I simply cannot understand how one can keep the children quiet if one talks to them about adverbs and subjunctives, for really this is something that cannot be of any interest to a normal child. At best it can happen that the children behave themselves out of love for the teacher…. Above all I find that the main trouble is that teachers do not know their own grammar…. The way in which grammatical terms are used is quite abominable. [Were I] a pupil I would raise a riot if I did not know why such things were being thrown at my head. The point is that not enough time is being taken by the teachers to acquire a reasonable amount of grammatical knowledge. Only then will it stimulate the pupils. The grammar lessons are horrible, if I may speak plainly. All the stuff which you find printed in books ought to be burnt. Something living must enter. (Discussions with Teachers Feb. 6, 1923)
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28 Rudolf Steiner gave many lectures on language and many others that include references to language and the teaching of language. In the beginning, I felt daunted and overwhelmed at the task of even compiling these lectures and references, let alone reading and understanding them. Since several respondents to the grammar survey had mentioned Steiner’s The Genius of Language: Observations for Teachers (translated by Gertrude Teutsch and Ruth Pusch), I decided to begin there. The Genius of Language I was immediately heartened not only by Steiner’s obvious delight in the subject, but also by translator Ruth Pusch’s introduction and the excellent “Afterword” by Adam Makkai, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In her introduction, Pusch reminds us that Steiner gave these lectures (December 26, 1919 to January 3, 1920) “to encourage every single teacher in the faculty to work with language, enliven their classes with it, and bring the children to reverence for its place in life.” (11) Although these lectures look at the German language, Makkai points out in his “Afterword” that everything Steiner had to say about the German language is true of the English language. To begin, we need to understand the context in which Steiner was using the phrase “the genius of language.” In The History of Linguistics in Europe linguist and anthroposophist Vivien Law tells us: Those universalists who took an interest in the peculiarities of specific languages were fired by the search for the genius (génie) of the language, a central theme of the 18th century. What is it that gives the language (and so the people that speak it) its essence?… That preoccupation with the genius of the language so characteristic of the French Enlightenment was taken up by the Germans in the years around 1800, becoming one of the most striking features of early Romanticism. (265–266) Neither the title nor the historical content of the lectures was original with Steiner, although his understanding of language and language development is very impressive, particularly since the lectures seem to have been spontaneous, requested during his Light Course lectures. Some of our friends have asked me to speak about language while I am here in Stuttgart. At such short notice and with our limited time, this will have to be rather sketchy … because what I say about language will simply be improvised. (15) What is original (as far as I have been able to determine) is his understanding of the role of nature in shaping sound and even the organs of sound, the idea that the spiritual is present in sound, the ability of eurythmy to manifest sound, the effect of sound on the organism of the listener, and the application of his understanding of language to the teaching of it. In addition, as Makkai points out, Steiner “correctly
29 anticipated one of the most important insights of 20th century scholarship and that is the observation of the fact that meaning change progresses from the concrete toward the abstract with practically no exceptions.” (“Afterword” 114) Steiner was very interested in the history of all aspects of language and felt that students would be, too. These lectures are packed with detail, and Steiner reminded the teachers that he was giving an illustration of how to teach by providing many examples. We are reminded by Steiner that every word has a history. We can extend this indication to recognize that the terminology we use in grammar has a history. Each piece of punctuation has a history. Every “rule” has a history. Tracing the history reenlivens, bringing back feeling into what has become abstract. Steiner warns teachers about the risk [in] almost all teaching … of not getting finished with the load of subject matter. It is only when subject matter is shredded into atoms and systematized that you don’t get finished with it, because it is so tempting to take up the single atomized parts that are uncharacteristic and pile them up, trying to show what is characteristic. (95) It is clear throughout that Steiner admires the creative, transformative properties of language, including the genius of inventing words and embracing words from other languages. He finds the genius most alive in dialects. He deplores “abstract instruction” asserting that there is “no better method of pushing children into materialism….” (94) Other Indications As I began to realize that the methods many Waldorf schools use to teach grammar, particularly in the high school, are contrary to Steiner’s indications, I was fortunate to be able to share ideas with colleagues in a number of short talks and workshops. One of these took place at The Hartsbrook School. Imagine my delight when Roberto Trostli passed me a CD-Rom containing a compilation of everything that Steiner had said about teaching language. With Trostli’s permission, I have included the relevant passages on teaching grammar, particularly as it relates to the high school, as Appendix V. Trostli’s full compilation has since been published by AWSNA as Teaching Language Arts in the Waldorf School: Compendium of Excerpts from the Foundation of Waldorf Education Series by Rudolf Steiner. I am deeply grateful to Roberto Trostli and have made free use of his painstaking work in quotations throughout this research. In Stockmeyer’s Rudolf Steiner’s Curriculum for Waldorf Schools, Steiner’s delight in language can be seen as coupled with dismay at how grammar was being approached in the Stuttgart School, through what he calls “the torture of undigested terminology.” … You may be sinning against the healthy condition of the child if you occupy him for an hour with what is usually called grammar. If the children have to occupy themselves distinguishing between what one calls subject, object, attribute, indicative, subjunctive, etc.—all things in which they
30 have only a half-hearted interest—then they are put into a state where their breakfasts are boiling in their organisms quite uninfluenced by their soul lives…. Enteric illnesses are often caused by grammar lessons. (21) Steiner gives fragmentary curriculum indications for first language grammar instruction. • Kindergarten and grades 1 and 2: Children are given rich language experiences through listening to stories and rhymes and engaging in conversations with peers and teachers. • Grade 1: “Hardly touch it at all” (Stockmeyer 21) • Grade 2: “Build up concepts of what is a noun and a verb with its tenses.” (Stockmeyer 21) “Conversations about the structure of sentences.” In some classes children chant irregular verb forms such as “to be” in a little verse. Adjectives are introduced (without the label) in the use of color words, and binary pairs such as big/small, thick/thin. Teachers are language-aware as they warmly encourage children in telling stories, describing events, and making up verses and songs and as they plan lessons full of stories, games, verses, and songs. • Grade 3: “A feeling approach towards articulation of language and general language-configuration … different parts of speech, and parts of sentences … structure of a sentence, punctuation.” (Stockmeyer 21) The first lessons in grammar are often taught most successfully through physical engagement. Willi Aeppli describes a delightful, physically active lesson in Rudolf Steiner Education and the Developing Child. By the end of Grade 3, many classes have had experiences of naming words, doing words, picture words, how, when, and where words (often with accompanying verses such as those offered by Dorothy Harrar). End punctuation is usually introduced with experiences of statements, questions, and exclamations. Some uses of the comma are introduced. In my correspondence with him, Adam Makkai emphasized: Grammar in the early grades should be introduced as a set of games in order to engage the creativity in children and not to hit them with this is “correct” and that is “wrong.” Emphasize that what people say is what matters. (03/19/2005) • Grade 4: “A clear idea of the tenses, of what is expressed by the changing forms of the verb … prepositions.…” (Stockmeyer 21) Teachers often introduce the terminology for what the children have experienced in earlier grades: noun, verb, adjective, adverb. Preposition, conjunction, and interjection are added. Verb tenses are often introduced using the Norse three Norns for past, present, and future.
31 • Grade 5: “Difference between active and passive voice … indirect speech … difference between writing one’s own opinion and reporting another person’s opinion … complete punctuation.” ((Stockmeyer 21) Students are able to abstract the structure of common sentences and recognize four common sentence types and the punctuation differences between them. Sentence structure—subject, predicate, and object—is introduced. Direct and indirect speech with appropriate punctuation are discovered and applied. • Grade 6: “A feeling for the subjunctive … a strong feeling for the plasticity of language.” (Stockmeyer 21–22) Some teachers introduce clauses and show the effect of movable modifiers. Some teachers teach or arrange to have taught classes in Latin. This might be useful for an understanding of how Latin grammar became applied to English. • Grade 7: “A sensitive feeling of forms expressing wish, wonder, and surprise.” (Stockmeyer 21) Stockmeyer gives no indications for Grade 8 and few for high school. For Class 9, it is suggested: “ Concerning essays: I should leave everything belonging to grammar and syntax until you discuss corrections in class.” (Stockmeyer 29) And for Class 10: “Everything connected with language is interesting.” (Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II 486) Michael Rose in “Towards a Living Grammar” in Paideia gives a thorough understanding of grammar teaching in the lower school that I find inspirational. He illustrates a Grade 3 lesson that integrates music, art, and language in an engaging lesson that prepares in subtle ways for what will evolve into “the nine parts of speech” in Grade 4. [Rose includes determiners.] I hope, at the same time, that the words noun and pronoun will still evoke the feelings associated with an Odin-like figure who knows the true names of things and who uses runes to represent those names; that adjective will still feel like a goddess bestowing qualities upon creation; that determiner will still be something of a Valkyrie, appearing suddenly on the field of action, saying, “That one stays; that one comes with me!” I hope that verb and adverb may still evoke a dwarf with his apprentices Howli, Whenli, and Whereli; that preposition may perhaps summon up a Sybil who pronounces upon the ordering of the world—or perhaps simply a Viking “ganger” who gangs through the world order on foot; that conjunctions may still be gossips, like the squirrel Rata-tosc, who scurries up and down the Tree Yggdrasil between the dragon and the eagle, relating the statements of the one or the other; and that interjections may still evoke the giant-land of Jotenheim, where language is still at a rather boorish and primitive stage. (8) Rose goes on in his article to offer such living examples of bringing grammar forth throughout the lower school grades.
32 If we are fortunate enough in our high school work to inherit young people in whom potentially dry “categories” continue to resonate with aliveness, how will we continue to honor that living wellspring? Much of what Steiner says about “how” to teach grammar is in accordance with teaching practices that come out of linguistic understanding. To begin with, Steiner values dialect. We can best do that if we use every opportunity that occurs to work from dialect. If we have a child who before the age of seven has already learned a more educated informal language, the so-called standard language, it will be extremely difficult to reach the aspect of the child’s unconscious that has a natural relationship to the logical formation of language, since that has already withered. Thus if we have children who speak dialect and others who do not in the same class, we should always connect our instruction in grammar with what those children who do speak in dialect already provide us. We first want to try to find the structure of a sentence and then a word from the perspective of dialect. We can do that if we proceed by having a child say a sentence, for example, one that is as simple as possible. The main thing the sentence will always contain is something that is an inner enlivening of an activity. The more often we begin with an inner enlivening of an activity, the more we will be able to achieve an awakening of consciousness in the child while teaching language. (Practical Advice to Teachers 55) Secondly, he understands that all grammar already exists within the child. We can certainly assume that all grammar already exists in the human organism. If you take that assumption seriously, you will realize that by making grammar conscious in a living way, you work on the creation of an I-consciousness in the child. You must orient everything toward that knowledge that exists in the body around the age of nine, when a consciousness of the I normally awakens. You need to bring forth into consciousness everything that exists unconsciously in the child’s organism. In that way the child will reach the Rubicon of development at the age of nine in a favorable way. In that way you bring into consciousness what is unconscious. You then work with those forces in the child that want to develop, not the forces that you bring from outside the child. There is a way of teaching language by using the way the child already speaks and supporting the instruction through a living interaction between those children who speak a more cultivated language and those who speak a dialect. In this way you can allow them to measure themselves against each other, not in some abstract way, but using feeling to guide a word, a sentence, in dialect into another. If you do that for an hour and a half, you will make the children really break out into a sweat. The teachers who teach this way in the Waldorf school certainly have enough when they do this for an hour and a half or so each morning! If you give instruction in language by working with the knowledge in the body so that you create an actual self-consciousness, you are working
33 in harmony with the foundation you have laid in drawing and musical instruction. Thus you have two processes that support each other. (The Renewal of Education 111–112) Most importantly, he believes in moving from observation of phenomena to raising consciousness through discovering inner structure. What we want to teach children about language has an effect upon them long before they become aware of it. We should therefore avoid trying to teach them the rules for speaking or writing, but instead enable them to awaken and become aware of what subconsciously acts within. Whether we have one intention or another in our instruction is tremendously important. We should always pay attention to the intention behind teaching. Speaking a dialect has an intimate connection with the subconscious, so we can develop real grammar and rules for sentence structure from the dialect language by basing our work upon the reason that lives within human nature. If, however, we need to work with children who already speak the standard language, we should whenever possible not work in such a way to develop a kind of grammar through the intellect, and not direct our work by teaching about the dative and accusative and how we write, how periods and commas are placed at particular locations and so forth. We instead need to work in a different way. (The Renewal of Education 159)
Fig. 4 – Left to right: David Sloan, Cheryl Latuner, and Wendy Bruneau
What’s Wrong with What We’re Already Doing? So many sins have been committed through the prevailing methods of learning reading and writing, especially in teaching what is connected with learning to read and write, that is, language, grammar, syntax, and so on. There has been so much waywardness in this area that there are doubtless few people who do not remember with some horror the lessons they had in grammar and syntax. This horror is quite justified. (Steiner Practical Advice to Teachers 55) Grammar is notoriously the most widely and deeply hated of all studies, at least in English-speaking countries. Several reasons, each containing at least some truth, have been advanced to explain this fact. One is that the kind of grammar that has been traditionally taught in our schools is based on Latin, and fits English so loosely that considerable parts of it can be understood only as an act of faith, with distinct elements of mysticism. Another is that the subject is often taught not as a body of information but as a system of morals, toward which we often have a split reaction. While one side of our minds tells us that we ought to obey the rules because they must somehow be right, the other tells us that if we do we” ll lose our friends and feel like prigs in the process…. (Myers 255–256) As I began to catch up with what has been happening in grammar education since the 1960s, it was immediately clear that the study of language has changed radically over at least the past half-century while the descriptions used in traditional grammar remain fixed in the 19th century. There are now two competing views of the subject known as “grammar.” Prescriptive grammar, often an error-based view of grammar, sees grammar teaching as learning rules for correct writing and focuses on avoiding errors. Descriptive grammar is the study of varieties of language to find the underlying principles and patterns by which that language works. Most school grammar teaching has been a combination of prescriptive and descriptive. However, the descriptive paradigm generally used has come from Latin and does not fit English. Latin is a fixed synthetic language in which meaning is carried by word endings; English is a synthetic language in which meaning is carried by sentence structure. Linguistics during the 20th century moved further and further away from using the Latin model. One of the basic understandings of current linguists is that English is composed exclusively of dialects. They also agree that we are on pretty slippery ground if we argue
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35 that some dialects are intrinsically better than others, though, of course, it is obvious that some have more prestige, and may therefore be worth learning. (Myers 9) Among the “Special Articles” that introduce The American Heritage Dictionary Third Edition is Morris Bishop’s excellent summary, “Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage.” In it he gives the principles of descriptive linguistics: (1) Language changes constantly. (2) Change is normal. (3) Spoken language is the language. (4) Correctness rests upon usage. (5) All usage is relative. (xxiii) Bishop goes on to say, “[Descriptive grammar] may classify usage as standard or non-standard, formal, informal, or slang; but not right or wrong. It describes usage; it piously avoids prescribing it.” The American Heritage Dictionary Third Edition was published in 1969 in response to the “permissiveness” of the third edition of Webster’s Dictionary. However, it is interesting to note that this edition of The American Heritage Dictionary was the first dictionary to assemble a Usage Panel of “about a hundred members—novelists, essayists, poets, journalists, writers on science and sports, public officials, professors.” (xxiv) Some participants on the listservs I participated in (Assembly of Teachers of English Grammar [ATEG] and New Public Grammar [NPG]) maintain that there are many dialects within English, including one called Standard English and that each dialect is equally valid. Others are insistent that Standard English is the only one that should be included in schools. Most agree, however, that a way needs to be found other than the traditional grammar teaching with workbooks and worksheets, often labeled “Drill and Kill.” The history of the rise of traditional grammar in England and the United States (including an account of the phenomenal success of the Warriner industry) can be found in the first chapter of Ed Schuster’s Breaking the Rules (7–18). The history is also succinctly outlined in David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (192–194). Linguistic studies over the past fifty years have shown that traditional grammar is deficient because many of the “rules” are based on Latin while English is not a Latinbased language. Meyers points out that the schoolroom version [of English language analysis] … did … become more and more Latinized … during a period when fewer and fewer students had any real knowledge of Latin. The result is that even people who have mastered the rules are often oppressed by a sense of mystery about the whole thing…. [C]ertain concepts which are quite comprehensible when applied to Latin become almost mystical when applied to English.
36 He continues with an intriguing analogy: The result is comparable to what we might get if we tried to indicate the political geography of Africa on an outline map of South America. The picture would not be utterly useless. After all, both continents are roughly triangular, and much wider at the top than at the bottom, so that the sizes and relative positions of the countries could be indicated after a fashion. But a good deal of distortion would be necessary—and instruction based on such a map would be better if this fact were continually borne in mind. Detailed arguments about the exact and true locations of all the boundaries would be rather pointless. (261) Myers’ detailed analysis of the weaknesses of Latinate descriptions of grammar in describing English, particularly verbs, shifted my perspective profoundly. I urge every teacher of English to read it. (Myers 260–281) The least effective and most boring way that grammar can be taught is the way that I have taught it and witnessed it being taught. At the back of many classrooms in several Waldorf schools and the few public schools that haven’t been stripped of all reference to grammar is a shelf on which stands a class set of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition. These are ritualistically dragged out and sections are worked through in the hopes that something will take and student writing improve. The following response to such teaching left me almost equally chagrined and delighted: The Rime of the Ancient Warriner’s It is an ancient Warriner’s And it stoppeth every wight From doing what is best to do When learning how to write. It mixes skills and drills and frills With exhortation solemn, And stacks itself on classroom shelves Column after column. Amoeba-like, it splits itself Into scope and sequence clones, With names alike as Mike and Ike And wholly writ by drones. (It transmogrifies itself with ease Into Little, Brown, and Hodges And Bedford, Crews and Ebbitts And a hundred other stodges.) It names the parts and modes and marks It’s a taxonomic rite— And multitudes are led through it, And still they cannot write,
37 And go as ones that have been stunned And are of sense forlorn, Much sadder and unwiser wights Than ever they was born. (qtd. in Schuster vi)
Fig. 5 – Left to right, foreground: Jason Gross, Mary Ann Wells, and Anne Greer
The Linguistic Revolution and the Teaching of Grammar Linguistics, in its various modes, is … one of the most important disciplines that human beings have developed throughout the course of evolution because … it is the prototypical consciousness soul discipline for our time which, if it is properly cultivated, will lead us to the ability to “think about thinking” … a spiritual activity of consciousness in freedom. (Makkai 103) In the 1960s a revolution was fast gaining momentum in the study of the English language that few of us have taken into consideration in our teaching of grammar. Most high school English teachers in the latter half of the 20th century were trained in and focused almost entirely on the study of literature. It was rare to be instructed in how to teach either writing or grammar. Those of us who were required to teach these subjects quickly fell back on the ways we ourselves had been taught. Many of us greeted with delight the studies from the ’60s claiming that the teaching of grammar had no effect at all on the students’ ability to write. For the most part, except in Waldorf schools, the teaching of grammar was abandoned with relief. While our colleagues in the sciences were adapting curriculum content to integrate wave theory or the genome project, English teachers largely ignored new findings in language. Waldorf teachers interested in the history of 20th century linguistics can dip into the waters in both the “Afterword” to The Genius of Language by Adam Makkai and the last chapter of Vivien Law’s The History of Linguistics in Europe (published posthumously in 2003). Both of these linguists are also anthroposophists. The Literary Arts and Humanities Section of the School for Spiritual Science continues to work with Vivien Law’s book at their yearly colloquium in Dornach. I also found Introducing Linguistics by Trask and Mayblin relatively easy wading although I suspect that I am not yet even up to my knees. What is clear is that by the 1960s, linguistics was creating great excitement among educators. Here are two examples taken from Exposition and the English Language, a collection of essays for a university freshman writing class: A long overdue revolution is at present taking place in the study of English grammar—a revolution as sweeping in its consequences as the Darwinian revolution in biology…. To anyone at all interested in language, it is challenging; to those concerned with the teaching of English (including parents), it presents the necessity of radically revising both the substance and the methods of their teaching…. Two vital questions are raised by this
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39 revolution in grammar. The first is: “What is the value of this new system?” In the minds of many who ask it, the implication of this question is: “We have been getting along all these years with traditional grammar, so it can’t be very bad. Why should we go through the painful process of unlearning and relearning grammar just because linguistic scientists have concocted some new theories?” The answer to this first question is the bravest and most honest. It is that the superseding of vague and sloppy thinking by clear and precise thinking is an exciting experience in and for itself. (Francis, W. Nelson. “Revolution in Grammar” 198–212) … Nearly all grammar books list as undesirable English the use of the split infinitive, the dangling participle or gerund, the possessive case of the noun with inanimate objects, the objective case of the noun with the gerund, the use of “whose” as a neuter relative pronoun, and many others; yet all of these uses may be found in the authors who form the very backbone of English literature and who are “reputable” and the “best writers” in every sense of the word. If the standard-makers defy the standards, to whom shall we turn for authority? … The way out of this perplexity is to shift the search for standards away from “authorities” and traditional rules to the language itself as it is spoken and written today. Just as the chemist draws his deductions from the results of laboratory experiments, the biologist from his observations of forms of life, and the astronomer from his telescope, so must students of language draw their deductions from an observation of the facts of language. In establishing the laws of language, our personal desires, preferences, and prejudices must give way to the scientific determination and interpretation of the facts of language. What language we use ourselves may take any form we desire, but the making of rules and the teaching of rules must rest upon objective facts. (Pooley, Robert C. “The Definition and Determination of ‘Correct’ English” 98) Given the import of this “revolution,” what has changed—or should have changed—in the teaching of grammar? In my experience, not much. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker writes: Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that is called science, but the news has been kept secret…. Some thirty-five years ago a new science was born. Now called “cognitive science,” it combines tools from psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neurobiology to explain the workings of human intelligence. The science of language, in particular, has seen spectacular advances in the years since…. (7) The recent illumination of linguistic abilities has revolutionary implications for our understanding of language and its role in human affairs, and for our view of humanity itself. (17) Pinker sees the difficulty of reconciling linguistic grammar and the prevailing pedagogical grammar (the norm in Waldorf high schools and in public schools prior to about 1980 and probably earlier).
40 The complexity of language, from the scientist’s point of view, is part of our biological birthright; it is not something that parents teach their children or something that must be elaborated in school…. A preschooler’s tacit knowledge of grammar is more sophisticated than the thickest style manual or the most state-of-the-art computer language system…. (6) Prescriptive rules are useless without the more fundamental rules that create [language]…. These [fundamental] rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammar because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules…. When a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words in simple sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. (384) In Steiner’s words: “We can certainly assume that all grammar already exists in the human organism.” (The Renewal of Education 111) Adam Makkai is clear about the importance of linguistics. “A linguistic approach to language is one of the tools that we can offer to students that will help them become effective in this “Age of Consciousness Soul.” Georg Kuhlewind has suggested that the three prototypical consciousness soul disciplines are linguistics, psychology, and epistemology.” (note 7; Adam Makkai, “Afterword,” 1995 edition to The Genius of Language). We need to find a way to bring such a linguistic approach to our high school students. Piaget’s account of adolescent thinking proposes that adolescents move toward “the ability to test a hypothesis by systematic consideration of all possibilities, and the ability, above all to reflect, to think about our own thinking and hence to construct systems of ideas.” (231) To “construct systems of ideas” is quite different from being given them. David Crystal extends the idea of English language revolution to global intensification. By “revolution” he means any combination of events that produces a radical shift in consciousness and behavior over a relatively short period of time. These do not appear very often in the history of a language. For Crystal, this is the third such revolution in the history of the English language since the 5th century. The first was the change from Old English to Middle English, the second, the change from Middle English to Modern English (from Chaucer to Shakespeare). This third, Crystal thinks, is the rapid development of Global English, or Englishes, as he would say. According to Crystal, what makes the second half of the 20th century and the 1990s in particular a highly significant period in the history of language is the coming together of three major trends, each global in significance, which cumulatively have altered the world’s linguistic ecology: the extension of English as a global language with new varieties around the world, the realization that huge numbers of languages are dying generating a sense of crisis and fresh initiatives toward preservation and regeneration, and the increasing use of Internet technology which has supplemented
41 spoken and written language adding a further dimension of variety to our linguistic experience. (Language and the Internet) One of the central assumptions of linguistics is the clear understanding that there is a difference between spoken and written English. No group of people speaks anything like standard written English as normal, everyday speech. Spoken language and written language are not, and have almost certainly never been, the same. We all have to learn a language different from our spoken dialect when we learn to write standard written English. Linguists certainly don’t think that teaching grammar is useless or unnecessary. But, in order to teach grammar effectively, teachers have to understand what it is they are teaching. Linguists have shown that all dialects, standard and nonstandard, are equally systematic and complete, and that what is considered “correct” is usually based on social decisions and certainly not precision or logic. As we have seen, Steiner recognized that “the genius of language” is stronger in dialect. Forms such as double negatives, third-person singular present “don’t,” “seen” as simple past of “saw,” and so on, are features of varieties of English that have as much history, as much complexity, and as much communicative value and effect as Standard English. They have come to be devalued only because they are associated with disfavored groups. The consensus among linguists is, as Steiner clearly believed, that students already know grammar. People learn their native language naturally and unconsciously without direct instruction and so do not need direct instruction in their native language. Steiner recognizes the need for bringing what is unconsciously known into consciousness, but this must be done artistically and with a clear understanding of what it is we are doing. As students grow older, because some language is still judged as “error,” instruction in “perceived error avoidance” is required. However, it needs to be given in a context of recognition that, aside from confusions of meaning, most so-called “error” is lack of conforming to conventions of a particular dialect called Standard English. Further, teachers need to be clear that the “error” currently stigmatized is neither superficial nor outdated. There are many resources that can help students and their teachers. Students need to be encouraged to use reference manuals, as many as possible, just as they do dictionaries, to look up what they are unsure about, even on tests, in order to diminish anxiety. Very few people can remember the changing rules and exceptions of standard written English. I am relatively certain that most Waldorf English teachers have copies of, and perhaps even treasure, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I find myself referring to Diane Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference frequently for clarification on formatting issues.
42 Students need to be helped to understand the effects of linguistic choice. Of course, students need to be able to locate and repair differences from the standard that stigmatize, but this needs to be done within a context of recognition as to how these differences came about and why they stigmatize. I have witnessed many delighted “poor spellers” rejoice at even a brief explanation of how English spelling came to be the way it is. They were then more amenable to finding ways to conform to the standard. A parallel explanation of evolving standards of syntax should be equally liberating and certainly interesting. As well, focusing on changing syntax for varieties of effect can strengthen writing and increase appreciation in reading. Students do need to be taught principles of formal self-expression: Writing, reading, and giving speeches seem not to come naturally to most in the way that ordinary spoken language does. Students need to be taught how to compose a paragraph, how to use terms that are not ambiguous, how to vary sentence structure so that the writing will sound more eloquent, how to use a varied and wide vocabulary, how to express things that would be obvious within context if one were speaking. This all takes practice. No one denies that students must learn conventions of academic speech and writing. While it is true that many “grammar rules” perhaps still taught in schools are arbitrary, students who aren’t introduced to them may be considered ignorant. But, if we continue to teach them in the traditional way, as “correcting” things that some students do “wrong,” then we will get the traditional results: Students who come from homes where the standard dialect is spoken get good grades but are extremely bored and may become snobs, while students who come from homes where a non-standard dialect is spoken get bad grades and think they’re stupid because they can’t understand what is more logical about the standard form. If both teachers and students recognize that these “rules” are largely changing conventions of academic style extended into public discourse, then students who want to succeed academically will use them in writing and may take an active interest in the why and how. In Grammar and the Teaching of Writing, Rei Noguchi gives a detailed account of two well-known studies of “errors” and how serious they are perceived to be. The Connors-Lunsford study gives percentage rankings of “the most frequently occurring ‘formal and mechanical’ errors among 3000 university students.” Maxine Hairston’s study “provides a … picture of what people in the professions consider ‘serious’ errors.” Such studies should lead English teachers to focus on what needs working on for our students to succeed in the post-secondary world. (Noguchi 19–24) Using these studies as informing practice, Noguchi presents a minimalist approach to teaching the grammar necessary to avoid stigmatizing variations from the standard. Such background understanding should enable us to explain to students why it is important to comply with specific elements of Standard English.
Mythrules In helping students to move toward an understanding of Standard English, we need to be careful not to confuse them with out-of-date conventions. In my exploration, I encountered many listserv conversations and several books that called attention to “Mythrules,” a term coined by Ed Schuster and explained in his book Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers through Innovative Grammar Instruction. Schuster suggests that we apply what he calls “The Favorite Writer Test of Correctness” to all so-called “rules.” Many of these quickly fade when we search for their adherence among our favorite authors, in non-fiction as well as fiction. I have compiled this list from e-mails exchanged on the listservs (ATEG and NPG), from Schuster’s book, and from Crystal’s Encyclopedia. Mythrules include: a. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. This prohibition was probably first introduced by John Dryden in the 17th century, showing the influence of Latin grammar. Sentences ending in prepositions have always been common in English. Most of us are aware of Winston Churchill’s famous response to this rule, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” b. Don’t begin a sentence with a coordinate conjunction. According to Crystal, this “rule” gained popularity in the 19th century. He shows that beginning a sentence with “and,” “but,” or “so” was a major feature in Old English texts and continued through Middle English, Early Modern English, and into the present day. c. Don’t begin a sentence with “hopefully.” Even Crystal says he is unclear about why “hopefully” is picked on when there are many sentence adverbs that are regularly used to begin a sentence, such as “frankly,” “naturally,” “gratefully.” d. Never use sentence fragments. Many writers use sentence fragments for rhetorical effect. Many can be found even in Strunk and White. The definition of a “sentence” remains an open question. e. Never split an infinitive. This is another carryover from Latin in which the infinitive marker is part of the verb and cannot be split off. Fowler refers to the “non-split diehard…bogy-haunted creatures … who would as soon be caught putting knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive.” Crystal (2003) quotes this delightful response from Stephen Leacock: “Many of our actual verbs are in themselves split infinitives, as when we say to undertake or to overthrow…. Many of us who write books are quite willing to split an “infinitive” or to half split or to quite split it according to effect. We might even be willing to sometimes so completely, in order to gain a particular
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f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
effect, split the infinitive as to practically but quite consciously run the risk of leaving the to as far behind as the last caboose of a broken freight train.” (How to Write 1944) Distinguish between “shall” and “will” according to first and second/third person. This was adapted from a Latin grammar published by the mathematician John Wallis in 1653. Lindley Murray insisted on the distinction in his English Grammar of 1795: In other words, he forced it from Latin on to English. He went so far as to condemn Psalm 23 from the King James Bible: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” According to Murray, it should have been translated as “Will follow me” and “I shall dwell.” (qtd. in Crystal 2006) In The Fight for English, David Crystal points out that “most people use the forms indiscriminately, and have done so for centuries.” (121) Avoid redundancy. The English language has a built-in redundancy essential for clarity. According to Pinker, “English text has been estimated as being two to four times as long as it has to be for its information content.”(181) Elimination of redundancy led to horrific results in the Newspeak of 1984. Place “only” as close as possible to the word it modifies. The context usually makes meaning clear. Can we imagine Frank Sinatra singing, “I have eyes for only you”? In writing, where ambiguity is possible, the position of “only” may be crucial, but creating a rule for one aspect of ambiguity seems unnecessary. Don’t confuse “good” and “well.” Many people reply to a “How are you?” greeting with “I’m good.” Crystal suggests that this is an increase in understanding allowing us to “focus on our general state of mind instead of just on our health.” (Fight 160) Everyone takes a singular pronoun. This is a conundrum. If we are really being logical, we realize that the pronoun that goes with “everyone” should also be neutral with respect to gender. Unfortunately, English has no neutral third person singular pronoun although all other pronouns are neutral. So “their” disagrees in number, but “his” or “her” disagrees in gender. When “everyone” and the pronoun are in different clauses, then usage of the pronoun is almost invariably plural: “After everyone finished the assignment, they handed it in.” Does anyone say, “After everyone finished the assignment, he or she handed it in”? When “every one” becomes “everyone,” does the meaning not change to “all”? None takes a singular verb. Noah Webster wrote, “None is often acceptably used as a plural,” in his Grammatical Institute, Part II, published in 1784. “None” has been used as a plural for a very long time.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of “Mythrules.” Instead, it is a reminder that English is constantly changing and is infinitely fascinating in its complexity and that any prohibition needs to be thoroughly investigated. In “The Place of Run-ons and Dashes in Writing—the Craft of Breaking Conventions,” Cornelia Paraskevas describes asking her students to find violations
45 of “Mythrules” by published authors to achieve rhetorical effect. She claims that this enhances consciousness in rhetorical choice among her students. If we think that students might be considered ill-educated if they do not follow these rules, we can teach them instead as conventions of academic style to be used in academic writing and invite the students to find use or non-use in standard written texts. If they do not understand what is more “logical” about the standard form, we must be prepared to admit that usage is not a question of logic. Assuming that there are some “rules” that are important to follow, we need to ask ourselves when and how we should introduce them to students, and how tolerant we can be of the natural mistakes that occur in the learning process. Many teachers state that students need to know the rules before they are free to break them. Schuster reminds us that “over-concern with following rules may undermine self-confidence and may be the root reason so many adults fear writing” and that “premature attention to rules may inhibit creativity and cause students to “play it safe.” (xiv–xv) Is it possible to move from inward recoiling and outward censure toward a questioning openness? Despite my history as a stickler, I have found interest rather than reaction not only possible but also liberating. I have come to be fascinated by the daily speech in rural Nova Scotia. The use of non-standard forms such as double negatives and singular verbs with plural nouns despite years of schooling is impressive. It has engaged me inwardly in ways that reacting and labeling never have. In fact, I have come to lament the loss of the double negative as an irretrievable diminishing of emphasis.
Fig. 6 – Left to right: John Wulsin, Patrice Pinette, and Anne Greer
“Correcting” Student Errors A language begins to die when you are always hearing that you cannot say something in one way or another, that you are speaking incorrectly. It may not seem as strange but it is just the same as if a hundred people were to go to a door and I were to look at them and decide purely according to my own view who was a good person and who was a bad person. Life does not allow us to stereotype things. When we do that, it appears grotesque. Life requires that everything remain in movement. For that reason, syntax and grammar must arise out of the life of feeling, not out of dead reasoning. That perspective will enable us to continue with a living development of language. (Steiner The Renewal of Education 180–181) As in many public schools and universities, much teaching of grammar in Waldorf high schools focuses on ways of detecting and correcting what are perceived as student errors. Many teachers assume that they know enough to identify error and “correct” students. Others pretend to, while harboring doubt. Even those “rules” that we all think we know are full of ambiguities. Consider the following:
1. She is a slow runner. 2. He ran slow. 3. He is a fast runner. 4. She ran fast.
In traditional grammar lessons, teachers make a distinction between adjectival and adverbial forms. Students are told that many adjectives become adverbs by adding -ly. Most of us as English teachers would add -ly to “slow” in the second sentence above. Why then would we not add -ly to the adjective “fast” when it becomes an adverb in the fourth sentence? We often get around such questions, when students dare to ask, by saying that “fast” is “an exception to the rule.” “She is a fast runner” becomes “She runs quickly.” After hearing responses such as these a few times, even the most inquisitive students stop asking questions. There are rules and there are exceptions to the rules, but there seems to be no way of predicting what the exceptions are. So they stop questioning and learn what they are asked to learn, or don’t learn, as the case may be. If they didn’t stop asking, and if we ourselves dared to ask, we might be led to some useful and exciting questions. No English teacher would utter a sentence like, “I ain’t got nobody,” although we might sing it in a moment of abandon. Yet, at the same time, we extol Shakespeare and Chaucer as great writers. Chaucer could say of the Friar, “Ther was no man nowher so vertuous”; and Shakespeare could allow Viola to say of her heart, “Nor never none /Shall mistress of it be, save I alone.” But what brave student would dare to point out the inconsistency of the English teacher when we move from literature to grammar?
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47 Some of us would find nothing wrong with. “ Did you see the man that I saw?” Others would immediately change “that” to “whom.” Even the computer weighs in. But not many of us bother to understand the several hundred years’ history of how “Did you see the man whom I saw?” became preferred over “Did you see the man that I saw?” and how “Did you see the man that I saw?” is at the present time once again preferred. In several workshops where participants were mainly English teachers, I have given the following exercise to be completed by each teacher and then compared in pairs. How many usage errors do you find in the following sentences? 1. The philosopher was born in the second century ad 2. Did you put the ad in the newspaper? 3. After having eaten his dinner, he left. 4. All of the trees were bare. 5. They bought bread and also butter. 6. Every place I go, I see her face. 7. We are not as young as we used to be. 8. The bus arrived at about noon. 9. Park your auto in the lot. 10. My dog was awfully sick yesterday. In all workshops, some found an error in every sentence, some found errors in some sentences, and some found errors in none. Some were vehement in dismissing several of these sentences as “wrong” while many were less sure. If a roomful of English teachers disagree on what is current usage, how can we presume to teach students “correct usage”? Very soon we find ourselves asking, “Who determines what’s correct?” As Myers points out: “… Some of our most cherished beliefs about language are inaccurate to the point of superstition” (Myers 2), and “… There is no such thing in nature as that intrinsically pure, good, or correct English that we would like so much to teach; and there never has been.” (Myers 13) I borrowed this exercise from Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers through Innovative Language Instruction by E. H. Schuster. Schuster took it from Hodges’ Harbrace College Handbook, a text printed in 1941. Here are the answers given then: 1. absurd: “in the second century ad” means “in the second century in the year of our Lord” 2. colloquial: “ad” should be “advertisement” 3. redundant: “after” should be cut 4. colloquial: should be “all the trees” 5. weak: cut “also” 6. vulgar: “every place” should be “everywhere” 7. careless: the first “as” should be “so”
48 8. redundant: cut “at” 9. not proper, informal writing: “auto” should be “automobile” 10. slang: “awfully” Now, the teachers who were subjected to this experiment were honest about their emotional reaction when I asked them to “correct” the sentences. They recognized they were in the same situation that our students regularly face. They admitted that there was an air of general anxiety in the room. More importantly, there was a notable lack of agreement. As Joseph Williams says in “The Phenomenology of Error”: … It is all very puzzling: Great variation in our definition of error, great variation in our emotional investment in defining and condemning error, great variation in the perceived seriousness of individual errors. The categories of error all seem like they should be yes-no, but the feelings associated with the categories seem much more complex. (154) There is anxiety about grammar, too, in many of our students, because we have focused on error-based revision with all its complexity and called it grammar. We know, in Waldorf education perhaps in particular, that anxiety inhibits learning; in fact, that it contributes to ill health. How can we move our approach from the anxiety inherent in “mistake detection” to the excitement of open inquiry about our language, how it serves us, and its changing nature? A deeper question is the value of all those “corrections” we feel we must make to student writing at enormous cost to ourselves. As one teacher put it: My own research has convinced me that red-inking errors in students’ papers does no good and causes a great many students to hate and fear writing more than anything else they do in school. I gave a long series of tests covering 580 of the most common and persistent errors to students in grades 9–12 in many schools and the average rate of improvement in ability to detect these errors turned out to be 2 percent per year. The dropout rate is more than enough to count for this rate of improvement if the teachers had not even been there. When I consider how many hours of my life I have wasted trying to root out these errors by a method that clearly did not work, I want to kick myself. Any rat that persisted in pressing the wrong lever 10,000 times would be regarded as stupid. I must have gone on pressing it at least 20,000 times without visible effect. [According to overwhelming evidence accrued though research] there seems to be little value in marking students’ papers with “corrections,” little value in teaching the conventions of mechanics apart from actual writing, and even less value in teaching grammar in order to instill these conventions. (qtd. in Weaver 82)
49 The teacher quoted above was not a Waldorf teacher, but we all know the cost of “correcting” student work: exhaustion and burnout. Very little learning, possibly none, occurs through post-production editing of student work. Moreover, focus on “error spotting” by teachers possibly inhibits the development of an authentic voice in student writing. At graduation one year, a Grade 12 boy sought me out to tell me, “I just wanted you to know that I read everything you wrote on the essays and main lesson books you handed back.” It was obviously a compliment, so I thanked him. But I was puzzled. Was his response so unusual? Didn’t all students take special note of what I had changed or questioned or commented on in all those hours of “correcting” ? The sad truth is: obviously not! An even sadder truth is that once I had faced this awful knowledge, I did not change my ways. Most of us would admit that the most onerous part of the English teacher’s task is grading papers, and I’m sure I’m not the only one among Waldorf high school teachers who has experienced a complexity of emotions on leaving school for the weekend burdened by 35 main lesson books or a dozen senior essays. Self-righteousness is likely high on the list of identifiable feelings, and, in the face of overwhelming evidence that all my work will not do much to improve student writing, recognition of masochism should be not far behind. I continue to receive letters and e-mails from former students and I am often embarrassed when they add a postscript something like “P. S. Please forgive the spelling and writing mistakes.” I am also somewhat haunted by memories of young people throughout my forty years of teaching who openly wept at my “corrections” or comments on creative writing assignments. What on earth did I imagine I was doing? Ed Schuster writes: Composition theorists insist … that students do not learn rules from English-teacher marginalia such as AWK, CS, or MM, or from teachers editing their work. Paul Diedrich, an outstanding teacher and specialist in composition … insisted many decades ago that the best thing we teachers could do to promote growth in student writers was to make positive comments on the content … and one suggestion on how the kids can improve next time.… This advice has been repeated by English educators thousands of times since, right up to the present day. In Coaching Writing (2001), William Strong suggests that after teachers read students’ writing, they add one or two suggestions on how the kids can improve next time. (xiv) The underlying assumption that students don’t use language “properly” is deeply troubling. At the age when the emerging self should be gaining strength in individuality, teachers and parents consistently undermine adolescent language choice, in speech as well as writing.
50 Adolescence is a critical time in many ways, not the least of which is gaining confidence in language. Jean Piaget describes the process of becoming an individual: As the child grows older, his respect for the superiority of the adult diminishes or at least alters in character. The adult ceases to represent unquestioned or even unquestionable Truth and interrogation becomes discussion. It is then that all that makes up a socialized attitude towards others, developed in the give and take of exchanges with contemporaries, prevails over a feeling of intellectual submission and thus constitutes that instrument so essential to the individual [a socialized intelligence—a mind capable of meeting other minds] of which he will make ever-increasing use and which will serve him throughout his life. (qtd. in Britton 93) The tough work of becoming an individual, of what Piaget terms “development of differences,” is the chief task of the adolescent. The whole seven-year period is a growing toward, as James Britton puts it: a more or less integrated individual, aware of himself as a person, having to some degree reconciled his description and evaluation of himself with the impression he appears to make upon other people, and aware of the relationship between the sort of person he would like to be and the sort of person he thinks he is—or, more generally, between what he believes and the way he behaves. An increasing ability to handle the possibilities of experience, to deal in terms of “what might be,” accompanies and maintains the ferment … of selfquestioning, doubting, experiment and counter experiment…. The task [is] reflected in particular in their talk, their writing, and their reading. (225) Britton goes on to quote Carl Rogers on his concept of “commitment”: It is only when a person decides “I am someone; I am someone worth being; I am committed to being myself,” that change [growth] becomes possible…. It is the kind of purposeful and meaningful direction which is only achieved by the individual who has come increasingly to live closely in relationship with his own experiencing…. (qtd. in Britton 226) For ten years I taught a main lesson block at the Toronto Waldorf School called The Flowering of English. It traced the history of the English language from the earliest known records to its “flower”: Shakespeare. It was a great block: I loved it and so did the students. After retiring from full-time teaching, I was asked to teach the block at High Mowing School. I continued to use that tried and true metaphor as title until an inquisitive young woman forced my underlying assumptions into consciousness. “If Shakespeare is the flower,” she asked, “then what about us? What is our language? The decayed flower?” Many adults believe and openly articulate that the answer to that question is clear: English is deteriorating, they claim. They often point to adolescent communication
51 as example of its rapid decline, most recently in diatribes against the language used in text messaging. Is this not the “debilitating pessimism” that Steiner warns us against in teaching adolescents? (Stuttgart, June 21, 1922). A more positive approach is that of David Crystal who views Internet use as encouraging a dramatic expansion in the variety and creativity of language. (Language and the Internet 2006) In his book Speaking, Georges Gusdorf eloquently describes the role of language in determining adolescent independence of thought: The life of the mind ordinarily begins not with the acquisition of language, but with the revolt against language once it is acquired. The child discovers the world through the established language, which those around prescribe for him. The adolescent discovers values in the revolt against the language he had until then blindly trusted and which seems to him, in the light of the crisis, destitute of all authenticity … which causes him to pass from naïve confidence to doubt and denial. (qtd. in Britton 233) An adolescent is confronted with the realization that language can never fully describe experience, and particularly that other people’s language can never describe his or her individuating experiences. Remember Hamlet’s dismissal of language when he laments, “Words, words, words?” It is the task of the teacher to bring the adolescent back to language, not in the previous understanding but in a new realization: The infantile conception of a magical efficacy of speech in itself gives way to that more difficult conception that language is … a privileged means of carving out … a road across material and moral obstacles in order to reach … the decisive values worthy of orienting his destiny. (Gusdorf qtd. in Britton 234) This can’t be done with red pencils of whatever color, rules, definitions, or worksheets. Neither can we convince the young to join us in our dedication to language through terms like “bad grammar,” “wrong word,” “incorrect usage,” and other terms that verge on the moralistic. In our high school work, we should remember Steiner’s principle that “before the age of twelve, … we attempt to base judgment upon authority…. [But] beginning at approximately the age of twelve, we slowly prepare the intellectual aspect of understanding, namely, free will.” (The Renewal of Education 110) As we all know and many of us have experienced, when someone’s language is perceived as “wrong,” there is a residual feeling that other aspects of their identity are questioned as well. When teachers “correct” papers or student speech, they often aren’t simply asking students to learn to use accepted Standard English, but implying, however subtly, that the language that they naturally use just won’t do. In order to teach language awareness and use effectively, we must begin with the understanding that each student must be encouraged to trust her or his own language.
52 Many teachers focus on hyper-correction of the surface of a text and leave other, far more substantial issues of meaning and language choice unattended. Constance Weaver, among others, suggests that certain kinds of “errors,” particularly in punctuation, are a sign of growth; we often appear to break rules before we learn them. (“Toward a Perspective on Error” Weaver 58). Over-correction, the rigorous marking we are so proud of, may undermine confidence and cause students to fear writing. In his chapter “Liberating the Student Writer,” Ed Schuster reminds us, “One of the major discoveries of Donald Graves and his colleagues was how important selfconfidence is to the developing writer.” Schuster asks that we increase our consciousness of what nourishes self-confidence and what kills it. (94) It seems that children learn language from positive responses only.
Fig. 7 – Meg Gorman illustrating a point at the blackboard
What’s Useful in the New Approach to Grammar? In subscribing to the ATEG listserv I quickly found myself immersed in a struggle to understand new terminology and debates among what seemed at first to be a neverending variety of grammars: Transformational-Generative Grammar, Tagmemics, Stratificational Grammar, Stucturalist Grammar, Pragmatics, Systemic Functional Grammar, Rhetorical Grammar, Dependency Grammar, Paraphrastic Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, and on and on. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of journal articles and books written about the teaching of grammar: its history as well as current practices. And, of course, the temptation of innumerable websites linked to other websites. Where could one begin? After a few months, I realized that several authors were recommended on a regular basis, most of them university professors of education: Constance Weaver, Martha Kolln, Harry Noden, Ed Schuster, Craig Hancock in the U.S., Keiran Egan in Canada, and David Crystal in Great Britain, among others. Most of the articles and books and most of the listserv participants suggested terminology new to me and I suspect to most Waldorf teachers, and most expressed the same conclusion about no longer relying on a grammar that solidified (good word, that!) in the late 19th century. New approaches to teaching grammar seem to fall into three categories: Reformed Traditionalism: characterized by minimizing traditional grammar terminology to those concepts that seem most pertinent and effective. Many in this camp include diagramming as an educational technique. Human Innatism: characterized by emphasizing the innate knowledge of the student and teaching grammar in context using a student’s innate knowledge of grammar. Revived Classicism: characterized by using exemplary sentences as models for students to emulate. Whatever the approach, all o are less prescriptive. o are less prone to error focus. o are more sensitive to the thought processes of the students.
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o are meaning centered rather than product centered. o consider error a natural part of the learning process. o see sentence editing as the final step in the writing process.
Asked to recommend one book, it would be David Crystal’s Making Sense of Grammar. Crystal is, frankly, a treasure. He is the most prominent and prolific English speaking linguist in the world, notwithstanding the fact that Noam Chomsky has become a household word. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language is essential for any teacher of English. The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left is a powerful antidote to best-selling prescriptivist Lynne Truss. One of the most reassuring aspects of the “new grammar” is that a thorough understanding based on descriptive principles allows the students to generate examples. As teachers we should be able to look at any item of discourse and aid students in describing it with a metalanguage that makes sense. We should also be able to admit when we are puzzled; in fact, we should be enlivened by the puzzles and invite our students into ways of solving them. In my own attempt to integrate an understanding of traditional grammar into a newer model, I was helped immeasurably by Jeff Glauner’s Essentials of Grammar: A Textbook for Teachers, Editors, Secretaries, and Other Semiwilling Curmudgeons. Glauner created the text for his students at Park University in Missouri, and now shares it as a free, downloadable course (http://captan.park.edu/jglauner/EN-ED325%20F2F/ GramText.htm). He was delighted to hear about our WHSRP Grammar Colloquium and is happy to have any of us use his e-text. Glauner set out to have a text that provided: 1) The simplest, most coherent, and logically complete systematic grammar of the English language I could devise using the fewest possible terms and referents. I found it centered loosely around Noam Chomsky’s kernel sentences and transformations—a phrase structure grammar. 2) A grammar which would require the fewest grammatical terms possible while still providing students with a metalanguage for the system of English grammar. The terms I found were mostly traditional. A couple of exceptions: The word constituent emerges from structural linguistics, and the word fuzzy, one of my favorites, emerges from linguistic pragmatics. 3) A grammar which would incorporate the latest scholarship about grammatical structure, pedagogical technique, and learning theory. Most Waldorf English teachers would recognize almost all Glauner’s list of terms, but there are some useful new concepts.
55 • Moving from the whole to the parts: The structuralist concept of working from the whole to the parts is very much in keeping with Waldorf pedagogy. Glauner uses the term constituents for the “pieces that make up text.” We might begin with a paragraph and look at the constituent parts, the sentences, and then move to the constituent parts of individual sentences. Within sentence constituents are phrases and clauses. What is new is that a phrase can be one word and that every phrase has a head word. • Parts of speech an open category: The idea that there is a set number of parts of speech is no longer recognized as a valid concept. Frankly, we can have as many as seem useful. The idea that the parts of speech list is limited to eight categories comes from the Greco-Roman grammatical tradition. Many, if not most, English grammarians ignored it for much of the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the most common part-of-speech schemas from the early 1800s has ten categories, rather than eight. The grammars of Latin most often used by the medieval Church schools have eight, and this may have somehow created the impression that the number of parts of speech is fixed. Classification systems vary. In whatever system is used, even the traditional one, I find Glauner’s notion of fuzziness heartening. Questioning the terms used in word labeling recognizes the excitement of ambiguity. As Glauner says, “Students should be taught to enjoy the gray areas between grammatical classifications rather than to fear them.” Even the term “parts of speech” is itself seldom used in newer grammars although Glauner does use it. The term comes from Latin pars orationis which comes in turn from two Greek phrases used by Aristotle and Dionysios of Thrace who listed eight meros logou which could be translated as: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, and conjunction. The original eight described classical Greek, but since there is no article in Latin, Latin grammarians left it out and added interjection. Medieval grammarians, describing Latin, invented the adjective (14th century ad). When the original scheme of Dionysios was applied to English, the article proved useful again (13th century ad), but because of its simplicity, it was not given its previous status. By the 14th century, participle had become a subcategory of verb. (McArthur) Fuzziness is a technical term for words that can be more than one part of speech. In the sentence, “Driving in the snow is a real blast,” “in the snow” is both an adjective and an adverb since “driving” is both a noun and a verb. The prepositional phrase “acts as” something rather than “is” something. • Form, function, and frame One of the most important concepts in the new grammar is the division between form and function. For example, the function of a noun is nominal while its form includes the possibility of plural and possessive endings, of a limited range of nominal suffixes, or of being able to be
56 modified by a determiner. The function of a verb is to head finite or non-finite verb phrases while its form includes the ability to take the four verb inflections (-s, -ed, -ing, -en) or end in a verb-marking suffix. In another context, if we take the word “driving” in the phrase “careless driving in the snow,” the form is a verb, the function is a noun, and the frame would answer the question, “What can frame something that is a noun”; in this case an adjective “careless.” • Form classes and structure classes: Generally, in the new grammars, word labels or word classes is preferred to parts-of-speech. I have summarized the following description from Chapter 8 of Grammar Alive! (Haussamen, et al.) There are two word classes: 1. Form classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs; so called because words can be added to these categories and the words in these categories undergo changes in form through affixes. These constitute about 99% of our language and provide the primary lexical meaning. 2. Structure classes: determiners, auxiliaries, qualifiers, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns; so called because they set up structures among words; they are closed to new additions and have remained primarily constant since the 16th century. Our 20 most frequently used words are all structure-class words. Structure-class words constitute 90% of our language. The interjection causes some labeling difficulty. David Crystal calls the interjection a type of minor sentence.
Form classes seem familiar to us, but new terminology in structure classes needs a little explanation.
o Determiners is a category that includes articles and words that can be used to replace articles including quantifiers (numbers, all, several, much), demonstrative adjectives (this, that, these, those), and possessive pronouns (my, our, your, his, her, its, their). o Auxiliaries, as traditionally recognized, are words whose function is to assist the main verb in a clause to express several basic grammatical contrasts such as person, number, and tense. This class is divided again into primary auxiliaries and modals (auxiliaries that convey probability, possibility, obligation). I also find the following new terms, gleaned from a variety of sources, useful: o Intensifiers: a small number of words that come before adjectives and adverbs to intensify (very, really, too, quite, pretty, a lot, somewhat, more, very much, rather, most) o Particles: those little additions to verbs that we don’t quite know what to do with as in “shut up,” “make do with,” “talk about,” or that come at the end of sentences, such as, “That’s the film I was referring to.” o Pro-forms: a word that replaces or refers to a longer construction. This includes definite and indefinite pronouns and ellipses.
57 o Sentence adverbs: self-explanatory as in “Frankly, I don’t understand all this annoyance with ‘hopefully.’” o Expletives: empty category place holders “it” and “there” in sentences such as “It is raining” or “There is someone at the door.” o Ergative verbs: found in sentences where the verb affects the subject such as “The butter melted.” • Sentence as open question Sentence pattern descriptions remain quite similar to traditional grammar with the exception that we can no longer get away with saying that a sentence is a complete thought. An individual sentence usually relies on the sentences that are grouped with it to complete its thought. The definition of a sentence as a group of words that expresses a complete thought goes at least as far back as The Art of Grammar of Dionysius Thrax (c 170–90 bce), which was a synthesis of Greek grammar. The original Warriner (1948) had “a sentence expresses a complete thought.” (37) This is no longer accepted as a useful concept. Whether or not we speak in sentences is an intriguing question. Even in writing, sentences do not rely on meaning completeness for their identity. Evidence of the ambiguity of “sentence” is reflected in the shift in punctuation over the past four or five hundred years. It is a brave exercise but great fun to pose the question to a class: What is a sentence? Great fun, that is, if you don’t presuppose that you know the answer. Suggestions might include that a sentence is “a something or someone doing or being,” that it “begins with a capital and ends with a sentence end mark,” that it “must have time, a form, and a movement.” Glauner’s seven patterns of declarative sentences are more inclusive than the five I have been used to working with: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Subject + Intransitive Verb Subject + Transitive Verb + Direct Object Subject + Transitive Verb + Indirect Object + Direct Object Subject + Linking Verb + Adjectival Subject Complement Subject + Linking Verb + Nominal Subject Complement Subject. + Transitive Verb + Direct Object + Adjectival Object Complement Subject. + Transitive Verb + Direct Object + Nominal Object Complement
Crystal also has seven patterns, not quite the same as Glauner’s. Crystal calls these “clause patterns”: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
S+V S+V+O S+V+C S+V+Adverbial S+V+OO (“an entity affects two other entities, making one of them a recipient or beneficiary”) 6. S+V+O+C (complement) 7. S+V+O+A (“an entity affects another in a context”)
58 Crystal also uses the term existential sentences, sentences beginning with a non-emphasized “there,” simple present or past tense “be,” and a small range of “presentational” verbs. (“There is a cat in the garden.” “There appeared a bright star in the sky.”) • Transformations How does a basic sentence pattern become interrogative, imperative, negative, or passive? Glauner explains that there are three basic forms of transformations. Basic sentence patterns are transformed and become T-sentence patterns through addition, deletion, and movement. Glauner has eight categories of transformed sentences. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
T-Command (deletion of subject) T-Yes/No (movement of verb to initial word) T-Do (question requiring addition of do, did, does) T-Do with transitive verbs (question requiring addition plus movement) T-Wh (question requiring movement plus addition of who, what, why, where, how) 6. T-Passive (a complex combination of addition and movement) 7. T-Negative (includes a large variety of ways of transforming positive statements into negative ones) 8. T-There (addition and movement) • Embedding Embedding could simply be called “sentence stuffing” or sentence combining. It includes the variety of processes of putting the information from one sentence into another. The efficiency ideal is to move as far as you can in this embedding toward turning the information in the embedded “sentence” into a single-word adjective or adverb. For example, two sentences: “The horse is in the pasture, and “The horse is red,” become “The red horse is in the pasture.” Or, less efficiently, “The horse that is red is in the pasture.” Embedding increases “syntactic maturity.” Sentence combining exercises, of course, do the same thing.
What Is Standard English? Of course there are snobbish people who think what they talk is pure English, and anything different is a dialect; and there are humble people who realize that they talk a dialect, but credit other more fortunate people with talking the language pure. However, all qualified students of the subject now seem to agree that the language [English] is composed exclusively of dialects. They also agree that we are on pretty slippery ground if we argue that some dialects are intrinsically better than others, though of course it is obvious that some have more prestige, and may therefore be worth learning. (Myers 9) English was standardized only a few hundred years ago as part of socioeconomic changes. It became a marker for class. (McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil 272) Standard English was never a totally homogeneous phenomenon…. Languages, like buildings and bridges, have tolerances built into them so that they can survive changing circumstances. The aim of prescriptivists is to removes these tolerances. If they were ever successful, languages, like buildings and bridges, would then indeed break down. This is not how to look after a language. (Crystal How Language Works 456) Peter Trudgill (University of Lausanne) has published an intriguing and revealing paper that he calls “Standard English: What It Isn’t.” He contends that Standard English is not a language, is not an accent, is not a style, is not a register (a variety of language determined by topic, subject matter, or activity), and is not a set of prescriptive rules. He then concludes that Standard English is a social dialect, but one with “grammatical idiosyncrasies”: 1. It fails to distinguish between the auxiliary forms of the verb do and the main forms of the verb do. This is true both of the present tense forms, where many other dialects distinguish between auxiliary “I do,” “he do” and the main verb “I does,” “he does” or similar, and the past tense, where most other dialects distinguish between auxiliary did and the main verb done, as in “You done it, did you?” 2. Standard English has unusual and irregular present tense verb morphology in that only the third-person singular receives morphological marking: “he goes” versus “I go.” Many other dialects use either zero for all persons or -s for all persons. 3. Standard English lacks multiple negation. Most nonstandard dialects of English around the world [and many other languages] permit multiple negation. 4. Standard English has an irregular formation of reflexive pronouns with some forms based on the possessive pronoun, e.g., “myself ” and others on the objective pronoun, e.g., “himself.” Most non-standard dialects
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60 have a regular system employing possessive forms throughout: “hisself,” “theirselves.” 5. Standard English fails to distinguish between second person singular and second person plural pronouns, having “you” in both cases. Many non-standard dialects maintain the older English distinction between “thou” and “you,” or have developed newer distinctions such as “you” versus “youse.” [or “you-en(s),” “you-all”]. 6. Standard English has irregular forms of the verb to be both in the present tense (am, is, are) and in the past (was, were). Many nonstandard dialects have the same form for all persons, such as “I be,” “you be,” “he be, she be, it be,” “we be, they be,” and “I were,” “you were,” “he were, she were, it were,” “we were, they were.” 7. In the case of many irregular verbs, Standard English redundantly distinguishes between past action and completed verb forms both by the use of the auxiliary have and by the use of distinct preterite and past participle forms: “I have seen” versus “I saw.” Many other dialects have “I have seen” versus “I seen.” (125,126) Looked at in this light, we can see that many sometimes frowned upon dialects seem much more logical and precise than Standard English. Trudgill concludes, however, “From an educational point of view, the position of Standard English as the dialect of English used in writing is unassailable.” (11)
* * * We must continue to teach our students the conventions of standard written English and formal standard spoken English. These are the standards much of society will expect of them and that some of their employers will also demand. However, some of the rules that are still being taught are clearly out or on the way out. None of the standard reference grammars and few of the major style manuals still insist on not splitting infinitives or not ending sentences with prepositions. The may/can distinction is also pretty well gone. The difficulty is that we can’t predict which arcane and archaic rule some employer or teacher or standardized tester may still believe is fully in force, and we do have to prepare our students as well as we can for such prescriptive judgments. We also need to help our students develop the ability to read formal English, literary English, and other variants from the recent past back to early Modern English, and to broaden their understanding of English to include all registers and major periods of Modern English. By the end of high school, we can expect many of them to read, obviously with a degree of effort, anything from the late 16th century on. The socalled rules won’t do us much good here, because many of them simply do not apply. In the 17th century , for example, modern passive voice was not fully developed, and one will find “The house is building” where we would write “The house is being built.” Also, in the 17th century “ain’t” was still the accepted contraction for “am not” and “do” had not yet fully developed to its current status as an auxiliary verb. These are just a few of the things that have changed since then.
61 What we tend to call errors often reflect ordinary historical change in the standard dialect rather than differences between standard and nonstandard dialects of English. That is, they are changes in the speech habits of the middle classes and the welleducated. The typical judge of usage is also a well-educated middle-class person. What is and is not accepted usage is constantly evolving (see Johanna Rubba, Maxine Hairston Appendix VII). However, dialect differences tend to be labeled as errors approximately 40% more often than non-conformities such as “who/whom” confusion. While Waldorf schools tend to have few students who speak dialect to any large degree, as teachers we must help our students be aware that all dialects are equal, and calling one wrong and one right is an act of preference and sometimes prejudice. Simply said, people can get away with middle-class deviations from standard more easily and more often than they get away with lower-class ones. And clearly, standards and conventions change. Handbooks continue to be rewritten. Teachers and students will find a visit to the online American Heritage Book of English Usage interesting (http://www.bartleby.com/64/). Not only does it give current usage acceptability for grammatical forms and individual words, but it gives excellent histories of rules and word changes. Wikipaedia also has a long list of words that are “in dispute.” Understanding the socioeconomic and linguistic realities behind grammar’s power leads us to teach students how to use that power for their benefit while at the same time being able to accept and understand varieties of expression. Once students are aware that English has a history, that there are a variety of codes within it at any time, and that most people are constantly switching codes, they can understand “value judgments” which they or others make based on the way that people speak or write. Some students might even be able to articulate moments when they themselves feel or have felt “judged” by their language. Is there a difference in judgment between speaking and writing? All dialects are equally complex grammatically. It seems worthwhile to engage in discussion about which particular dialect has become standard and why. It should become clear that the designation “standard” is purely sociological. It could be called “the language of power.” Any dialect could become standard if the group in power spoke it. Further, if language is constantly changing, who decides what the standard is at any particular time? These are fascinating topics for classroom discussion. Students need to explore varieties of sources for the answer: dictionaries, books on language, websites, varieties of prose, and several handbooks. It will be clear to most high school students (and no doubt to all teachers) that it is important to be fluent in Standard English but also comfortable about the changing level of formality and using dialect where appropriate.
62 If we consider Piaget’s understanding that adolescent thinking is at first egocentric, “deeply colored by the role he sees for himself and by his need to assert himself in his role as an adult in adult society,” we can further see that to be socially effective these adolescents must go beyond this to be tested in the practical world; they must be “decentered.” (Britton 232) Coming to terms with the demands of Standard English in academic life is a necessary “de-centering.” It needs to be done with an understanding of adolescent development and of the changing nature of Standard English. As David Crystal reminds us: For the most part, language changes because society changes. To stop or control the one means that we have to stop or control the other—a task which can succeed to only a very limited extent. Language change is inevitable and rarely predictable, and those who try to plan a language’s future waste their time if they think otherwise. These days, there is in fact a growing recognition of the need to develop a greater linguistic awareness and tolerance of change, particularly in a multi-ethnic society. This requires … that schools have the knowledge and resources to teach a common standard, while recognizing the existence and value of linguistic diversity.
What Might Work in a Waldorf High School Ideally, North American Waldorf teachers will develop a systematic, comprehensive approach to K–12 grammar that is founded on sound linguistic concepts and uses the age-appropriate understanding of Waldorf pedagogy that learning moves from perception (observation) to conception (understanding). In the meantime, here are a few suggestions for high school language exploration. 1. Speech and Comparative Analysis: There is a way of teaching language by using the way the child already speaks and supporting the instruction through a living interaction between those children who speak a more cultivated language and those who speak a dialect. In this way you can allow them to measure themselves against each other, not in some abstract way, but using feeling to guide a word, a sentence, in dialect into another. Steiner (The Renewal of Education 111–112) Given Steiner’s emphasis on the importance and “life” of dialects, a first step in promoting a conscious understanding of language would be to have students do comparative research. The first place that many linguistics professors suggest such a beginning is to record spoken English. To begin with speech would also be in keeping with Steiner’s understanding that “the written word is dead in comparison to spoken language.” (The Genius of Language 98) Such a nascent analysis might ask questions such as these: Who says what to whom, where, and under which circumstances? Which structures are evident in spoken language? How does spoken language differ from written language? How does speech change for different audiences and different purposes? Of course, this “recording” will be rudimentary among high school students but will allow an initial understanding of an important concept. Speech is especially important to adolescents. As James Britton in Language and Learning reminds us: Entering into … a talking relationship with their peers is for adolescents a new look at the familiar world and a turning point. As the influence of adults upon their ways of seeing, thinking and feeling declines, these chattering consultations with their own age-group first fill the gap. “Getting to know people” does not seem an adequate way of describing the purpose of talk in the classroom: yet it is evident that the most serious, the most taskoriented discussion bears at the same time, favorably or unfavorably, upon the relations between the people taking part…. Perhaps the most important general implications for teaching, however, is to note that anyone who
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64 succeeded in outlawing talk in the classroom would have outlawed life for the adolescent: The web of human relations must be spun in school as well as out. (223) Language lessons should be full of talk. As Steiner says, “By and large then, let grammar and syntax lessons be conversational.” (Practical Advice to Teachers 121) It is interesting for older students to attempt to record the language of young children, those in kindergarten or first grade, or younger siblings. From such an exercise, they might discover how young children are attempting to follow pattern as they learn to speak the “code” of those around them. They will probably discover, for example, that children expect logic in plurals like: “foots” and “mices,” or in past-tense verb forms such as,“I goed” or “I holded.” It is unlikely that older Waldorf students will have much exposure to others who speak an extensively different English dialect, but some students will have examples. Literature is also a useful resource for examples of dialect. We might even use transcriptions of talk shows that are available online (see Rebecca Wheeler’s Codeswitching). Recording the speech of classmates during lunchtime would be an interesting exercise. Improvisational drama is an obvious way to illustrate language choice in speech. Students should then be encouraged to discover some of the differences between spoken English and written English that they encounter in a variety of sources: newspapers, magazine articles, popular books, and various genres in literature. This will lead them to understand some of the ways in which spoken and written English are different from each other. We must not assume that they already know this.
2. Understanding Audience: Students might be encouraged to give an account of the same experience to an imagined variety of audiences. How would they describe a weekend party to a friend, a parent, a grandparent, a teacher? They immediately see that they are “codeswitching” as determined by their perception of audience. Within most later elementary and high school classes, there are examples of “subgroups” (skateboarders, computer aficionados) all of which use particular “codes.” In fact, asking students to make a small dictionary of words that they use with each other that parents and teachers may not know, or the language they use in text-messaging, reveals the quickly changing adolescent code. It is an easy step to looking at how written language also shifts according to audience. Newspapers and magazines can also be a rich resource for this activity. This will lead them to understand that choices in spoken and written English are determined by the speaker’s or writer’s perception of audience. They will also understand that language is always in a process of change.
65 3. Understanding Purpose: Engaging students in a discussion of the variety of purposes for spoken and written language use can be an engaging exercise. Many keep diaries and journals, for example. Who is the “Diary” in “Dear Diary”? To whom are they writing and for which purpose? Many still are encouraged to write “thank you notes” and a few might still write handwritten letters to a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes. There might be a school or class newsletter. They may have written or be encouraged to write accounts of recent class trips for such publications. Some may even have engaged in political activity such as writing to a company or to a politician or letters to the editor of local papers. Many will be e-mailing friends and will be eager to talk about the purpose of such exchanges. They can easily be lead to understand that choices in spoken and written English are determined by the speaker’s or writer’s perception of purpose.
4. Understanding Additional Elements in Spoken English: Close observation of “body language” can be the basis for valuable discussions in language choice. Is gesture arbitrary? What about the gestures for “Come here” for “Stay there,” for “Bless you,” or attitudes of prayer in various religions? This can easily lead into a discussion about whether the words humans have used to name things are arbitrary. Would “a rose by any other name … smell as sweet”? (see Adam Makkai “Afterword”).
5. Understanding Lexical Difference: By Grade 10, students have enough understanding of other languages to talk about the varieties of ways by which human beings have named things that we differentiate every day, such as tree, dog, sun, star, wind. Such discussion should have moved out of the realm of “one way is better than another” and into an interest in comparison. They need to know that every language has as complex a history as the history of the English language, and that every word has a history. Such discussions can also move into conversations about the “gestures” of nature. An interesting side path into the wonders of “onomatopoeia” could be tempting. (For excellent exercises in sound, see Mary Oliver’s Rules of the Dance and Paul Matthews’Sing Me the Creation.)
6. Educating Historical Perspective: In Grade 10, a main lesson on the history of the English language is essential. Students will learn that language is in constant process and that in the English language vocabulary increases while syntax simplifies. The story of English is thrilling. Students are delighted to learn that once there was no standard spelling, that “the dictionary” has a history of its own, that some of “the rules” were actually made up by identifiable men. The biographies of Alcuin of York, William Caxton, or dictionary makers like Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and Sir James Murray, or rule makers and grammar book writers like Bishop Lowth and John Dryden are thoroughly engaging.
66 Grade 10 seems the appropriate year for students to acquire a basic understanding of the evolution of English into the current Standard English, although before then, students can certainly understand that their choice of language for audience and purpose varies and that there is a “preferred code” for spoken and written English in a school setting. An understanding of the remarkable blend of Germanic and Romance elements in the English language allows students to become consciously aware of the concreteness of many Anglo-Saxon derivations and the abstractness of many Romance derivations, where we choose to use each, and the effect this has on listener or reader. Such a block on the development of the language can also introduce students to the development of the study of linguistics, including small biographies of Sir William Jones, Jacob Grimm, and perhaps even Noam Chomsky. Giving students practice in tracing the history of words (see American Heritage Dictionary, especially the Indo-European appendix) can lead to the question: Do all words come originally from a “concrete” beginning? Words such as “calculate,” “language,” or “curfew” can spark such a question. Steiner gives some excellent examples in The Genius of Language (“lord” and “lady”). He says, “…It is extraordinarily stimulating to point out … bits of language history occasionally to the children right in the middle of your lesson; at times it can truly enlighten a subject and also stimulate more lively thinking.” (Genius 64) An obvious discussion point would be the reasons for the spread of the English language. Students need to have an understanding of where the standards that are ever-changing and somewhat nebulous have come from. Such an understanding also reminds us as teachers that what is important is that the natural language of students not be impeded by over-consciousness of how far they fall short of a generally undefined “preferred code.” Can we avoid moral judgments by finding other ways to describe non-standard usage than “right and wrong,” or similar terms such as “correct” and “incorrect”? Can we simply take an interest in such constructions as “double (or triple) negatives” without responding with some nonsense that “two negatives make a positive”? Can we interest our students in tracing some of the change since Chaucer’s use of the negative? For example:. He nevere yet no vileyne ne sayde In al his lif unto no manner wight. It might be useful to learn that Old English had many ways of forming noun plurals. The most common was the addition of -en. We still have oxen, children, and brethren. But -as (later -es, -s) gained ground. Another way was the mutation plural (changing the vowel): geese, feet, mice, lice, men, women. During my History of Language block, I ask each student to find a word that could be used as at least two parts of speech (they are enormously common, which is a revelation right away), to look it up in the OED (now online), and to see if they can find the core meaning of the word, additional meanings that grew up over time, the shift from one part of speech to another, and what all this tells us about language
67 and how it changes and grows. The results of their research is hands-on proof that language is dynamic.
7. Freewriting to Establish Trust: In order to teach language awareness and use effectively, we begin with the understanding that each student must be encouraged to trust her or his own language. Many teachers focus on hyper-correction of the surface of a text and leave other, far more substantial issues unattended. Students who are not engaged do not write well, and students who are not allowed to bring in their own experiences and articulate their own perspectives do not learn to write well. It has been my experience that when I ask students to journal for ten minutes on a question that interests them, with no attention to being “correct,” I find a surprising thoughtfulness and fluency. If a writer does not trust his or her own language, then there is little chance of putting it to work in meaningful discourse. When a writer concentrates on getting important ideas on paper, many minor problems will take care of themselves.
8. Writing for Peers: Minor problems also dramatically disappear when students write for other students. With a Grade 9 class, I asked that original short stories be keyed in, printed, and submitted with a removable cover page for the title of the story and the studentauthor’s name. The title of the story also appeared on page one of the stapled story but with no indication as to the identity of the author. A blank page was stapled to the end of the story for comments. The stories were stacked on a central table and readers chose stories from the stack. Readers were expected to make suggestions in pencil throughout the story and had to include on the final page a summary statement about what was good about the story and what questions they still had. I was astounded not only by the dramatic reduction in what I would have been tempted to “red pencil” but also by the ability of students to help each other in clarity of expression and editing. Students were asked to produce one story each week for five weeks. Those without a story to submit were not permitted to join in the reading. By the end of week three, all students submitted a new story each week and all stories for the five weeks continued to be circulated. The other unforeseen benefit was an absolutely silent classroom while students read. As each class ended, students rushed forward eagerly to read what others had written about their stories.
We must help our students to be aware that all dialects are equal, and calling one wrong and one right is an act of preference and sometimes prejudice.
68 9. Introducing a Variety of Style Manuals: It seems important to teach students in high school that different style guides exist, that they don’t all agree, and that it is the writer’s responsibility to find out which style a particular assignment is supposed to reflect. The “just be consistent” requirement doesn’t serve students well either in college or after. Neither is it helpful to let students believe that one style manual is universally accepted. Many teachers do not adhere to a single style guide but simply assume that the “way they learned” a particular usage “rule” is the only “right” way. Their students then adopt the same attitude. This seems nearsighted. Having a number of style manuals in the classroom for side-by-side comparison is an interesting way to get students thinking: The Associated Press Style Manual, the Chicago Manual of Style, the MLA Style Manual, the APA Style Manual along with a simpler style manual like the one prepared by Diane Hacker. The students can be shown how to compare preferences in serial commas or apostrophe use after names ending in s. Inevitably, some students will react by wanting to know which one is “right,” and may be upset to find that variance exists. As teachers, we must help them to become comfortable with seeming ambiguity.
10. Discovering through Inductive Grammar: At a Waldorf Grade 12 conference in 1998, I heard a young man from Green Meadow describe an experiment in language that he had undertaken as a project out of 1984. He limited himself to three phrases only in response to all questions asked him for a full week. He was astonished that no one noticed that his language had been in any way restricted. It was a powerful lesson for him in the general unconscious way in which language is received. This is discovering language! In teaching grammar, we should resist the temptation to define terms. Rather, we should present them in various settings to be identified in context rather than by abstract definitions. Students should be taught to enjoy the gray areas between grammatical classifications rather than to fear them. Most teaching and learning of terminology can happen without prepared lessons as a natural part of the conversation about language and writing. In 1966, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner published a small book called Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching. It is a remarkable and readable overview of the history of grammar and linguistics, as well as examples of classrooms in which students are active “language–inquirers.” In it, they quote S. I. Hayakawa as he describes such a classroom: The emphasis in instruction is not upon authoritarian rules and principles, but upon the development of curiosity and habits of accurate observation of language-in-process, whether in the language of Dickens, at Chamber of Commerce meetings, or in labor-organizing drives. Styles of discourse, whether in scientific papers or in underworld argot are studied,
69 and their effectiveness within their social content is noted. Such training in linguistic observation produces students who, instead of being petrified into inarticulateness by stilted notions of “correctness,” take delight in the variety and richness of the English language and seek to cultivate … flexibility of linguistic resources…. (35–36) Postman and Weingartner characterize an “inquiry” language class as a place that: 1. requires that the burden of intellectual inquiry be carried by the student, 2. requires that students try to solve problems like those that linguists must solve, and 3. requires that students become involved in processes of defining, questioning, data gathering, observing, classifying, generalizing, and verifying matters of language. (37–40) An example of such a lesson comes from a junior high classroom in New Rochelle, NY, in which students investigated the concept of an adjective and what needed to be taken into consideration in definition. Students learned that the definition of a grammatical term reflects the point of view of the definer, that definitions of grammatical terms may be approached in a variety of ways, and that no single type of definition is likely to be completely satisfactory. The students were told that one common definition of an adjective is that it is a word that describes or modifies a noun. They were then asked how well this definition worked in the following given sentences: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The boy smiled. Those men are violinists. The boy is crying. He became a book salesman. Samoa is an American possession.
Then these questions were posed: Strictly in terms of our definition, are these words adjectives? What other ways are there to define an adjective? The teacher wrote on the blackboard: “She is a ––––––––– person than Kathy.” Student suggestions were listed. Then they were asked: What do you notice about all these words? Can we define an adjective as a word to which -er might be added? And so the exercise continued. (74–77) One high school teacher, quoted in Postman and Weingartner’s book, begins, “What to do? Isn’t the answer obvious? Let us return to direct observation, to direct experience.” He goes on to describe one of his adventures with students. Someone was asked to speak a sentence. That sentence was then recorded. Students were then given five fundamental questions:
70 1. Are all words alike? 2. Since obviously not, what are the kinds of words? (These students had read 1984, including “the Principles of Newspeak.” They brought this in as one way of defining kinds of words. They then freely discussed other differences from the number of letters in the word to rhyming possibilities. They arrived at differences in function.) 3. Out of this came another question: What are their differences in function? 4. Where do words occur in relation to each other by function? 5. In what patterns do words occur? They took three weeks to answer those questions. They came up with four classes of words: 1. labels and substitutes for labels, 2. predicates that show action and that show being, 3. pointers that point to labels, that point to predicates, that point to other pointers, 4. connectors. They learned that there is a discoverable pattern of words in English. “Control words” (subject, predicate, object, or complement) are the least variable in their places within the patterns. Pointers are extremely variable in size and location. They were then delighted to look at the “control words” in “Ode to the West Wind.” (79–82) As part of a review of grammar in Grade 9, I sent two scribes to the board and had the students describe all the things that there were in the room. They eventually included abstract nouns as well. Then I gave them a paragraph from the literature we were reading and had them underline the nouns. Then, working in groups, I had them discuss how they knew that the words that they had underlined were nouns. They came up with all sorts of answers beyond the usual definition of a noun: the position or function in a sentence, having identifiable suffixes, being preceded by “the,” “a,” or “an” or an adjective, and words not at the beginning of a sentence that start with capitals. It isn’t a radical shift to move from having them discover the “rules” rather than giving them definitions. The traditional definitions of the parts of speech can be difficult to apply. Students recognize the basic elements of grammar more reliably and quickly by looking at the form of a word and by using sentence “frames.”
11. Using Technology: Ah! The Internet. How else would we know that March 7 was Grammar Day? So decided by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG). Grammar, it turns out, is a hot topic with hundreds of sites. As high school teachers, we would be wise to learn to use it to our advantage. A lesson on the apostrophe might begin with an assignment asking students to spend 20 minutes of homework time looking at this website, then coming to class prepared with questions and opinions: www.apostropheabuse.com.
71 Small-group discussions could share responses to the site. Working in pairs and using their own language, students could then articulate their understanding of current conventions for the use of the apostrophe based on what they know from reading and usage and these understandings then shared. Followup assignments could include individual investigations of the history of the apostrophe, googling grammar sites for current conventions, considering George Bernard Shaw’s decision that apostrophes are not necessary, checking classroom handbooks (as many as possible) for current conventions, testing grammar check for conformity to current conventions, and probably many other topics. There are many grammar sites at the touch of a finger. Why not have students investigate some of these and share their discoveries? Why not try a daily usage panel within the classroom using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_ with-disputed_usage? Or ask students to evaluate the grammar check interference they encounter when word processing? Some websites worth checking are:
An – www.takeourword.com Grammar and Style Notes – http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/ The Guide to Grammar and Writing – http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/ My Virtual Reference Desk – http://www.refdesk.com/ Online English Dictionary and Thesaurus – www.dictionary.com Online Dictionary and links to grammar guides for 110 languages, including English – http://www.yourdictionary.com Smartthinking.com – www.smartthinking.com THOR: The Virtual Reference Desk – http://thorplus.lib.purdue.edu/reference/ index.html Vavra, Edward. Teaching Grammar as a Liberating Art – http://www2.pct.edu/ courses/evavra/TGLA/Index.htm Oxford English Dictionary – http://www/askoxford.com/?view=uk
12. Learning through Writing: Understanding rhetorical grammar means understanding the grammatical choices available to writers and the rhetorical effects those choices will have on readers. According to much research, the most successful teaching of grammar in high school seems to be lessons that are taught in the context of reading or writing using a constructivist approach rather than an error-based approach. Constance Weaver summarizes the difference between the two. An error-based approach, which she calls “product” or “behavioral,” is a “teaching perspective: to eliminate all errors by establishing correct, automatic habits; mastery of
72 the target language is the goal.” (Teaching Grammar in Context 63) The constructivist or process approach sees “errors as a natural part of learning a language,” and is “a learning perspective: to assist the learner in approximating the target language; support active learning strategies and recognize that not all errors will disappear.” Weaver’s book is an excellent resource for ways to teach grammar through such a process approach. Harry Noden’s Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing was developed in part through working with his wife in a Waldorf elementary school (in Akron, Ohio). He helps students develop a “palette” of stylistic devices by finding them in literature and then trying them out in their own writing. His book is based on the premise that a writer is much like an artist who paints images, only using grammatical structures as tools. Each chapter is divided into concepts and strategies: Concepts illustrate how professional writers have applied image grammar to develop their art, and strategies provide classroom-tested lessons. Only after students are familiar with the effect does the teacher introduce terminology. Noden’s book has been described as “revolutionary” and more than one teacher has called it “the most exciting resource I have ever found.” Noden’s book comes complete with a companion CDRom containing over 60 complete lesson strategies, 100 illustrative examples, and 80 links to additional images. Chapters are: (1) The Writer as Artist: Basic Brush Strokes; (2) The Artist’s Eye: Seeing Specific Details; (3) The Artist’s Rhythms: The Music of Parallel Structures; (4) From Imitation to Creation: Learning from the Masters; (5) The Artist’s Special Effects: The Grammar-Meaning Connection; (6) Toward a Grammar of Passages: Linking Images beyond the Sentence; (7) Story Grammar and Scenes: Shapes for Fiction; (8) Nonfiction Form #5: A Close Examination of a Feature Article Form; and (9) Systematic Revision: Form, Style, Content, and Conventions. I recommend it highly. Sentence stuffing is another technique to elicit more complex writing. Begin with a simple sentence like “The baby cried” and ask the journalistic questions: who, what, why, where. Allow students to discover the variety of patterns of language through which they answer these questions. Constructing increasingly complex sentences: Students can challenge each other to build sentences with specific grammatical elements. The game starts with a simple sentence: “Mary writes a letter.” For example, when asked to add an adverb, students who truly understand grammatical function will choose words such as never as well as adjectives with -ly endings. From that point, the game proceeds to larger units, including, perhaps, adding a second independent clause to create a compound sentence: “Mary writes a letter, and Hank watches television.” An adverbial phrase might follow to make the sentence complex (“Before going to the store, Mary writes a letter, and Hank watches television.”) or a second proper noun added for a compound subject (“Before going to the store, Joe and Mary write a letter, and Hank watches television.”). Further modification might add subordinate clauses, appositives, or the like.
73 Flash fiction pieces, sometimes called microfiction or postcard stories, insist on an exact number of words. This can be a great way to raise language awareness: To reduce a story that has 120 words to the absolutely required 100 words makes for very careful choices.
13. Focusing on Stylistic Choice: Integrating grammar into literature lessons would promote a “discovery grammar” starting with the students’ perception of a certain general characteristic in the style of the text, and tracing that characteristic back to a grammatical feature. This could come from even such a vague response as “ it’s descriptive” and “it’s hard to follow.” Which rhetorical choices does James Joyce use? How does his written language differ from that of Stephen King? How does that show through in the grammatical structures each chooses to use? What is the difference in clause structure? What decisions did Shakespeare have to make when he was writing primarily in iambic pentameter? What decisions do rap artists make regarding grammar and usage? What are the similarities and differences between those pieces of writing and a Langston Hughes blues poem? In his explanatory note at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain explains one of the difficulties with using nonstandard language: In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremist form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of the last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. What a great invitation to investigate language variation! There are many example that we often overlook in literature that have an exciting relationship to grammar: finding the subject and verb in the first sentence in “The Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, for example, with its lengthy series of adverbial clauses and the similar pattern in Shakespeare’s “When Icicles Hang by the Wall”; or noticing the effect of the opening paragraph of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and discovering that it has no verb.
14. Playing with Words: Let us not forget the Steiner injunction to “Make ’em laugh!” at least once every lesson. Funny examples are remembered. I’m convinced that Lynne Truss can thank the clever panda joke for a large part of the phenomenal success of Eats, Shoots &Leaves.
74 She’s a funny lady and it was her sense of humor that kept me reading even as I became increasingly saddened by her prescriptivism. Her comic novels are even funnier. David Crystal’s Language Play, or what he calls Applied Ludic Linguistics, is packed with language awareness fun stuff. Beneath the fun, however, Crystal poses a troubling reflection in his chapter on language play in children’s language acquisition. Given the high profile of language play within adult society, its prominence during the years when children are learning to speak, and its relevance to literacy and verbal art, you would naturally expect that it would have a privileged place in those materials and settings where children are being taught to read and write, or to develop their abilities in the use of the spoken language. You would expect reading schemes to soak themselves thoroughly in it. You would expect authors writing for very young children to make copious use of it. You would expect curriculum documents to draw special attention to it. Well, if you do have these expectations, you will be severely disappointed. For when we look for ludic language in the books and materials which children have traditionally encountered in school, while learning to develop their abilities in listening, speaking, reading and writing, … we shall find next to nothing there. (182) Word games and jokes work wonders and make for terrific lesson starters or daily grammar engagements. How about these for comma use?
As I ate my dog Sam watched. I respect my parents, Mother Teresa and Einstein. I think I know. A woman without her man is nothing.
Or have them punctuate this paragraph brought to our colloquium by David Sloan: Dear John I want a man who knows what love is all about you are generous kind thoughtful people who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior you have ruined me for other men I yearn for you I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart I can be forever happy will you let me be yours Gloria Punctuating it one way shows Gloria completely in love, punctuated another way, completely puts John down. (Hint: Put the first full stop after “is.”) How about giving the kids the transcript of Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” (available online). Ask them to figure out the grammatical reason why it’s funny and
75 why it wouldn’t work in print. Or ask them to describe the grammatical ambiguity that makes this funny: “Please call me a taxi.” “O.K., if you insist. You are a taxi.” Or use the “Question Game” from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (available online) to probe transformations from declarative sentence patterns to questions or for discussion on following rules. Books by Richard Lederer are rich resources – http://www.verbivore.com. Maybe we can combine grammar, play, and art to understand the ambiguity of “dangling participles” with illustrations. An example would be: “Slithering through the pile of leaves, the little girl was frightened by the snake.” The drawing might show a little girl slithering through a pile of leaves confronting a snake. Think what Grade 9 could do with: “I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith.”
15. Wider Language Investigation: “I have never met a person who is not interested in language.” So says Stephen Pinker in The Language Instinct. (7) Our high school students are no exception. On the Monday morning following our grammar symposium at High Mowing, Mary Ann Wells (Waldorf High School of Massachusetts Bay) experienced the interest inherent in students when they are free to engage in a broader exploration of grammar: I walked into my 12th grade homeroom and the students asked for a studytime. I told them that would be wonderful, as I had to get some work done because I had been away attending a grammar conference all weekend. Several of the students thought that was very exciting and I thought they were making fun of it—but they were indeed serious and a discussion ensued not unlike those we were having in Wilton. Johnny thinks grammar matters and cares deeply about correct usage. His very best friend Jahan sees the importance of correct usage and the rules of grammar but feels he knows them so he can speak any way that is comfortable and gets his point across. Augie wonders who invented punctuation—and it went on and on. The entire 12th grade was engaged in a discussion about the importance of grammar and correct usage and they were fascinated that Waldorf teachers are researching and discussing it as well. Language Exploration & Awareness: A Resource Book for Teachers by Larry Andrews is rich with activities worthy of our inquisitive students. Andrews is convinced that “language learning in schools ought to be more than recognizing aspects of correct syntax and good usage” and needs to include “study of genuine, authentic language rather than abstract and contrived textbook examples and models.” (ix–x) The best way for people to learn about language is for them to observe language, ask questions about how and why language forms are used as they are in various contexts, make closer and more focused observations, and then form a tentative generalization. (xi)
76 As we well know, most students do not think of school as an academic institution; most learners regard school as … the center of their social lives…. Since social ties, identification, groups, and networks are of central importance to schoolage learners, there is logic behind a decision to focus more on language study in its use in society, in real life. Throughout the school years, students increasingly come into greater contact with wider ranges of social classes and more contact with adults; their language networks grow and become increasingly more socially sensitive and perceptive. (36) Andrews includes in his resource hundreds of suggestions, games, and explorations ready-made for any high school classroom. These cover lexicography, multiple use of dictionaries, regional, social and historical variations, rules and conventions of varieties of discourse, euphemisms and jargon, intolerance and prejudice. Language texts for high school and college written and published in the 1960s and 1970s continue to be excellent resources. Most include short, easily readable, and, in most cases, model essays on the nature of language, body language, animal language, the history of language, the history of grammar, the history of dictionaries, language conventions, spelling reform, slang, “doublespeak,” “gobbledygook,” “weasel words,” politics, advertising, sexism, racism, and on and on. My favorites listed below (and in Works Cited and of Interest) are all available from online booksellers (ABE books, for example). Even though they can prove invaluable to English teachers, most can now be bought for $1.00. Exposition and the English Language Sanderson and Gordon (1963) Looking at Language: Essays in Introductory Linguistics Scargill and Penner (1966) Grammar Is…. MacDonald and Shephard (1974) Language on Paper Penner and McConnell (1977) Language: Introductory Readings Clark, et al. (1977) Speaking of Words: A Language Reader MacKillop and Cross (1978)
PART II:
Additional Contributions Meg Gorman: Bringing Traditional Grammar to Life Meg Gorman is a seasoned teacher with many years of experience who has taught at Waldorf high schools in Washington, Sacramento, San Francisco, and most recently Seattle. She treats her students to a three-week review or introduction to the parts of speech at the beginning of Grade 9. Then, she drops grammar and teaches a literature unit. Following this, she uses examples from the literature in a grammar session on verbals for three weeks. Meg has devised humorous stick figure representations for the traditional parts of speech and even suggests personality traits. For example, Miss Adjective only wants to hang out with nouns and pronouns whereas Mr. Adverb is outrageous because he not only likes verbs, but he likes Miss Adjective and even other Adverbs! She invents rap riffs for the class to chant: “How, when, where, how much, how many, to what extent are Mr. Adverb’s questions.” Meg gives plenty of practice and tells her students to “blunder boldly,” make lots of mistakes, and learn from them. Students who need a little extra help are invited to join Sir Lunchalot during Grammar Lunch days. After bringing the parts of speech to life, Meg moves on to parts of the sentence, again personifying these in humorous ways. For example, she draws Miss Independent Clause holding Mr. Dependent Clause. He wasn’t able to support himself; he leaned on a subordinator. In her presentation at the colloquium, Meg illustrated a rapid fire game in which students alternately generated dependent and independent clauses: I had a cat—When I had a cat; I slept well—Because I slept well; I was clever in class—Although I was clever in class, I failed the test. Again, there are classroom chants: “Mr. Indirect object: To whom, to what, for what, for whom?” It is an easy next step to show how whole phrases can be parts of speech by asking questions such as: What drives this phrase?. What is it in terms of a part of speech? First, Meg intrigues them with a mystery. Take, for instance, this sentence: Running the ball with his head between his legs was the special tactic of the running back when he wanted to confuse a hardened opponent. Students can quite easily see that the phrase “Running the ball with his head between his legs” seems like a noun because it is the subject of “was.” Yet “ball” is the
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78 direct object of “running.” It is a mystery! The only solution is to see that “running” is half noun and half verb. Thus, the concept of verbal is discovered and the labels gerund, participle, and infinitive reinforced through lots of practice. After they have built up a picture, she gives practice distinguishing between the three forms in sentences such as these: Driving in the snow is a real blast. Barbara feared skidding in the snow. Dancing is my pleasure. To dance is my pleasure. I love writing about gerunds. My greatest delight is eating scones. The horses continued neighing. The mouse scurried across the room, running with the cat. He gave her laughing, singing, and dancing for her birthday. Elmo explored swallowing goldfish. Swimming is fun. Jumping hurts my knees. He was afraid of running. Students then write their own sentences using gerunds as subjects, objects, predicate nominatives, and so on, asking other students to determine if they’re correct. Meg and the students enjoy ambiguity. In a sentence such as “Elmo explored swallowing goldfish, she might ask students to clarify whether “swallowing” is a gerund or a participle by composing the next phrase, clause, or sentence. “Elmo explored swallowing goldfish and noticed that their gills flapped 50 times a minute while the fish food disappeared.” Or, “Elmo explored swallowing goldfish and found that his throat felt really weird.” Meg’s encore was a performance illustrating “phonetic punctuation” that she learned from the late musical comedian Victor Borge. Although pressed to share her delightful approach by publishing, Meg replied that each teacher needs to create an individual teaching style out of individual life experience. Nevertheless, we live in hope that she will change her mind.
79 Wendy Bruneau: Using Image Grammar in the Classroom Wendy Bruneau, who teaches English at High Mowing School, has been using Harry Noden’s Image Grammar as a resource in her writing classes for several years. The exercise she shared at the colloquium works well in both Grades 9 and 11. Noden has students create a palette of effective images from writers they admire and then model the grammatical structures in their own writing. Our exercise was to enable us to use images to make our writing more colorful. Wendy began by asking us to work in pairs, giving a different book to each pair. Books included The Grapes of Wrath, The Old Man and the Sea, and other classics. We were instructed to open the books at random, and, reading a page aloud, choose effective words or phrases in as many as possible of the following categories that she had listed on the blackboard, with examples from Hemingway and Steinbeck: • movement: e.g., “stood up, toes working, looking out”; “strove against the sun” • character description: e.g., “nose, beaked and hard”; “wore overalls and a blue shirt”; “muzzled and goggled” • moods: e.g., “gentle, thoughtful pace”; “jumpy as a studhorse in a box stall” • random parts of speech:. Nouns: e.g., “shining iron seat” Verbs: Adjectives: Adverbs: During a timed writing assignment (15 minutes) each of us took the phrases and words that we had gleaned from our particular book and used them in our own paragraph that had nothing to do with the original story. As she does in her classes, she then asked for some of these to be read aloud. The following passage was created during our exercise, working with words and phrases from The Grapes of Wrath: The boy shivered violently as he sat, bent over the wheel. He looked out over the desert; the sun touched the horizon and flattened over it. A long gasping sigh came from the boy’s mouth. He started the truck and it rumbled along, putting a little earthquake in the ground as he headed home to the ranch and his dying father. Students often think the results of this exercise are the best writing they’ve ever done because they can “see” the story they’ve written. Wendy also used the exercise with The God of Small Things and Lord of the Flies. Here are two examples of student work:
80 Alexander lowered himself down the elevator shaft while attempting to disentangle his anxious, disorderly pile of thoughts. He had been confined in the elevator for his apartment building for nearly 24 hours before he relented and began his journey out. His gray shirt stuck to him as he cautiously planned his next move. The heat was becoming unbearable and lagoons of humidity wafted through the stale air. Alexander’s face was a glowing burgundy and his hair was plastered to his forehead. It seemed as though there were no escape. Finally, his feet reached solid ground. He bent down and crawled through a small opening into the fresh air of the city. She didn’t know what to do, so she just watched. Through the hole in the base of the tree she could see a city, a tiny, shimmering city, made of wood and decorated with glass and withered flowers. She had no idea what to expect, but it wasn’t this. Tiny people with brightly colored skin (fairies, she supposed) went about their business, but with a sense of fun most humans lose by the age of ten. They ran from a pool of water to shade, danced down the streets. They were filthy dirty and full of restlessness and energy. The air in the cavern was full of noise, talking, singing, and crying. A green man picked fruit from a tiny tree (did they use bonsai?). A pile of blue and purple children huddled together for comfort in a mound of milkweed fluff. Red-eyed and miserable, a pink child watched them, from the shadow nearby. A circle of savagely beautiful women with striped skin and hair smoked a pipe that was larger than they were. A circle of fairies of all ages danced passionately in the grass. Stars seemed to glow on the ceiling of the cavern, but Saami know it had to be some kind of illusion. Her mind tried to discount everything she was seeing, but what was the explanation unless she had just gone batty? Suddenly, something poked her in the back of the head. “Hooray, Image Grammar !” Wendy says. Jason Gross: Seeing Grammar Jason teaches English at Kimberton Waldorf School. He began by telling us that he had no grammar instruction until university, where he had studied transformational grammar. Transformational grammar looks at the relation between words. Before assigning us an exercise, he posed some fundamental questions. If we take a phenomenological approach to grammar, can we allow students to discover it for themselves? If we label something, are we teaching a concept? What value does a label have? At what point and how do we present labels? Can we teach grammar without labels other than basic concepts such as “word” or “phrase” and allow students to discover what the word or phrase is actually doing? Working in groups of three, we were given three diagrammed sentences and asked to look at the relationship between the words in each. (Jason has Grade 9 students work on this exercise over a period of about a week.)
81 1.
S Fire
burns.
2.
S The fire
3.
is burning. S
? The
? fire
is burning
? in the stove.
Then we were given this statement to complete: The fundamental elements of any sentence are a _______ and a ________. We discussed our answers. We were next instructed to draw lines that show the relationships of all the words in this quoted passage (punctuated as one sentence) from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”: ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; / All mimsy were the borogroves, / And the mome raths outgrabe, The concept of “kernel sentence” (simple sentences) was introduced and we were asked to list each possible “kernel sentence” in the quoted passage. For example: It was brillig. The toves gyred. The toves gimbled. The toves were in the wabe. The borogroves were all mimsy. The raths were mome. The raths outgrabe. The next step was to rearrange the word order of each “kernel sentence” and note if and when the meaning changed, stayed the same, or was lost. We were asked to give each word a label that defined its role in the sentence, avoiding if we could the standard Latinate terms of traditional grammar. This was largely impossible for most of us, but it was an enlightening exercise to attempt. The next step was to create a glossary of terms, showing all forms of the word, defining how, when, and why the term changes form (transforms).
82 Jason Gross: Serious Fun with Commas Jason presented a lesson from a Grade 12 class inspired by publicity surrounding the Supreme Court’s agreement to consider District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down Washington’s strict gun ordinance as a violation of the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.” Consider the role commas play in the current debate over the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: the right to bear arms. A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Consider the meaning of this sentence in terms of 1) The “collective” right of states to maintain their militias, versus 2) The “individual” right to carry a gun whether in a militia or not. Look up the definitions and comma rules for Independent and Dependent Clauses. Punctuate the sentence favoring the argument for “collective” right: A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Punctuate the sentence favoring the argument for “individual” right: A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Rewrite the sentence to best support “collective” right and “individual” right: A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Read the attached article. Clause and Effect Published: December 16, 2007 LAST month the Supreme Court agreed to consider District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down Washington’s strict gun ordinance as a violation of the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.” This will be the first time in nearly seventy years that the court has considered the Second Amendment. The outcome of the case is difficult to handicap, mainly because so little is known about the justices’ views on the lethal device at the center of the controversy: the comma. That’s right, the “small crooked point,” as Richard Mulcaster described this punctuation upstart in 1582. The official version of the Second Amendment has three of the little blighters:
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A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The decision invalidating the district’s gun ban, written by Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cites the second comma (the one after “state”) as proof that the Second Amendment does not merely protect the “collective” right of states to maintain their militias, but endows each citizen with an “individual” right to carry a gun, regardless of membership in the local militia. How does a mere comma do that? According to the court, the second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one “prefatory” and the other “operative.” On this reading, the bit about a well-regulated militia is just preliminary throat clearing; the framers don’t really get down to business until they start talking about “the right of the people. . shall not be infringed.” The circuit court’s opinion is only the latest volley in a long-simmering comma war. In a 2001 Fifth Circuit case, a group of anti-gun academics submitted an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief arguing that the “unusual” commas of the Second Amendment support the collective rights interpretation. According to these amici, the founders’ use of commas reveals that what they really meant to say was “a well-regulated militia … shall not be infringed.” Now that the issue is heading to the Supreme Court, the pro-gun American Civil Rights Union is firing back with its own punctuationpacking brief. Nelson Lund, a professor of law at George Mason University, argues that everything before the second comma is an ”absolute phrase” and, therefore, does not modify anything in the main clause. Professor Lund states that the Second Amendment “has exactly the same meaning that it would have if the preamble had been omitted.” Refreshing though it is to see punctuation at the center of a national debate, there could scarcely be a worse place to search for the framers’ original intent than their use of commas. In the 18th century, punctuation marks were as common as medicinal leeches and just about as scientific. Commas and other marks evolved from a variety of symbols meant to denote pauses in speaking. For centuries, punctuation was as chaotic as individual speech patterns. The situation was even worse in the law, where a long English tradition held that punctuation marks were not actually part of statutes (and, therefore, courts could not consider punctuation when interpreting them). Not surprisingly, lawmakers took a devil-may-care approach to punctuation. Often, the whole business of punctuation was left to the discretion of scriveners, who liked to show their chops by inserting as many varied marks as possible. Another problem with trying to find meaning in the Second Amendment’s commas is that nobody is certain how many commas it is supposed to have. The version that ended up in the National Archives has
84 three, but that may be a fluke. Legal historians note that some states ratified a two-comma version. At least one recent law journal article refers to a fourcomma version. The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence. Professor Lund is correct that the clause about a well regulated militia is “absolute,” but only in the sense that it is grammatically independent of the main clause, not that it is logically unrelated. To the contrary, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause. The founders—most of whom were classically educated—would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” [Ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras]. The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.” Likewise, when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary. Advocates of both gun rights and gun control are making a tactical mistake by focusing on the commas of the Second Amendment. After all, couldn’t one just as easily obsess about the founders’ odd use of capitalization? Perhaps the next amicus brief will find the true intent of the amendment by pointing out that “militia” and “state” are capitalized in the original, whereas “people” is not. Adam Freedman, the author of The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese, writes the “Legal Lingo” column for the New York Law Journal Magazine.
Patrice Pinette: Grammar and Poetry Patrice, who teaches English and Eurythmy at High Mowing School, is herself a published poet. Her creative writing workshops are offered as electives: one for students in Grades 9 and 10, the other for students in Grades 11 and 12. Patrice brings examples of great writing, creates a space for listening, and gives opportunity for finding voice. The young people learn by deeply receiving how others use language. Patrice is aware that there is a tension between scholarly and respected usage and the individualization of language. Our sense of self is inseparable from the way we use language and even more so in poetry. Metaphor helps lead students beyond themselves by using the outer world to express the inner life. We are released from
85 self-absorption but haven’t lost the sense of feeling. Paul Matthews’ work speaks of the value of inviting randomness. Many other creative artists of the word would agree. Patrice asks students to engage in a strict observation of something in nature, stripping away similes. She then offers the students one of Pablo Neruda’s “Elemental Odes” which sees the cosmos in a lemon:
Ode to the Lemon Out of lemon flowers loosed on the moonlight, love’s lashed and insatiable essences, sodden with fragrance, the lemon tree’s yellow emerges, the lemons move down from the tree’s planetarium Delicate merchandise! The harbors are big with itbazaars for the light and the barbarous gold. We open the halves of a miracle, and a clotting of acids brims into the starry divisions: creation’s original juices, irreducible, changeless, alive: so the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb. Cutting the lemon the knife leaves a little cathedral: alcoves unguessed by the eye
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that open acidulous glass o the light; topazes riding the droplets, altars, aromatic facades. So, while the hand holds the cut of the lemon, half a world on a trencher, the gold of the universe wells to your touch: a cup yellow with miracles, a breast and a nipple perfuming the earth; a flashing made fruitage, the diminutive fire of a planet.
– Pablo Neruda
“Snake,” by D. H. Lawrence, has intense, clear, descriptive observation, laden with emotion revealing the soul’s struggle. Snake A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there. In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree I came down the steps with my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me. He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough And rested hishroat upon the stone bottom, And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.
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Someone was before me at my water-trough, And I, like a second comer, waiting. He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more, Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. The voice of my education said to me He must be killed, For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous. And voices in me said, If you were a man You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. But must I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, Into the burning bowels of this earth? Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured? I felt so honoured. And yet those voices: If you were not afraid, you would kill him! And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more That he should seek my hospitality From out the dark door of the secret earth. He drank enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, Seeming to lick his lips, And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, And slowly turned his head, And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
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And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, Overcame me now his back was turned. I looked round, I put down my pitcher, I picked up a clumsy log And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter. I think it did not hit him, But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste. Writhed like lightning, and was gone Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination. And immediately I regretted it. I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education. And I thought of the albatross And I wished he would come back, my snake. For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again. And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate: A pettiness.
– D. H. Lawrence Taormina, (1923)
89 Patrice reminded us of e.e. cummings’ description of the tension of finding our own voice: As Patrice tells her students, “Poetry starts when ordinary words don’t do it.”
A Poet’s Advice A real human is somebody who feels and who expresses his or her feelings. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know what they feel—but that’s thinking or believing or knowing: not feeling. And being real is feeling—not just knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but it’s very difficult to learn to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for communicating nobody-but-yourself to others, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t real can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as just being just like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we are not real. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve loved just once with a nobody-but-yourself heart, you” ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become real is: Do something easy, like dreaming of freedom—unless you’re ready to commit yourself to feel and work and fight till you die.
– e.e. cummings
Again e.e. cummings. “This is terrible grammar! Don’t you love it?!” said Patrice.
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Fair Warning Here is a thing. To one somebody, this “thing” is a totally flourishing universal joyous particular happening deep amazing miraculous indivisible being. To another somebody, this “same” thing means something which, if. sawed in two at the base, will tell you how old it is. To another somebody, this “same” thing doesn’t exist because there isn’t a thunderstorm; but if there were a thunderstorm, this “selfsame” thing would merely exist as something to be especially avoided. To a fourth somebody, this “very selfsame” thing, properly maltreated, represents something called “lumber,” which, improperly maltreated, represents something else called “money,” which represents something else called (more likely than not) “dear.” Somebody number one is a poet. Actually he is alive. His address is: Now. All the other somebodies are unpoets. They all aren’t alive. They all merely are not unexisting—in a kind of an unkind of real unreality or When. Here is another thing: Whatever happens, everybody cannot turn the Nowman’s Now into When; whatever doesn’t, nobody can turn the Whenman’s When into Now.
– e.e. cummings from the Junior League Magazine, May 1938
Patrice shared examples of student “chap books” including an “artist’s statement” for the beginning of each. Examples of poems of self-discovery include “In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many of the poems of Denise Levertov. Patrice asks students to write about experiences of themselves as a self. The poetics block deals with both form and function through practice. She recommends Some Things Words Can Do by Martha Collins for its syntactical inventiveness. She shares poems with her students that repeat particular grammatical constructions. “When” clauses: When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes … (Sonnet XXIX Shakespeare) When I heard the learn’d astronomer … (Walt Whitman) When it is finally ours, this freedom … (“Frederick Douglass” Robert Hayden) Or prepositions: Out of the cradle endlessly rocking Or If … when and If … then constructions.
91 She recommended Paul Matthews’ Sing Me the Creation, which is filled with such exercises. Patrice finished by reading “They Feed They Lion” by Philip Levine.
They Feed They Lion Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow. Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch, They Lion grow. Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, “Come home, Come home!” From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow. From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,” Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels, The grained arm that pulls the hands, They Lion grow. From my five arms and all my hands, From all my white sins forgiven, they feed, From my car passing under the stars, They Lion, from my children inherit, From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion, From they sack and they belly opened And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth They feed they Lion and he comes.
– Philip Levine
92 Jane Wulsin: Study of Man Jane Wulsin currently teaches Grade 5 at the Green Meadow Waldorf School. She was the only lower school participant in our colloquium and we were delighted that she was able to be with us. Her spontaneous offering from recent Green Meadow faculty work with Rudolf Steiner’s Study of Man raised essential questions as we move forward in developing a Waldorf grammar curriculum. Jane’s clear picture of willing, feeling, and thinking as they work in body and soul during the three phases of child development precipitated an intense discussion of what is appropriate at which age. How can we awaken consciousness in appropriate ways at appropriate times, phenomenologically. In Study of Man Steiner speaks of the stages of early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. The first is primarily working out of willing, the second out of feeling, and the third out of thinking. As well, each seven-year period can be divided into thirds. Each third is colored by willing, feeling, and thinking. At the age of seven a new capacity for thinking occurs (thinking more actively in pictures). Children move from object-related memory and thinking; they are freed from the object. In Jane’s experience of fourth grade, if the students are given a sentence such as: The lioness is pregnant for three and one-half months and may give birth to two to four cubs, they aren’t satisfied and want to rewrite until it sounds better. Students are given the option to rewrite or choose from possibilities. The grammar arises from the writing. This seems consistent with Steiner’s description of this age. However, when the child reaches the turning point between the 9th and 19th year his own development demands that he acquires some knowledge of grammar. which must not be given in a pedantic way, for at this stage the child must find the transition toward ego-development. He must now learn to do everything more consciously that he has done hitherto. One therefore needs to introduce an element of thinking into the teaching of the language with which the child is already familiar; though in a feeling way…. At this important point between his 9th and 10th year, the child needs to occupy himself with grammar in order to express himself with certainty, supported by the logic of grammar. (Stockmeyer 20) At age 14 something happens that makes deeper grammar exploration possible, although this opening seems to begin in 7th grade with the elongation of the skeleton. In high school how do we work in grammar through will, then feeling, then thinking? Particularly, when do we get to the thinking part of thinking? What is possible with the birth of the astral body at 14 and with the birth of the etheric heart at 16? Much research invites us.
Works Cited and of Interest Aeppli, Willi. 1970. Rudolf Steiner Education and the Developing Child. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press. Andrews, Larry. 1983. Language Exploration and Awareness: A Resource Book for Teachers. New York: Longman. Barnes, Christy MacKaye. 1996. “The Crisis of the Word Today,” For the Love of Literature. ed. Douglas Gerwin. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press. Bernstein, Theodore M. 1991. Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bishop, Morris. 1969. “Good Usage, Bad Usage and Usage,” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Third Edition xxi–xxiv. Britton, James. 1970. Language and Learning. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press. Burridge, Kate. 2005. Weeds in the Garden of Words. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Casagrande, Jane. 2006. Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite. London: Penguin Books. Crystal, David. 1998. Language Play. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ––––. 2003. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Second Edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ––––. 2006. The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––––. 2006. How Language Works. London: Penguin Books. ––––. 2006. Language and the Internet. 2nd Edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ––––. 2006. Making Sense of Grammar. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Longman. Demanett, Susan. 1996. “Questing toward a True Understanding of Grammar,” For the Love of Literature. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press. Egan, Keiran. 2006. Teaching Literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Fine, Edith H. and Judith P. Josephson. 1998. Nitty-Gritty Grammar: A Not-So-Serious Guide to Clear Communication. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press.
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94 Fowler, H. W. 1965. [1926] A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Second Edition. Revised by Sir Ernest Gower. London: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Karen Elizabeth. 1993. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. New York: Pantheon. ––––. 1993. The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, rev. and exp. New York: Ticknor & Fields. Hacker, Diana. 2005. A Writer’s Reference. Sixth Edition. Boston: Bedford Books. Hancock, Craig. 2005. Meaning-Centered Grammar: An Introductory Text. London and Oakville, CT: Equinox. Halpern, Mark. “A War That Never Ends,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1997. Harrar, Dorothy. 1985. An English Manual: Compiled from Lessons in the Elementary School. Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press. Haussamen, Brock, et al. 2003. Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Kischner, Michael and Edith Wollin. 2002. Writers’ Choice: Grammar to Improve Style. Harcourt College Publishers. Kolln, Martha and Craig Hancock. “The Story of English Grammar in United States Schools,” English Teaching: Practice and Critique. December 2005, Volume 4, Number 3, 11–31. Law, Vivien. 2003. The History of Linguistics in Europe: From Plato to 1600. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lederer, Richard. 1991. The Miracle of Language. New York: Pocket Books. ––––. 1994. Adventures with a Verbivore. New York: Pocket Books. –––– and John Shore. 2005. Comma Sense: A Fundamental Guide to Punctuation. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Lowe, Michelle and Ben Graham. 1998. English Language for Beginners. New York and London: Writers and Readers. MacDonald, John and Ronald Shephard. 1974. Grammar Is… Don Mills, Ontario: Nelson. Makkai, Adam. “Afterword: Rudolf Steiner on Language: A View from Modern Linguistics” in Rudolf Steiner, The Genius of Language. Matthews, Paul. 1996. Sing Me the Creation: A Sourcebook for Poets and Teachers, and for All Who Wish to Develop the Life of the Imagination. Stroud, UK: Hawthorn Press. McArthur, Tom, ed. 1992. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press. Myers, L. M. 1966. The Roots of Modern English. Boston: Little, Brown.
95 Noden, Harry. 1999. Image Grammar. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. Noguchi, Rei. 1991. Grammar and the Teaching of Writing: Limits and Possibilities. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Nunberg, Geoffrey. “The Decline of Grammar,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1997. Paraskevas, Cornelia. “The Place of Run-ons and Dashes in Writing—the Craft of Breaking Conventions.” Unpublished paper. www.sargent.nelson.com/runons. html. Penner, P. G. and R. E McConnell. 1977. Language on Paper. Toronto: Macmillan. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin Books. Postman, Neil. 1979. Teaching as a Conserving Activity. New York: Delta. Postman, Neil and Charles Weingartner. 1966. Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching. New York: Delta. ––––. 1969. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Delta. Postman, Neil and Greta and Harold Morine. 1963. Discovering Your Language. New York: Rinehart and Winston. Rawson, Martyn. 2002. “Angel Dances: Language as a Formative Force in Human Development,” Language and Learning. Paideia Books No. 2, ed. Martyn Rawson and Peter Lutzker. Forest Row, UK: Steiner Schools Fellowship Publications. Sanderson, James and Walter Gordon, eds. 1963. Exposition and the English Language. New York: Appleton/Century/Crofts. Scargill, M. H. and P. G. Penner. 1966. Looking at Language. Toronto, Canada: W. J. Gage. Schmid, Rudolf. 1995. An English Grammar: The Language before Babel. Fair Oaks, CA: AWSNA. Schuster. E. H. 2003. Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writing through Innovative Language Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Simon, John. 1980. Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. NY: Clarkson N. Potter. Steiner, Rudolf. 1995. The Genius of Language: Observations for Teachers (Six Lectures given at Stuttgart 1919–1920. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press. Stockmeyer, Karl. 2001. Rudolf Steiner’s Curriculum for Waldorf Schools. Forest Row, UK: Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship. Trask, R. L. and Bill Mayblin. 2005. Introducing Linguistics. Thriplow, Royston, UK: Icon Books. Trostli, Roberto, compiler. 2007. Teaching Language Arts in the Waldorf School: A Compendium of Excerpts from the Foundation of Waldorf Education Series by Rudolf Steiner. Fair Oaks, CA: AWSNA.
96 Trudgill, Peter. 1999. “Standard English: What It Isn’t,” Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge, 117–128. Truss, Lynne. 2004. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York: Gotham. Wallace, David Foster. “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” Harper’s, April 2001: 39–58 Weaver, Constance. 1996. Teaching Grammar in Context. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Wheeler, Rebecca S. and Rachel Swords. 2006. Codeswitching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Williams, Joseph M. 1981. “The Phenomenology of Error,” College Composition and Communication 32, 152–168. Winter, Dorit. “We Love Grammar,” For the Love of Literature. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1996 Wulsin, John. 1999. The Laws of the Living Language. Fair Oaks, CA: AWSNA.
Fig. 8 – Meg Gorman
Appendix I SURVEY:
Teaching of English Grammar in Waldorf High Schools (16 responses) 1. Do you consider it important for students to fully comprehend (master) English grammar? A. Yes, extremely so. B. For those who would actually use the knowledge, yes. For others it is probably valuable on some level for them to make the workings of speech conscious. C. Fully? That puts the bar higher than most teachers can leap. Or do you mean rules of English usage? D. Yes E. Absolutely—critical for Ego development F. Yes G. I’m not sure what you mean by “master.” I think it would be great if they thought grammar was an interesting and helpful subject. H. Sorry, I can’t answer this question.… It seems to answer itself … and I’m not sure what you mean by “master.” I. Yes J. Yes, the basics. K. Yes L. Yes M. Yes, but only “practical” grammar. Obscure terminology isn’t needed. N. Yes O. Yes P. Grammar is very important—it is how a language thinks. 2. Do you think that there is a connection between knowledge of grammar and clarity in writing? A. Absolutely, yes. B. For a few students, yes; for most, no. C. Yes D. Yes E. Again, absolutely. F. Yes, qualified. I think a good ear and a sense of style carry one a long way. G. Yes H. There is certainly a deep connection in penetrating the structure of language
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98 (grammar) and clarity of expression. However, the standards of punctuation, capitalization, formatting and—alas—even spelling have more to do with social convention than clarity. Some students can be articulate without a conscious knowledge of grammar, but knowledge strengthens clarity. I. I know there is some connection; I’m not sure how close. J. Little—mostly as language for revision and as training for logical thought. K. Yes L. Yes, but primarily through voice—most of us “know” grammar through our speaking ability. M. Yes N. Yes O. Yes, and clarity of thinking. P. Yes. 3. Do you consider the students who come to you from Waldorf lower school(s) well grounded in grammar? A. I have only one-half year of experience, but, so far, yes. B. No C. No D. Varies from class to class. E. Fairly well in general. Public school kids are better “drilled,” but Waldorf kids are more able to apply grammar to writing. F. Some, actually most, are fairly well grounded. G. Some classes, yes. Others, no. H. My experience is that the class teacher has a profound impact on grammar learning. Some classes are well grounded, others not. I. I am new at this school. My initial experience is that they have been exposed to grammar yet need a lot of review. J. No K. No L. Yes, in that they speak well and intuitively know the rules; no, in that they cannot explain the rules in the vocabulary of grammar. M. Waldorf kids may have an edge, if not in knowledge, at least in love of reading and writing. In general, I do not feel that students arrive here well prepared. N. No O. Not at all. They have only the vaguest notions of parts of speech. P. The job hasn’t been done all that well. The last few classes coming into the high school have been in good enough shape. 4. Do the lower school teachers in your school or Waldorf feeder school(s) use Dorothy Harrar’s curriculum as described in An English Manual? A. I am currently using it, as I teach English to the middle school students, but to my knowledge, the former English skills teacher in the middle school did
99 not use that manual. She was a non-Waldorf trained teacher with 25 years of experience teaching high school English. B. Some do. C. Don’t know. D. I don’t know. E. I doubt it. F. I don’t know. G. I don’t know. We have had many discussions on what students need to know before ninth grade, but I can’t remember what text(s) they use. H. I don’t know. I have not heard it mentioned so I would guess not. I. I don’t know. J. The school is in transition with a new specialist in Middle School Language Arts. K. Don’t know. L. I do not know. M. I don’t know. N. I don’t know. O. I don’t know. P. I don’t know. 5. In your experience, is there a difference between Waldorf students and students from non-Waldorf schools in grammatical understanding? A. Yes, the students from non-Waldorf schools have a much better understanding of grammar in the abstract. They seem to be better able to answer definition questions regarding grammar, although I would say that their usage of grammar isn’t that much better. B. Students from other schools generally have less sense of grammar than Waldorf students do. C. Not that I’ve noticed. D. No E. See #3. F. I can’t make a general statement about this. G. Varies (see #3). Students from other schools are very different as well. H. My limited experience is that students from non-Waldorf schools have had a better grammatical understanding—but my sample is too small to be very conclusive. I. The prep schools where I have taught put more emphasis on grammar and this does make a difference, J. Yes—some non-Waldorf know the drill better—but it varies greatly. K. Yes L. Not in a categorical way. M. I experience Waldorf students as usually feeling more at ease in writing and many write quite well. I can’t say I’m sure about grammatical understanding. N. No
100 O. Yes. Children from Catholic schools have excellent grammar. Waldorf and public schools are about the same. There are exceptions with some class teachers. P. Some public school students arrive in our classes knowing more of the technical aspects of grammar, though they may not be as adept in translating that into good writing as students who come up through our own ranks— with some remarkable exceptions. 6. Where does English grammar fit into your curriculum? – occasional lessons? – regular part of track class? – as needed in composition classes? A. Grammar fits into my curriculum, as needed as part of their writing. We are going to begin a “unit” on grammar which will last approximately 1.5 months in the spring. This is not my ideal, though. B. Occasional lessons; as needed as part of composition classes. C. Occasional lessons and as needed as part of composition classes; understanding English grammar and mastering rules of correct usage are different. D. Regular part of track class; as needed in composition classes. E. Regular part of track class; short but almost daily lessons of 10–15 minutes. F. All of the above with occasional lessons on special topics. G. It is the subject of at least one (possibly two) track classes in 9th and 10th grades; also as needed in composition classes. H. Grammar is a periodic part of track classes—as well as entering into main lesson blocks. As a new school, we are still experimenting to see how to integrate it into the curriculum. I. Regular part of track classes. J. Regular track classes in 9th, occasional in 10–12; as needed in 12. K. Regular part of track class. L. By grade level and need. M. Regular part of track classes although I do more with vocabulary than grammar. N. My intention is to make it a regular part of track class. O. A regular part of track classes in 9th and 10th; as needed in composition classes; occasional lessons after a written assignment is returned. P. I teach it consistently in both grades ten and eleven track classes, plus in my ruthless marking throughout my main lessons. 7. Have you ever taught/considered teaching a main lesson on English grammar? A. I have considered it, but never seriously. What an idea! B. No, not in high school. C. No D. No
101 E. No F. No. It is interesting to consider, though. G. No H. No … but now that you’ve planted the seed … I. No J. No K. No L. No M. No, but it sounds like a good idea. N. No O. No. I believe this belongs in lower school. It should be mastered as it was in history—during the study of the Middle Ages. P. No. 8. Do you have a faculty wide policy on editing for grammatical errors? A. No. But what an intriguing idea. B. No formal policy, but teachers do correct grammatical errors. C. No, but we should. D. No E. Departmental wide, yes. F. No G. No H. No. We’ve talked briefly about it but haven’t done it. I. Not that I know of. J. No K. No L. No M. No N. No O. No P. No 9. Do you feel supported as an English teacher by your colleagues who teach other subjects? A. Yes. B. They care about English in papers they get. C. Somewhat. D. No E. Yes F. I don’t quite know how to think about this question, but I will think about it. G. Not really. They concentrate mostly on content. H. The science and math teachers are supportive as colleagues but have rarely expressed interest or support for English as a subject.
102 I. Yes J. In a way. Upholding grammatical standards. K. Yes L. In terms of grammar, we do not lead as an English department in terms of setting standards school-wide. M. English teachers at this school have traditionally been blamed for poor writing skills, even in students who arrive as juniors or seniors. N. I’m not sure. O. Most of the time. P. Largely. 10. Do your colleagues “mark” for spelling? for grammar? or is such editing considered to be the role of the English teacher? A. I don’t know. B. Most mark English errors. C. They sometimes do, but not as systematically as would be ideal (as far as I know). D. Not carefully enough. E. Not all do, but some in history and science have certainly made efforts. F. Some make note of it; not all. G. They often catch spelling—but not grammar or punctuation. H. The humanities teachers mark for spelling and grammar—but other editing is spotty at best. I. I’m not sure, but I assume so (although they may not be as “picky” as I am). J. Some do—inconsistent. This could be much improved in coordination. Some teachers even come to show me what they’re seeing and ask me to work on this. K. Yes, I think they do. L. Yes, but I do not believe there is any consistency is what is marked or how. M. A few “mark” papers taking spelling and grammar into account. I don’t believe it is a widespread practice here. N. Perhaps a little bit. O. Some do and some don’t. The English teachers are definitely the most thorough. P. Some. 11. Have you established common terminology and teaching techniques with teachers of other languages at your school? A. No. The foreign language teachers at our fledgling school are not Waldorf trained, are hourly employees, and we see them rarely. In fact, our French teacher just left. A new French teacher will begin in March. Our German teacher is very strict about grammar and has said that he is impressed by the
103 knowledge of grammar that our 9th graders (our one and only [high school] class) exhibit. B. No C. No D. Some, including the Latin teacher’s lesson. E. Not very consciously. F. We do work towards this. G. We have discussed this. We do have a common terminology. H. Our language programs have had multiple part-time teachers—there has been little crossover in sharing terminology and techniques—this will strengthen when there is a more regular faculty. I. No J. No K. Somewhat. L. No M. No N. No O. No, but we’ve talked about this. P. No. 12. What techniques have worked best for you in teaching grammar? Would you be willing to share resources? sample lessons? A. I have no useful experience as yet in the high school to share. B. Having students create lots of colorful examples. Incorporating humor, fun, and wonder that we are all so wise that we use complex grammatical constructions correctly every day. Rhythmical, humorous repetition (every day for a few days) seems to help. C. Mostly I teach grammar in Greek classes. D. Going over and over the problems that occur. E. Humor, humor, humor! Tie to their writing, even creative writing! Yes, I would be happy to share. F. This varies so much depending on class, collective grammar background, my own ease and clarity or lack of it with a given topic. Context seems to help and the opportunity to relate the rules and practice to context. G. Taking problematic sentences off their own papers and giving them back to them as a grammar exercise. H. In 9th grade, work sheets and exercises have some benefit—but they also profit from beginning to struggle with what grammar is. We spent several classes on trying to define what a sentence or paragraph is and what makes for a good sentence. These were more beneficial in the long run than explaining for the umpteenth time the difference between “it’s” and “its.” I worked through much of The Elements of Style with our 11th grade—but when it came to SAT testing, they performed poorly. I am, of course, willing to share—but don’t feel I have a great deal to offer.
104 I. ----J. Out of student writing and out of great writing—imitation early on, then generating, then analysis. K. I favor a “grammar through discovery” approach. The Magic Lens by Thompson (Royal Fireworks Press) is helpful. Yes, I would be willing to share. L. I have not tried this but I always felt that 8th and 9th graders should create their own language (vocab and rules) a la Carroll and Tolkien. M. I am a new teacher of freshmen and could learn from more experienced teachers. Years ago I taught juniors and the emphasis was on literature rather than grammar. N. I’m just beginning. I would be willing to share resources. O. I have all kinds of crazy cartoon characters who run around inside sentences and ask questions. Miss Adjective loves nouns—but she is co-dependent— she loves to change them. Adverb is outrageous—may be found anywhere in the sentence. Yes, I would be willing to share. P. Of course I would share what I know. 13. If you do not teach grammar, what do you think prevents you from teaching it? Lack of knowledge? Lack of interest? Lack of commitment? Lack of time? A. Lack of time, thus far. B. ----C. Lack of knowledge 0%; lack of interest 0%; lack of commitment 20%; lack of time 80%. D. -----E. -----F. -----G. N/A H. Impediments—the main difficulty is having a grade-appropriate means of teaching grammar that I have worked with enough and that I have confidence in it. (Personally, I have put so much effort into preparing and teaching history that I have tended to short much of the English curriculum except literature … and perhaps creative writing.) I. N/A J. I feel there is a prime time—perhaps Grades 7–9. The window is closed by Grade 11, but it always needs reinforcing. I’m convinced it’s the weakest link to writing skill. K. N/A L. I feel much of it belongs in language classes through comparison. I work with grammar primarily through writing. M. I do teach grammar, but I probably should do more. Student pleas and protests wear me down. N. Lack of knowledge and lack of time. O. N/A P. I teach it.
105 14. If you would like to be a more effective teacher of grammar, what resources would help you? A. I would greatly appreciate a manual delineating how to teach grammar in a phenomenological fashion in a skills class. So much of what I can access (except for the lower school English Manual by Harrar) consists of dry “sheets” for practicing rules. I would also appreciate a listing of what is considered appropriate standards of knowledge for each grade, e.g., by the end of 9th grade what the students should know, by the end of 10th what they should know, etc. B. I wish I knew. C. Time mainly, I think a minimal level of grammatical understanding should be required of students in 9th and 10th grades, and this requires systematic, focused instruction, not of usage but of concepts and principles. D. We are working at it. E. A deeper understanding of the connection between grammar and the human being. F. A clear, nicely laid-out book with a number of practice exercises offering a cumulative or developmental approach to essential grammar. A text for each student. G. More exercises that actually address common mistakes, real issues that occur in their own writing. The PSAT/SAT catches some of these issues (subjective/ objective; pronouns, etc.). H. If someone laid out a year-by-year curriculum for grammar with both general objectives and specific examples of exercises, this would be manna. I. I need to talk more with my English department colleagues. J. ----K. Workshop on transformational grammar. L. Deeper understanding of Steiner’s The Genius of Language. M. Conversations with teachers who have had real success in helping students make progress. N. Time outside to prepare and time inside of class with the students. O. Drill in Grades 6 and 7. P. Not sure. 15. Do you use a grammar text or style manual? If so, which one? A. Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition (my high school grammar text), Harrar’s English Manual, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. B. No C. Diane Hacker in 12th Grade D. I choose material from several. We have The Bedford Handbook for Writers— enough for a class at a time. E. Warriner’s as a resource.
106 F. I browse and take selected topics and exercises from a variety of texts. Frequent resources are Warriner’s and Hacker. G. Diane Hacker A Writer’s Reference. H. The Magic Lens. I. 11th and 12th MLA Handbook; Warriner’s High Sschool Handbook; The Transitive Vampire. J. Karen E. Gordon’s books, Warriner’s. K. MLA Handbook, student examples. L. I have many grammar and style books. Essential English Grammar by Philip Crocker (Dover) is easy to carry and use and is inexpensive. M. Some new books that I ordered look great: Grammar Wars: 179 Games and Improvs by Tom Ready; English Grammar Guidebook: Drills and Tests for High School by Evelyn Rudolph, C. N. Hayes, and Aileen Allman. N. Yes. Warriner’s. It’s not great. O. ----P. Grammar Survival Course I by Richard Gradie. 16. Do you create your own exercises? student workbooks? style manual? A. No, but this is my wish: I would like to teach grammar in such a way that by the end of the year the students would have a main lesson book that they have created that would be their own grammar textbook. They could keep this book, not unlike the Warriner’s book I have kept since high school. B. My own exercises but not workbooks or style manual. C. No, no, no D. My own exercises. E. My own exercises. F. I create my own exercises and I draw on other resources as well. G. I create my own exercises. H. I have created some of my own exercises for grammar but haven’t created student workbooks or style manuals. I am fond of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I. Yes, now and then. J. Yes, out of literature and student work. K. Yes, lots and lots. L. Yes, plus student examples. M. I underline errors on all writing assignments and ask the students to correct them on a second draft. I meet with them to explain “why” grammar or usage is “wrong” or “weak” in specific instances. N. Not yet; I use xeroxes from workbooks. O. Yes, I create my own exercises; seniors use Strunk and White. P. I devise exercises of my own now and then, just for the fun of it, especially in the area of punctuation.
107 17. Are you familiar with/do you use Rudolf Schmid’s book, An English Grammar: The Language before Babel ? Have you used it? A. Yes. I have used it, but not to create a lesson, per se. I read it and then I—let’s say I meditate on it. I can’t seem to be able to use it in a practical way to create a lesson. I guess I could say I use it in an ethereal way. B. That book is so poorly edited/proofread it is an embarrassment to the Waldorf movement. It does however have some fascinating concepts which I have adapted to today’s American students. C. No D. No E. Yes, but I have my questions about some of it, especially using “great” literature as examples of reductionist grammatical analysis. I also wonder if their aren’t some misunderstandings in it between Germanic and English usage. Still, the idea behind it, looking more deeply and esoterically at grammar, is just what I’m looking for. F. Yes, I use it and/or adapt selected topics and exercises. I sometimes refer to the book for my own background reading. G. No H. I have seen Schmid’s book but haven’t looked at it carefully or used it. I. No J. Yes, I know it; no, I have not used it. K. Yes, I like it. L. No I don’t know it so I haven’t used it. M. No N. I’m familiar with it but haven’t used it yet. O. No, I don’t know it. P. I have Rudolf Schmid’s book and make use of it, as well, both for my own deepening sense of what grammar is about and for some of the exercises he gives. 18. Please add comments or questions about the teaching of English grammar and your experience of it. A. I believe that an understanding of English grammar is the basis of clear writing. Clear writing is possible only, I believe, if one can clearly organize one’s thoughts. If one doesn’t have an understanding of English grammar, one cannot express oneself clearly. In addition, I don’t think I ever understood how important my own understanding of English grammar was until I began to study the French language. In studying French, I had to use my knowledge of grammar to understand the different aspects of French grammar. I understand now why so many English students find foreign languages so difficult; I believe it is because they do not have a solid understanding of their own English grammar.
108 B. I once thought learning about grammar would help students with their writing. Over the years, I have decided there is very little transfer: Students who already write well can understand and appreciate grammar, and those who are poor writers, who make grammatical mistakes, tend to have the most difficulty understanding it and applying it to their writing. I am willing to consider this my fault and would be open to learning to teach it in a way that would be helpful to struggling students if someone has figured out how to do it. C. Teaching English grammar is very difficult because it seems unnecessary to students—they do seem to use the language successfully, after all, and the rules of correct usage seem like formalism. I really think the only reliable avenue to understanding English grammar is coordinating with the study of foreign languages. D. N/A E. N/A F. N/A G. I wish students liked grammar more. I have always found it interesting—like a puzzle to solve and understand. I also loved diagramming sentences. I have read Steiner’s “warning” about this—about killing off the sentence—the Word—I still use diagramming in my mind when I’m trying to understand a difficult sentence—or compose one. But, I am not a writer so maybe that’s nothing to brag about. I have tried to identify what is not correct in their writing and help them understand why it is wrong. This is obviously not the same thing as teaching grammar in such a way that it enhances and leads to the development of their own writing. I try to have “the other English teacher” be a writer with a strong grammar background although I do teach—and love teaching—the grammar tracks and always take on the grammar questions in their writing assignments. H. I’m confused about the teaching of grammar—and the role the middle school plays in the development of it. I am glad you are preparing this survey; it is encouraging me to focus on something that is significant but has not been carefully or fully enough considered. I. There should be more contact and information between the high school English teachers and the 7th and 8th grade teachers. J. Please forgive a polemical comment. Our school serves what seems to be a very European community. We have a number of parents and faculty for whom English is a second language. Not only is time wasted in meeting for lack of simple vocabulary, but meeting minutes and written announcements, signage, etc., are often riddled with errors. Were we a car dealership this would be fine. But we are a school. Question: Is this common in Waldorf communities, and, if so, how can it be addressed in a socially responsible manner? K. The subject is difficult to bring life to. Grammar must be able to be more than rules and codes. L. -----
109 M. Current students at our school are better writers than students of ten years ago! My biggest problem is that I face classes with such a wide range of knowledge and ability (and interest). Some are writing at a lower school level while others are almost at a college level. Some “hate” grammar and make a fuss every time I teach it. I don’t believe in “tracking,” but a remedial class in grammar, spelling, handwriting, and other basic skills might work out well if the teacher had saintly qualities. N. ----O. I enjoy grammar, but I feel it is wrong to drill in high school. I want them familiar with punctuation, grammar, and usage except for the noun clause by the time they leave 8th grade. If the Catholic schools can do this, why can’t we? P. I have no lack of resources; it is simply a matter of putting them to work. Particular crusades of mine include the correct use of the semicolon (it is not a comma with biceps!), free floating pronouns, spelling, review of verbs—form, tense, voice, work, tone and mood—and the current practice of writing/saying, “Somebody needs to correct their spelling.” I refer to this as a grammatical copout from taking on the issue of singular personal pronoun gender and don’t let students get away with it. Let’s go for “her spelling” for the next hundred years and see what that brings or “his or her” where that does not bog down a sentence. Anything but this current trend which politicians and Waldorf lecturers are now indulging in. My little crusade, however futile it might be.
Fig. 9 – Left to right, group closest to camera: Anne Greer. Pam Colgate, Patrice Pinette, and John Wulsin
Appendix II Some Questions and Answers about Grammar (A Guideline found to be consistent with NCTE positions on education issues) NCTE’s Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar Why is grammar important? Grammar is important because it is the language that makes it possible for us to talk about language. Grammar names the types of words and word groups that make up sentences not only in English but in any language. As human beings, we can put sentences together even as children—we can all do grammar. But to be able to talk about how sentences are built, about the types of words and word groups that make up sentences—that is knowing about grammar. And knowing about grammar offers a window into the human mind and into our amazingly complex mental capacity. People associate grammar with errors and correctness. But knowing about grammar also helps us understand what makes sentences and paragraphs clear and interesting and precise. Grammar can be part of literature discussions, when we and our students closely read the sentences in poetry and stories. And knowing about grammar means finding out that all languages and all dialects follow grammatical patterns.
Is grammar included in the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts? Four of the twelve standards call on the students’ understanding of language and sentence structure (italics added): • Standard #3 refers to the range of strategies and abilities students should use to comprehend and appreciate texts, and among these is their understanding of sentence structure. • Standard #4 explains that students should adjust their spoken and written language for different audiences and purposes, and these adjustments include changes in the conventions and style of language. • Standard #6 states that students should “apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation)” to create and critique both print and non-print texts. • Standard #9 calls for students to “develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.” Understanding basic grammar can help students see the patterns of different languages and dialects.
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111 I hear that teaching grammar doesn’t help students make fewer errors. But students make so many mistakes in their writing. What should I do? Teaching grammar will not make writing errors go away. Students make errors in the process of learning, and as they learn about writing, they often make new errors, not necessarily fewer ones. But knowing basic grammatical terminology does provide students with a tool for thinking about and discussing sentences. And lots of discussion of language, along with lots of reading and lots of writing, are the three ingredients for helping students write in accordance with the conventions of Standard English.
I try to teach the standard parts of speech and the usual rules for correct writing even though I’m not convinced the students retain the information for very long. What’s the best way to approach grammar under these circumstances? Two suggestions: The first is to be selective, to the extent that you can. Students benefit much more from learning a few grammar keys thoroughly than from trying to remember many terms and rules. Experiment with different approaches until you find the ones that work the best for you and your students. Some teachers focus on showing students how phrases add rich detail to sentences. Other teachers find that sentence diagrams help students see the organization of sentences. Some use grammar metaphors (the sentence, for example, as a bicycle, with the subject as the front wheel and the predicate as the back). Some emphasize the verb as the key part of speech, showing students how the sentence is built around it and how vivid verbs create vivid sentences. The second suggestion is that whatever approach you take to grammar, show students how to apply it not only to their writing but also to their reading and to their other language arts activities. For example, knowing basic grammar can help students when they come across a difficult story or poem. If they know how to find the main verb and the subject, they have a better chance of figuring out a difficult sentence. When they like the way a writer writes, they can identify the sentence structures that the writer uses, and they can experiment with them themselves. Make good use of the other languages and the various dialects of English in your classroom. Compare the informal private language that students speak around friends and family with public Standard English. Learn a little about the noun and verb patterns in Spanish and African American Vernacular English, for example, so that you can make comparisons when discussing Standard English. Students feel prouder of their home language when they hear even briefly in school about its grammatical patterns.
112 Grammar workbook exercises get pretty dull, but they do cover the basics. Are they worthwhile? How should I use them? Traditional drill and practice will be the most meaningful to students when they are anchored in the context of writing assignments or the study of literary models. Students find grammar most interesting when they apply it to authentic texts. Try using texts of different kinds, such as newspapers and the students’ own writing, as sources for grammar examples and exercises. This approach helps make grammar relevant and alive. It also avoids the artificiality of studying sentences in isolation, a problem with grammar books; in real texts, students can see how sentences connect and contrast to each other through their grammar. What kinds of grammar exercises help students write not just correct sentences but better, more expressive ones? • Inexperienced writers find it difficult to make changes in the sentences that they have written. Expanding sentences, rearranging the parts of a sentence, combining sentences—these skills do not come easily. So any exercises that help students acquire sentence flexibility have value. Two methods have yielded good results. One is sentence combining: Students start with simple exercises in inserting phrases and combining sentences and progress towards exercises in embedding one clause in another. Another approach is for students to imitate model sentences: When students read a model passage and then write their version of it, imitating its grammatical features, they integrate reading skill, writing practice, and grammatical understanding. • Another type of grammar exercise is for students to practice using certain subordinate constructions that enrich sentences. Participles, -ing and -ed verb forms, can be used by themselves or as phrases, adding detail with a sense of action, drawing the reader into the sentence (as with the two participial phrases that close this sentence). Its purpose being to focus readers’ attention, an absolute phrase, like the one that begins this sentence, operates like a zoom lens. An appositive, a noun or noun phrase that renames another noun, adds information quickly (as this sentence illustrates). Grammar is a large, complicated subject, and I’m not very sure about some of it myself. Besides the grammar material that is in the books I teach, what topics in grammar will help my students? Here are some recent additions to the traditional study of grammar that you can use in the classroom: • All native speakers of a language have more grammar in their heads than any grammar book will ever contain. Part of our goal as teachers is to help students discover that knowledge. ESL students can also benefit from the following suggestions, depending on their experience with English. Pass these methods on to your students, who will make good use of them.
113 1. The traditional definitions of the parts of speech can be difficult to apply. Students recognize the basic parts of speech more reliably and quickly by looking at the form of a word and by using sentence “frames.” If a word can be made plural or possessive, or if it fits in the sentence “The _______ went there,” it is a noun. If a word can be made past, or can take an -ing ending, it is a verb. Of course the same word form can often serve as more than one part of speech, but you can help students learn to recognize how a particular form is being used in a particular sentence by introducing them to a variety of tests. 2. Is a group of words a whole sentence or a fragment? If it doesn’t make sense after an opening such as “I am convinced that,” it is a fragment.
Whatever you could do to help my sister. I am convinced that whatever you could do to help my sister. This is what you could do to help my sister. I am convinced that this is what you could do to help my sister.
3. To help students find the verb phrase in a sentence, have them make the sentence negative by inserting did not, don’t, or a similar term. The verb phrase is usually next to the word not.
Simon tried to put the bike in the garage. Simon did not try to put the bike in the garage.
4. To help students find the subject of a sentence, have them add a tag question such as isn’t it? or aren’t they? The pronoun that ends the appropriate tag question will usually refer to the sentence subject.
Listening to loud music will damage your ears. Listening to loud music will damage your ears, won’t it?
5. Substitute a pronoun for the complete subject. This change shows students where the division between subject and predicate lies; it is also a simple way to check on subject-verb agreement.
The girl with the saxophone is walking home. She / is walking home.
• A paragraph may be confusing or clear, vivid or vague, easy or difficult to read. No matter which it is, the quality of the paragraph depends in part on the grammatical features of the individual sentences. Show your students a few points that will help them both write better paragraphs and understand better the paragraphs in literature. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams is an outstanding resource on these approaches. 1. The grammatical subjects of all the sentences in a paragraph, taken together, tell the reader what the paragraph is about. If the subjects of the sentences are too diverse, the paragraph will usually be difficult to follow. Sentence subjects that are related to each other help make the paragraph coherent. Students can circle the sentence subjects in a published paragraph, observe this pattern at work, and then apply it to their own writing.
114 2. Another pattern is extremely important in the way groups of sentences flow together to make sense. Most sentences start with information that is already familiar to the reader, such as a pronoun or a subject noun that was mentioned earlier. Sentences then move toward new information that makes the point of the sentence and adds the details. This movement from the familiar to the new in each sentence makes text both interesting and coherent. Students can observe this pattern in literature and apply it to their own writing. They can also see it at work in casual conversation, in asking questions, and in speaking (and writing) in sentence fragments—all situations when the familiar information becomes detached from the new information. 3. The tendency for the vital information to fall toward the end of most sentences is known as end focus. Because so many sentences use end focus, placing the important words early catches the reader’s attention. Key phrases can be moved forward. Cleft structures (“It was Juan who helped me”) also move emphasized words forward.
Fig. 10
Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading
Adger, Carolyn Temple, Catherine E. Snow, and Donna Christian (eds). What Teachers Need to Know about Language. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2002. DeBeaugrande, Robert. “Forward to the Basics: Getting Down to Grammar.” College Composition and Communication. 35 (1984), 358–367. __________. “An Issue on Teaching Grammar.” English Journal. 85. 7 (1996). Kolln, Martha. Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. Kolln, Martha and Robert Funk. Understanding English Grammar. 6th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002. Noden, Harry R. Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. Noguchi, Rei. Grammar and the Teaching of Writing: Limits and Possibilities. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1991. Nystrand, Martin. “English Language Instruction.” Encyclopedia of Education Research. Ed. M. C. Alkin. New York: Macmillan, 1992. 443–453. Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977. Weaver, Constance. Teaching Grammar in Context. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1996. _____, ed. Lessons to Share on Teaching Grammar in Context. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998. Wheeler, Rebecca, ed. Language Alive in the Classroom. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. _____, ed. The Workings of Language. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2000. Wolfram, Walt, Carolyn Temple Adger, and Donna Christian. Dialects in Schools and Communities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. www.ateg.org. The website for the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar, with a variety of resources for teaching and learning about grammar.
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Prepared by Brock Haussamen with Paul Doniger, Pam Dykstra, Martha Kolln, Kathryn Rogers, and Rebecca Wheeler, and with appreciation for the works and discussions of all the members of NCTE’s Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
This document has been endorsed by the Linguistic Society of America. This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.
Fig. 11 – Left to right: Wendy Bruneau facing Patrice Pinette (partly hidden), Christine Meyer, John Wulsin, Cheryl Latuner, and Anne Greer
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Appendix III Response from the Assembly of Teachers of Grammar to the NCTE The Hillocks’ report on “Research on Teaching Composition,” the foundation for NCTE’s current anti-grammar position, is now twenty years old and out of touch with recent shifts in our understanding of grammar, notably functional, rhetorical, and cognitive approaches. The usefulness for teaching grammar was measured in very narrow terms, reduction in writing “errors” over short term. Grammar teaching was deemed “harmful” primarily because it pulled instruction time away from reading and writing, which were a priori labeled “higher order concerns.” Little attention was paid to the possibility that grammar can mean many things, that reducing any activity to “avoidance of error” is fundamentally reductive, or that school-based traditional grammar of the time was not a particularly accurate description of the language. Particular damage was done by presenting these conclusions as definitive, when, in fact, they were simply reporting the ineffectiveness of teaching a faulty or impractical understanding of language when measuring short term growth on controlled, holistically assessed writing samples. For a sympathetic consideration of the context for these mistakes here and in England, see Hudson (2005) and Kolln and Hancock (2005). One result has been a progressive loss of knowledge about grammar within the field. We have also seen reemergence of regressive practices to fill the void of no instruction. Professionals have continued to avoid reconsideration of grammar in part because they have insufficient knowledge to draw on People who have considerable knowledge of grammar seem universally to find that knowledge valuable, not just in specialist enterprises, but in everyday language interactions, in reading, in forming/revising their own writing, and in helping others. That knowing about grammar is valuable but teaching of grammar is not seems counterintuitive. It may very well be that any “higher order concern” is not easily addressed in short term spurts. It’s a solid truism in writing instruction that growth in writing is not adequately tested within a semester. The same is roughly true for reading; many students who take a post-test after a half year or year will score lower on the followup test, which would seem to be saying that they have been harmed by the instruction. Even indications of growth are often within the margin of error for the test. This has been rightly attributed to weaknesses in the tests as measures of long-term progress and long-term growth. It’s hard to measure short term, for example, the extent or
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118 usefulness of a student being engaged by writing or reading. It may very well be that knowledge about language shows its value over longer periods of time, especially when the focus is not on teaching to a narrowly focused test, but on cultivating maturation of the student. Students may experience periods of awkwardness as they try out the new rhetorical tools that a rich exploration of grammar brings to the fore Animosity toward grammar is connected to a narrow and distorted view of what grammar is about. For most people, it is a catalogue of constraints that language needs to conform to in more formal registers. The progressive anti-grammar position has never questioned that narrow view and has never tried or succeeded in lessening the burdens of correctness. Rather than argue against the validity of these surface “rules,” the argument has been that direct teaching of grammar has little effect on their reduction. The prevailing view is that they can be addressed “in context” and with a minimal metalanguage, a minimal need for conscious understanding. The position fails on three counts. It fails to replace or diminish a fixation on “error.” It fails to provide the complex understanding necessary for a dialogue about error “in context” to be useful. And it fails to acknowledge the rich role of grammar in carrying out the work of discourse, in building purposeful and effective writing. The question of whether knowledge of grammar is useful is best understood as a question about knowledge about language. Language can be acquired naturally in language-rich environments, but that does not mean that reflection on language is not natural or valuable or that cultural knowledge about language should not be valued and passed on. Students come to school with a rich language already acquired, but they do not know the conventions of Standard English, do not know how to use their own. natural grammar as rhetorical resource in critical reading and writing, and have not yet acquired the language or conventions typical of the academic disciplines. Particularly important is the role of conscious knowledge in acquisition of structures and rhetorical options more common to writing than reading. A much better measure of what it means to teach grammar “in context” is looking at the work of grammar when grammar is working well, especially in contexts the student has yet to master. Grammar is a natural and inevitable component of all languages, one that would be there with or without our awareness of it, one that makes meaning possible. Words are not words apart from their grammatical functions. When language is working well, the role of grammar is below consciousness. But grammar is best understood in precisely these situations, when it contributes smoothly to the clarity and thoughtfulness of effective discourse. “Error in context” is not a true context approach to grammar. Modern linguistics is not a unified or uncontentious field, but solid insights are available from rhetorical, functional, and cognitive perspectives. We are beginning to collect a solid body of approaches that aid in interpretive reading and effective writing. Rather than a set of limiting constraints, grammar can be thought of as a meaning-making resource. It can be incorporated into the “higher order” activities of reading and writing as an enormously useful adjunct toward their goals. It is also
119 worth studying in its own right as central to language, to our most communal resource as members of human communities. State standards universally call for mastery of writing conventions and fluency with more formal discourse, but they do not present a reasonable path to accomplish those goals. Official opposition to the teaching of grammar has not changed the demands, but has simply asserted that these achievements cannot be taught directly. We believe that every student has the right to achieve mastery and the right to have the notion of mastery articulated as clearly as possible. We believe that curriculum should be structured with the assumption that mastery is possible for all students, not just a talented few. People knowledgeable about language are much more likely to see dialect forms as rule-driven, as nonstandard rather than incorrect, much less likely to see them as indicative of the abilities of the speaker. Ignorance about language creates a climate in which myths about language and language prejudice can flourish and grow. We believe that any student graduating from a public school system should have spent a considerable amount of time studying language, including the grammar of his/her native language and its role in the making of meaning.
Fig. 12 – Colloquium participants practicing ball exercises to strengthen grammar
Position on Standard English Each student has a right to the tools necessary to a confident and competent public voice, including an understanding of Standard English. a) We define Standard English as the language of mainstream American public life. It is not inherently better or more “correct” than minority or regional dialects, but valuable in being the shared language of public life. Community languages that differ from it should be thought of as valuable community languages and important resources, as nonstandard, but not incorrect or wrong. b) Standard English is better described by the corpus grammars than by the prescriptive handbooks, which are often at odds with current practice and generations behind. It is a living, viable, changing language, not a rigid and set one, and it gets much of its vitality from the contributions of a diverse people. Students should have a deep enough understanding of language to weigh prescriptive advice. Students should be encouraged to look closely at the work of writers they admire. They should understand that Standard English includes many levels of formality and that language conventions differ widely in different public domains. c) Written languages require somewhat arbitrary conventions for the representation of language in a written form, and students should have the tools necessary for mastery of these. This includes standardized spelling, including spelling that shades into syntax. It also includes a deep enough understanding of syntax to fully understand the syntax based conventions for punctuation. We do not believe most people can master punctuation on the basis of intuition or “feel,” especially if those are meant to lead toward conventional choices defined in more analytic ways. This also includes attribution conventions, which are important tools in ensuring honesty and integrity in the language of academic and public life.
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Appendix IV Rudolf Steiner on Grammar 1. Lifting Speech to Consciousness through Grammar Before delving into these matters in more detail, I want to dispel certain ideas you may have that could cause confusion. So many sins have been committed through the prevailing methods of learning reading and writing, especially in teaching what is connected with learning to read and write, that is, language, grammar, syntax, and so on. There has been so much waywardness in this area that there are doubtless few people who do not remember with some horror the lessons they had in grammar and syntax. This horror is quite justified. We should not conclude, however, that learning grammar is useless and should be gotten rid of. This would be a completely erroneous idea. In seeking to find what is right by going from one extreme to the other, it might be natural enough to come up with the idea that we should do away with grammar. Let’s teach the children to read by the practical method of selecting passages for them; let’s teach them to read and write without any grammar. This idea could arise quite easily out of the horror that so many of us remember. But learning grammar is not an unnecessary practice, especially in our day and age. I will tell you why. What do we do when we raise unconscious speech to the grammatical realm, to the knowledge of grammar? We make a transition with our students: We lift speech from the unconscious into the conscious realm. Our purpose is not to teach them grammar in a pedantic way but to raise something to consciousness that otherwise takes place unconsciously. Unconsciously or semiconsciously, human beings do indeed use the world as a ladder up which to climb in a manner that corresponds to what we learn in grammar. Grammar tells us, for instance, that there are nouns. Nouns are names for objects, for objects that in a sense are self-contained in space. It is not without significance for us that we find such objects in life. All things that can be expressed by nouns awaken us to the consciousness of our independence as human beings. By learning to name things with nouns, we distinguish ourselves from the world around us. By calling a thing a table or a chair, we separate ourselves from the table or chair; we are here, and the table or chair is there. It is quite another matter to describe things using adjectives. When I say, “The chair is blue,” I am expressing a quality that unites me with the chair. The characteristic that I perceive unites me with the chair. By naming an object with a noun, I dissociate myself from it; when I describe it with an adjective I become one with it again. The development of our consciousness takes place in our relationship to things when we address them; we must certainly become conscious of the way we address them. If I say a verb—for example, “A woman writes”—I not only unite with the being in relation
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122 to whom I used the verb, I also do with her what she is doing with her physical body. I do what she does—my I-being does what she does. When I speak a verb, my I joins in with what the physical body of the other is doing. I unite my I with the physical body of the other when I use a verb. Our listening, especially with verbs, is in reality always a form of participation. What is at this time the most spiritual part of the human being participates; it simply suppresses the activity. Only in eurythmy is this activity placed in the external world. In addition to all its other benefits, eurythmy also activates listening. When one person says something, the other listens; he engages in his I with what lives physically in the sounds, but he suppresses it. The I always participates in eurythmy, and what eurythmy puts before us through the physical body is nothing other than listening made visible. You always do eurythmy when you listen, and when you actually perform eurythmy you are just making visible what remains invisible when you listen. The manifestation of the activity of the listening human being is, in fact, eurythmy. It is not something arbitrary, but rather the revelation of the activity of the listening human being. People today are, of course, shockingly slovenly; at first, when they listen, they do very poor inner eurythmy. By engaging in it as they should, they raise it to the level of true eurythmy. Through eurythmy people can learn to listen effectively, which they are presently unable to do. I have made certain unusual discoveries in my recent lectures. Contributors come forward during discussions, but from what they have to say, one quickly notices that they really never heard the lecture, not even in a physical sense; they heard only certain parts of it. This is enormously significant, particularly in the present era of our human development. Someone enters into the discussion and says whatever he or she has been used to thinking for decades. You find yourself speaking in front of people with socialist ideas, but they will hear only what they have always heard from certain activists; the rest is not heard even in the physical sense. Sometimes they innocently admit as much by saying, “Dr. Steiner says a lot of good things, but he never says anything new.” People have become so rigid in their listening that they become confused about anything that has not already fossilized gradually within them. People cannot listen and will become increasingly less able to do so in our age, unless the power of listening can be reawakened by eurythmy. The human soul being must find healing again. It will be particularly important in school to supplement the healthy qualities provided by gymnastics, which benefits the body and everything that takes account only of the physiology of bodily functions. The other important factor is the health of the soul: To provide benefits for the soul requires that gymnastics lessons alternate with eurythmy lessons. Although eurythmy is primarily an art, its health-giving forces will be especially salutary to the students. In eurythmy they will not simply learn something artistic; through eurythmy they will derive the same benefits for their soul as they derive through gymnastics for their body. The way these two disciplines complement each other will be very helpful. It is essential to educate our children in a way that will enable them once again to notice
123 the world around them and their fellow human beings. This is the foundation of all social life. Everyone talks today of social impulses, yet nothing but antisocial urges are to be found among people. Socialism ought to have its roots in the new esteem human beings should gain for one another. But there can be mutual esteem only when people really listen to each other. If we are to become teachers and educators, it will be vastly important that we become attentive to these matters once more. Now that you know that when you say a noun you dissociate yourself from your environment, when you say an adjective you unite yourself with your surroundings, and when you say a verb you blossom out into your environment and move with it, you will speak with quite a different inner emphasis about the noun, the adjective, and the verb than you would if you were not aware of these facts. All this is still only a preliminary discussion and will be continued later. For the moment, I merely want to evoke certain ideas, the absence of which might lead to confusion. It is extraordinarily important for us to know what it means for a person to become conscious of the structure of language. … In addition, we must develop a feeling for the great wisdom in language. This feeling, too, has all but died out today. Language is far cleverer than any of us. You will surely believe me when I say that the structure of language has not been formed by human beings. Just imagine what would have been the result if people had sat in parliaments in order to decree, in their cleverness, the structure of language. It would result in something about as clever as our laws. The structure of language, however, is truly more clever than our statutory laws. Inherent in the structure of language is the greatest wisdom. And an extraordinary amount can be learned from the way a people or a tribe speaks. Entering consciously in a living way into the framework of language, we can learn a very great deal from the genius of language itself. It is extremely important to learn how to feel something definite in the activity of the spirits of language. To believe that the genius of language works in the structure of language is of great significance. This feeling can be extended further, to the point where we realize that we human beings speak, but animals cannot yet speak; they have at most the beginnings of articulated speech. In our day and age, when people like to confuse everything, speech is ascribed even to ants and bees. But in the light of reality this is nonsense. It is all built on a form of judgment to which I have frequently drawn attention. There are some natural philosophers today who consider themselves most wise and say, “Why should not plants, too, have a will life and a feeling life? Are there not plants, the so-called carnivorous plants, that attract small animals that fly near them and then snap shut on them when they have settled?” These are beings that seem to have a will relationship with whatever comes into their vicinity, but we cannot claim that such outward signs are really characteristics of will. When I meet this attitude of
124 mind, I usually use the same form of logic and say: “I know of something that also waits till a live creature comes near it and then encloses and imprisons it—a mousetrap.” The mere workings of a mousetrap might therefore just as well be taken as proof that it possesses life as the nature of the Venus flytrap is taken as proof that it possesses consciousness. We must be profoundly conscious that the power of articulate speech is a human possession. And we must also be aware of our position in the world compared with the other three kingdoms of nature. When we are conscious of it, we also know that our I is very much bound up with everything that constitutes speech, even though today’s way of speaking has become very abstract for us. But I would like to make you aware of something that will give you a new respect for language. In ancient times—in the Jewish culture, for example (though it was yet more pronounced even further back)— the priests, or those who administered and represented the cults, would stop speaking when they came to certain concepts while celebrating the rites. They interrupted their speech and communicated the names of high beings—not in words but in silence— through the appropriate eurythmic gestures. Then they continued the spoken rites. For instance, the name that sounds so abstract to us, rendered in Hebrew as “I AM the I AM,” was never spoken aloud. The priest spoke only up to the point where this name appeared, made the gesture, and resumed speaking. What was expressed in this gesture was the pronounceable name of God in humankind. Why was this done? If this name had been spoken and repeated straight out, people were so sensitive at that time that they would have been stunned. There were sounds and combinations of sounds in speech that could stun the people of ancient cultures, so great was the effect of such words on them. A state like fainting would have taken them over if such words had been spoken and heard. That is why they spoke of the “unutterable name of God,” which was profoundly significant. Such names could be spoken only by the priests, and even by them only on special occasions, for were they to be spoken before unprepared listeners heaven and earth would collapse. This means that people would fall unconscious. For this reason such a name was expressed only in a gesture. Such a feeling is an expression of what speech really is. Today people thoughtlessly blurt out everything. We can no longer vary the feeling nuances, and it is very rare to find a person who can be moved enough, without being sentimental, to have tears in their eyes when they come across certain passages in a novel, for example. This is today quite atavistic. The lively feeling for what lies in speech and sensitivity to language have become very dulled. This is one of the many things that need to be enlivened again today; when we do enliven it, it will enable us to feel more clearly what we really have in speech. We have speech to thank for much that lives in our I-being, in our feeling of being a personality. Our feelings can rise to a mood almost of prayer: I hear the language around me being spoken, and through the speech the power of I flows into me.
125 Once you have this feeling for the sanctity of summoning the I through speech, you will be able to awaken it in the children by a variety of means. Then, too, you will awaken the feeling of I-being in the children, not in an egoistic manner but in another way. There are two ways of awakening the feeling of the I-being in a child. Done wrongly, it serves to fan the flames of egoism; done rightly, it stimulates the will and encourages real selflessness and willingness to live with the outer world. I said these things to you because as teachers and educators you must be permeated by them. It will be up to you to use them in teaching language and speech. We shall speak tomorrow about how we can permeate them with consciousness to awaken in the children the sense for a consciousness of personality. Practical Advice to Teachers (55–61) 2. Introduction to Grammar Grammar should be taught in a very lively way. It should be taught in such a lively way that we assume that it already exists when the child speaks. When the child speaks, the grammar is already there. You should allow the children to speak sentences in the way they are used to speaking so that they feel the inner connection and inner flexibility of the language. You can then begin to draw the child’s attention and make them aware of what they do unconsciously. You certainly do not need to do that through a pedantic analysis. You can develop the entirety of grammar by simply making the children more aware of the life of the grammar that is already there when the child has learned to speak. We can certainly assume that all grammar already exists in the human organism. If you take that assumption seriously, you will realize that by making grammar conscious in a living way, you work on the creation of an I-consciousness in the child. You must orient everything toward that knowledge that exists in the body around the age of nine, when a consciousness of the I normally awakens. You need to bring forth into consciousness everything that exists unconsciously in the child’s organism. In that way the child will reach the Rubicon of development at the age of nine in a favorable way. In that way you bring into consciousness what is unconscious. You then work with those forces in the child that want to develop, not the forces that you bring from outside the child. There is a way of teaching language by using the way the child already speaks and supporting the instruction through a living interaction between those children who speak a more cultivated language and those who speak a dialect. In this way you can allow them to measure themselves against each other, not in some abstract way, but using feeling to guide a word, a sentence, in dialect into another. If you do that for an hour and a half, you will really make the children break out into a sweat. The teachers who teach this way in the Waldorf school certainly have enough when they do this for an hour and a half or so each morning! If you give instruction in language by working with the knowledge in the body so that you create an actual self-consciousness, you are working in harmony with the foundation you have laid in drawing and musical instruction. Thus you have two processes that support each other. The Renewal of Education (111–112)
126 3. Developing Grammar Developmentally In language, broadly speaking, the unconscious has had a great effect on the child. We should also learn from the fact that primitive peoples have often developed a much richer grammar than those present in the languages of more civilized peoples. This is seldom taken into account outside of spiritual science, but it is something we should consider as a result of a genuine observation of human beings, namely, that the human being develops a logic from within so that language is actually logically formed. Thus we do not need to teach grammar in a way other than by bringing what already exists as a completely developed language structure into consciousness. When teaching and learning grammar, we need only to follow the general tendency of awakening the child and of bringing that into consciousness. We need only to develop those forces that can be developed until the age of nine, in the sense that I described before. We need to use the instruction in language in order to continue to awaken the child. We can best do that if we use every opportunity that occurs to work from dialect. If we have a child who before the age of seven has already learned a more educated informal language, the so-called standard language, it will be extremely difficult to reach the aspect of the child’s unconscious that has a natural relationship to the logical formation of language, since that has already withered. Thus if we have children who speak dialect and others who do not in the same class, we should always connect our instruction in grammar with what those children who do speak in dialect already provide us. We first want to try to find the structure of a sentence and then a word from the perspective of dialect. We can do that if we proceed by having a child say a sentence, for example, one that is as simple as possible. The main thing the sentence will always contain is something that is an inner enlivening of an activity. The more often we begin with an inner enlivening of an activity, the more we will be able to achieve an awakening of consciousness in the child while teaching language. There is a very extensive and clever literature about so-called subjectless sentences, for instance, “It is raining,” “It is lightning,” “It is thundering,” and so forth. The most important point about this is hardly mentioned in all of that research, however. What is most important is that these sentences correspond to the child’s actual understanding. The sentences correspond to that feeling in children that exists in people who are not educated, and where the soul feels itself to be at one with the external world. A differentiation between the I and the external world has not yet been developed. If I say, for example, “It is raining,” this is based upon an unconscious feeling that what is occurring as an activity outside of myself continues in that space within my skin, and that my I does not confront the external world. When saying something like “It is raining” or “It is lightning,” we do not feel ourselves separate from the world. In a certain sense, these subjectless sentences are the original sentences of human nature. They are simply the first step of language development which arrests an activity. Originally, we perceived all of the world as an activity, something we do not consider enough. In a certain sense, in our youngest childhood, we see everything substantial as a substantiated verb and accept it simply as it is. Later, what we become aware of, what is active, is what is active and then occupies our own activity. Now you might
127 say that contradicts the fact that children first say “Papa” or something similar. That is not at all a contradiction, since in speaking the series of sounds, the child brings into life that activity which the corresponding person presents to the child. Learning to speak is at first the enlivening of an activity whose substantiation occurs only afterwards. This is something that, when we look at dialect, we can certainly take into account. You can attempt to feel that by having a child say something and then trying to feel that within yourself. The words in dialect are such that they are extremely close to what lives in the gesture that accompanies the word in dialect. To a much greater extent dialect words require the person to participate, to live into the word. By feeling the word in dialect you can determine what is an abstraction, and what the subject and the predicate are. The predicate is derived from the activity, whereas the subject is actually more of an intellectual abstraction of the activity. When we have children speak sentences in dialect and we then consider the pictures they provide us with, and we can see those as representing what human beings actually feel when we go on to develop the rules of grammar, we are using instruction in grammar and sentence structure to help the child to awaken. The Renewal of Education (153–155) 4. Developing Grammar Artistically What we want to teach children about language has an effect upon them long before they become aware of it. We should therefore avoid trying to teach them the rules for speaking or writing, but instead enable them to awaken and become aware of what subconsciously acts within. Whether we have one intention or another in our instruction is tremendously important. We should always pay attention to the intention behind teaching. Speaking a dialect has an intimate connection with the subconscious, so we can develop real grammar and rules for sentence structure from the dialect language by basing our work upon the reason that lives within human nature. If, however, we need to work with children who already speak the standard language, we should whenever possible not work in such a way to develop a kind of grammar through the intellect, and not direct our work by teaching about the dative and accusative and how we write, how periods and commas are placed at particular locations and so forth. We instead need to work in a different way. When we need to teach children who do not speak in dialect, then we must create our instruction and grammar in an artistic way and appeal to a feeling for style. Children bring an instinct for language with them into elementary school, and we need to develop this feeling wherever possible until the child reaches the age of nine. We can only do this by developing a feeling for style in an artistic way. That is something we can achieve—although in this age when authority is being undermined everywhere this may be laughed at—by using the natural desires of children to follow authority, and thus to form those sentences that we present to the children in the most artistic way. We need to artistically form the sentences so that we draw from the child a feeling for their artistic form. That is something we can do when we make the children
128 aware of the difference between an assertion or a question, or perhaps a statement of feeling, and have the child speak it in such a way that a statement with feeling is spoken with the intonation of an assertion. We can then make the children aware of how an assertion is spoken in a neutral, objective way; whereas a statement of feeling is spoken with certain nuances of feeling. We can work with this artistic element of language, then out of that element develop grammar and syntax. If we use dialect in order to develop the natural human instinct for language while using standard language in order to awaken an inner feeling for style, we can achieve what is necessary in teaching language. The Renewal of Education (158–160) 5. Bringing Language to Life Today hardly anyone is interested in trying to bring life into language. I have tried to do that in my books in homeopathic doses. In order to make certain things understandable, I have used in my books a concept that has the same relationship to force as water flowing in a stream does to the ice on top of the stream. I used the word kraften [to work actively, forcefully]. Usually we only have the word Kraft, meaning “power” or “force.” We do not speak of kraften. We can also use similar words. If we are to bring life into language, then we also need a syntax that is alive, not dead. Today people correct you immediately if you put the subject somewhere in the sentence other than where people are accustomed to having it. Such things are still just possible in German, and you still have a certain amount of freedom. In the Western European languages—well, that is just terrible, everything is wrong there. You hear all the time that you can’t say that, that is not English, or that is not French. But, to say “that is not German” is not possible. In German you can put the subject anywhere in the sentence. You can also give an inner life to the sentence in some way. I do not want to speak in popular terms, but I do want to emphasize the process of dying in the language. A language begins to die when you are always hearing that you cannot say something in one way or another, that you are speaking incorrectly. It may not seem as strange but it is just the same as if a hundred people were to go to a door and I were to look at them and decide purely according to my own views who was a good person and who was a bad person. Life does not allow us to stereotype things. When we do that, it appears grotesque. Life requires that everything remain in movement. For that reason, syntax and grammar must arise out of the life of feeling, not out of dead reasoning. That perspective will enable us to continue with a living development of language. The Renewal of Education (180–181) 6. Working with the Unconscious Element in Language If you understand the spirit of what I have just presented, you will recognize how everywhere there has been an attempt to work with this unconscious element. I have done that first by showing how the artistic element is necessary right from the very beginning of elementary school. I have insisted that we should use the dialect that the children speak to reveal the content of grammar, that is, we should take the children’s language as such and accept it as something complete and then use it as the basis for presenting grammar.
129 Think for a moment about what you do in such a case. In what period of life is speech actually formed? Attempt to think back as far as you can in the course of your life, and you will see that you can remember nothing from the period in which you could not speak. Human beings learn language in a period when they are still sleeping through life. If you then compare the dreamy world of the child’s soul with dreams and with how melodies are interwoven in music, you will see that they are similar. Like dreaming, learning to speak occurs through the unconscious, and is something like an awakening at dawn. Melodies simply exist and we do not know where they come from. In reality, they arise out of this sleep element of the human being. We experience a sculpting with time from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. At their present stage of development human beings are not capable of experiencing this sculpting with time. You can read about how we experience that in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. That is something that does not belong to education as such. From that description, you will see how necessary it is to take into account that unconscious element which has its effect during the time the child sleeps. It is certainly taken into account in our teaching of music, particularly in teaching musical themes, so that we must attempt to exactly analyze the musical element to the extent that it is present in children in just the same way as we analyze language as presented in sentences. In other words, we attempt to guide children at an early age to recognize themes in music, to actually feel the melodic element like a sentence. Here it begins and here it stops; here there is a connection and here begins something new. In this regard, we can have a wonderful effect upon the child’s development by bringing an understanding of the not-yet-real content of music. In this way, the child is guided back to something that exists in human nature but is almost never seen. Nearly everyone knows what a melody is and what a sentence is. But a sentence that consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object and which is in reality unconsciously a melody is something that only a few people know. Just as we experience the rising and subsiding of feelings as a rhythm in sleeping, which we then become conscious of and surround with a picture, we also, in the depths of our nature, experience a sentence as music. By conforming to the outer world, we surround what we perceive as music with something that is a picture. The child writes the essay—subject, predicate, object. A triplet is felt at the deepest core of the human being. That triplet is used through projecting the first tone in a certain way upon the child, the second upon writing, and the third upon the essay. Just as these three are felt and then surrounded with pictures (which, however, correspond to reality and are not felt as they are in dreams), the sentence lives in our higher consciousness; whereas in our deepest unconsciousness, something musical, a melody, lives. When we are aware that, at the moment we move from the sense-perceptible to the supersensible, we must rid ourselves of the senseperceptible content, and in its place experience what eludes us in music—the theme whose real form we can experience in sleep—only then can we consider the human being as a whole. Only then do we become genuinely aware of what it means to teach language to children in such a living way that the child perceives a trace of melody in
130 a sentence. This means we do not simply speak in a dry way, but instead in a way that gives the full tone, that presents the inner melody and subsides through the rhythmic element. Around 1850 European people lost that deeper feeling for rhythm. Before that, there was still a certain relationship to what I just described. If you look at some treatises that appeared around that time about music or about the musical themes from Beethoven and others, then you will see how at about that time those who were referred to as authorities in music often cut up and destroyed in the most unimaginable ways what lived in music. You will see how that period represents the low point of experiencing rhythm. As educators, we need to be aware of that, because we need to guide sentences themselves back to rhythm in the school. If we keep that in mind, over a longer period of time we will begin to recognize the artistic element of teaching. We would not allow the artistic element to disappear so quickly if we were required to bring it more into the content.The Renewal of Education (189–192) 7. Grammar as a Synthesis of the Drawing and Musical Elements As I mentioned yesterday, we should also take such things into account when teaching music. We must not allow artificial methods to enter into the school where, for instance, the consciousness is mistreated by such means as artificial breathing. The children should learn to breathe through grasping the melody. The children should learn to follow the melody through hearing and then adjust themselves to it. That should be an unconscious process. It must occur as a matter of course. As I mentioned, we should have the music teachers hold off on such things until the children are older, when they will be less influenced by them. Children should be taught about the melodic element in an unconscious way through a discussion of the themes. The artificial methods I mentioned have just as bad an effect as it would have to teach children drawing by showing them how to hold their arms instead of giving them a feeling for line. It would be like saying to a child, “You will be able to draw an acanthus leaf only if you learn to hold your arm in such and such a way and to move it in such and such a way.” Through this and similar methods, we do nothing more than consider the human organism simply from a materialistic standpoint, as a machine that needs to be adjusted so it does one thing properly. If we begin from a spiritual standpoint, we will always make the detour through the soul and allow the organism to adjust itself to what is properly felt in the soul. We can therefore say that if we support the child in the drawing element, we give the child a relationship to its environment, and if we support the child in the musical element, then we give the child a relationship to something that is not in our normal environment, but in the environment we exist in from the time of falling asleep until awakening. These two polarities are then combined when we teach grammar, for instance. Here we need to interweave a feeling for the structure of a sentence with an understanding of how to form sentences.
131 We need to know such things if we are to properly understand how beginning at approximately the age of twelve, we slowly prepare the intellectual aspect of understanding, namely, free will. Before the age of twelve, we need to protect the child from independent judgments. We attempt to base judgment upon authority so that authority has a certain unconscious effect upon the child. Through such methods we can have an effect unbeknownst to the child. Through this kind of relationship to the child, we already have an element that is very similar to the musical dreamlike element.The Renewal of Education (194–195) 8. Teaching Grammar and Syntax You cannot teach a foreign language in school without really working at grammar, both ordinary grammar and syntax. It is particularly necessary for children older than twelve to be made conscious of what lies in grammar, but here, too, you can proceed very circumspectly. This morning in our study of the human being I said that in ordinary life we form conclusions and then proceed to judgment and concept [see lecture 9, The Foundations of Human Experience]. Although you cannot present the children directly with this logical method, it will underlie your teaching of grammar. Particularly with the help of the lessons in foreign languages, you will do well to discuss matters of the world with the children in a way that will allow grammar lessons to arise organically. It is purely a matter of structuring such a thing properly. Start by shaping a complete sentence and not more than a sentence. Point to what is going on outside—at this very moment you would have an excellent example. You could very well combine grammar with a foreign language by letting the children express in Latin and French and German, for example, “It is raining.’start by eliciting from the children the statement “It is raining.” Then point out to them (they are, after all, older children) that they are expressing a pure activity when they say: “It rains.” Now you can proceed to another sentence; you can include, if you like, foreign languages, for you will save a great deal of time and energy if you also work this method into the foreign language lesson. You say to the children: “Instead of the scene outside in the rain, imagine to yourselves a meadow in springtime.” Lead the children until they say of that meadow, “It is greening, it greens.” And then take them further until they transform the sentence “It is greening,” into the sentence “The meadow is greening.” And, finally, lead them still further until they can transform the sentence “The meadow is greening,” into the concept of a “green meadow.” If you stimulate these thoughts within the children one after the other in your language lessons, you will not be pedantically teaching them syntax and logic. You will be guiding the whole soul constellation of the children in a certain direction; you will be teaching them in a discreet way what should arise in their souls. You introduce sentences beginning “It” or “It is” to the children, sentences that really live only in the domain of activity and exist as sentences in themselves, without any subject or predicate. These are sentences that belong to the living realm of conclusions—they are, indeed, abbreviated conclusions. With an appropriate example, you take the further step of finding a subject: “The meadow greens” or “The meadow that is green.” Here
132 you have taken the step of forming a judgment sentence. You will agree that it would be difficult to construct a similar judgment sentence for the sentence “It rains.” Where would you find the subject for “It rains”? It is not possible. By practicing in this way with the children, we enter linguistic realms about which philosophers—Miklosic, Brentano, and Marty in Prague—have written a great deal. [Franz Xaver von Miklosic (1831–1891), was a Slavic philologist and professor in Vienna; he is considered founder of modern Slavic philology. Franz Brentano (1838– 1917) was a German philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and professor in Würzburg and Vienna; he wrote on “act psychology,” or intentionalism, as well as on Aristotle. Anton Marty (1847–1914) was a student of Brentano.] They all sought to find the rules connected with subjectless sentences, such as “It rains,” “It snows,” “It lightens,” “It thunders,” and so on—for out of their logic they could not understand where sentences without subjects originated. Sentences without subjects, as a matter of fact, arise from the very intimate links we have with the world in some respects. Human beings are a microcosm embedded in a macrocosm, and their activity is not separated from the activity of the world. When it rains, for instance, we are very closely linked with the world, particularly if we have no umbrella; we cannot separate ourselves from it, and we get just as wet as the pavements and houses around us. In such a case we do not separate ourselves from the world; we do not invent a subject but name only the activity. Where we can be somewhat more detached from the world, where we can more easily remove ourselves from it, as in the case of the meadow, there we can invent a subject for our sentence “The meadow is greening.” From this example you see that in the way we speak to the children we can always take account of the interplay between the human being and the environment. By presenting the children (particularly in the lessons devoted to foreign languages) with examples in which grammar is linked to the practical logic of life, we try to discover how much they know of grammar and syntax. But in the foreign language lessons, please avoid first working through a reading passage and subsequently pulling the language to pieces. Make every effort to develop the grammatical side independently. There was a time when foreign language textbooks contained fantastic sentences that took account only of the proper application of grammatical rules. Gradually this came to be regarded as ridiculous, and sentences taken more from life were included in foreign language textbooks instead. But here, too, the middle path is better than the two extremes. When you develop grammar and syntax with the children, you will have to make up sentences specifically to illustrate this or that grammatical rule. But you will have to see to it that the children do not write down these sentences illustrating grammatical rules. Instead of being written down in their notebooks, they should be worked on; they come into being, but they are not preserved. This procedure contributes enormously to the economical use of your lessons, particularly foreign language lessons, for in this way the children absorb the rules in their feelings and after a while drop the examples.
133 If they are allowed to write down the examples, they absorb the form of the example too strongly. In terms of teaching grammar, the examples ought to be dispensable; they should not be carefully written down in notebooks, for only the rule should finally remain. It is beneficial to use exercises and reading passages for the living language, for actual speech, and, on the other hand, to let the children formulate their own thoughts in the foreign language, using more the kind of subject that crops up in daily life. For grammar, however, you use sentences that, from the start, you intend the children to forget, and therefore you do not let them do what is always helpful in memorizing—write them down. All the activity involved in teaching the children grammar and syntax with the help of sentences takes place in living conclusions; it should not descend into the dreamlike state of habitual actions but should continue to play in fully conscious life. Naturally, this method introduces into the lessons an element that makes teaching somewhat strenuous. But you cannot avoid the fact that you will have to make a certain effort, particularly in the lessons with the students who come into the higher classes. You will have to proceed very economically, and yet this economy will actually benefit only the students. You yourselves will need to spend a great deal of time inventing all the techniques that will help make the lessons as spare as possible. By and large, then, let grammar and syntax lessons be conversational. It is not a good idea to give children actual books of grammar and syntax in the form in which they exist today; they also contain examples, but examples, on the whole, should be discussed and not written. Only the rules should be written down in the notebooks the children use for learning regular grammar and syntax. It will be exceedingly economical and you will also do the children an enormous amount of good if on one day you discuss a particular rule of grammar in a language with the help of an example you have invented. Then, the next day or the day after that, you return to this rule in the same language lesson and let the children use their own imaginations to find an example. Do not underestimate the educational value of such a method. Teaching is very much a matter of subtleties. It is vastly different whether you merely question children on a rule of grammar and let them repeat from their notebooks the examples you have dictated or whether you make up examples specially intended to be forgotten and then ask the children to find their own examples. This activity is immensely educational. Even if you have in your class the worst young scamps, who never pay any attention at all, you will soon see what happens when you set them the task of finding examples to fit a rule of syntax. (And you can indeed succeed if you yourself are fully alert as you teach.) They will start to take pleasure in these examples—they will especially enjoy the activity of making them up themselves. When the children come back to school after the long summer holidays, having played out of doors for weeks on end, you will have to realize that they will have little inclination to sit quietly in class and listen attentively to things that they are expected to remember. Even if you find this behavior rather disturbing during the first week
134 or two, if you conduct your lessons, particularly the foreign language lessons, in a way that lets the children share in the soul activity of making up examples, you will discover among them after three or four weeks a number who enjoy making up such examples just as much as they enjoyed playing outdoors. But you, too, must take care to make up examples and not hesitate to make the children aware of this. Once they have gotten into the swing of this activity, it is very good if the children want to go on and on. It might happen that while one is giving an example, another calls out: “I have one too.” And then they all want a turn to share their examples. It is then helpful if you say at the end of the lesson: “I am very pleased that you like doing this just as much as you enjoyed romping outdoors. Such a remark echoes within the children; they carry it with them all the way home from school and tell it to their parents at dinner. You really must say things to the children that they will want to tell their parents at the next meal. And if you succeed in interesting them so much that they ask their mothers or fathers to make up examples for this rule, you really have carried off the prize. You can achieve such successes if you throw yourself heart and soul into your teaching. Just consider what a difference it makes if you discuss with the children in a spirited way the process forming “It rains,” “It greens,” “The meadow is greening,” and “The green meadow” instead of developing grammar and syntax in the usual way. You would not point out that this is an adjective and this is a verb and that if a verb stands alone there is no sentence—in short, you would not piece things together in the way that is often done in grammar books. Instead you would develop the theme in a lively lesson. Compare this living way of teaching grammar with the way it is so often taught today. The Latin or French teacher comes into the classroom. The children get out their Latin or French books. They have finished their homework, and now they are to translate; afterward they will read. Soon all their bones ache because the seats are so hard. If proper teaching methods were practiced, there would be no need to take such care in designing chairs and desks. The fact that so much care has had to be lavished on the making of seats and desks is proof that education has not been conducted sensibly. If children are really taken up in their lessons, the class is so lively that even if they are sitting down, they do not sit firmly. We should be delighted if our children do not sit down firmly, for only those who are themselves sluggish want a class of children to remain firmly seated, after which they drag themselves home aching in every limb. Particular account must be taken of these matters in grammar and syntax lessons. Imagine that the children now have to translate; grammar and syntax are worked out from the very things of life they ought to be enjoying. Afterward they are most unlikely to go home and say to their fathers: “We’re reading such a lovely book; let’s do some translating together.” It really is important not to lose sight of the principle of economy—it will serve you particularly well in your teaching of foreign languages. We must see to it, of course, that our teaching of grammar and syntax is fairly complete. We shall have to discover the gaps in the previous experience of the students
135 who are coming to us from all sorts of other classes. Our first task will be to close the gaps, particularly in grammar and syntax, so that after a few weeks we shall have brought a class to a stage where we can proceed. If we teach in the way I have described (and we are quite capable of doing so if we are totally involved in the lessons and if we ourselves are interested in them), we shall be giving the children what they will need to enable them to pass the usual college entrance examinations later on. And we impart to the children a great deal else that they would not receive in ordinary elementary or secondary schools, lessons that make them strong for life and that will serve them throughout life. Practical Advice to Teachers (121–128) 9. Working Hygienically with Grammar I once again need to take this opportunity of mentioning that in teaching it is of primary importance to take care to bring the nerve-sense system and the metaboliclimb system into a proper balance. When that is not done, it shows up as irregularities of the rhythmic system. If you notice the slightest inclination toward irregularity in breathing or in the circulation, then you should immediately pay attention to it. The rhythmic system is the organic barometer of improper interaction between the head and the limb-metabolic system. If you notice something, you should immediately ask what is not in order in the interaction of these two systems, and second, you should be clear that in teaching you need to alternate between an element that brings the child to his or her periphery, to the periphery of the child’s body, with another element that causes the child to withdraw within. Today, I cannot go into all the details of a hygienic schoolroom; that is something we can speak of next time. A teacher who teaches for two hours without in some way causing the children to laugh is a poor teacher, because the children never have cause to go to the surface of their bodies. A teacher who can never move the children in such a way as to cause them to withdraw into themselves is also a poor teacher. There must be an alternation, grossly expressed, between a humorous mood when the children laugh, although they need not actually laugh, but they must have some inner humorous feeling, and the tragic, moving feeling when they cry, although they do not need to burst into tears, but they must move into themselves. You must bring some life into teaching. That is a hygienic rule. You must be able to bring humor into the instruction. If you bring your own heaviness into class, justified as it may be in your private life, you should actually not be a teacher. You really must be able to bring the children to experience the periphery of their body. If you can do it in no other way, you should try to at least tell some funny story at the end of the period. If you have caused them to work hard during the period on something serious, so that their faces are physically cramped from the strain on their brains, you should at least conclude with some funny story. That is very necessary. There are, of course, all kinds of possibilities for error in this regard. You could, for example, seriously damage the children’s health if you have them work for an entire period upon what is normally called grammar. You might have children work only with the differences between subject, object, adjective, indicative, and subjunctive
136 cases, and so forth, that is, with all kinds of things in which the child is only halfinterested. You would then put the child in the position that, while determining whether something is in the indicative or the subjunctive case, the child’s breakfast cooks within the child, uninfluenced by his or her soul. You would, therefore, prepare for a time, perhaps fifteen or twenty years later, when genuine digestive disturbances or intestinal illnesses, and so forth, could occur. Intestinal illnesses are often caused by grammar instruction. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II (538–542) 10. Maintaining Discipline in Grammar Classes by Awakening Interest In spite of the fact that we have a Waldorf pedagogy, there is, for example, sometimes too much grammar in the classes, and the children cannot handle that. Sometimes I absolutely do not understand how you can keep the children quiet at all when you are talking, as sometimes happens, about adverbs and subjunctive cases, and so forth. Those are things for which normal children have no interest whatsoever. In such instances, children remain disciplined only because they love the teacher. Given how grammar is taught in language class, there should be no cause for any complaints in that regard. We can really discuss the question only if all the language teachers in the Waldorf school meet in order to find some way of not always talking about things the children do not understand. That, however, is so difficult because there are so many things to do. What is important is that the children can express themselves in the language, not that they know what an adverb or a conjunction is. They learn that, of course, but the way such things are done in many of the classes I have seen, it is not yet Waldorf pedagogy. That is, however, something we need to discuss here in the meetings. There are so many language teachers here and each goes their own way and pays no attention to what the others do, but there are many possibilities for helping one another. I can easily imagine that the children become restless because they do not know what you expect of them. We have handled language class in a haphazard way for too long. A teacher: There is examination fever in the highest grade. The middle grades are missing the basics. Dr. Steiner: That is not what they are missing. Look for what they are missing in another area. That is not what they are missing! It is very difficult to say anything when I am not speaking about a class in a specific language, since I find them better than the grammar instruction. Most of our teachers teach foreign languages better than they teach grammar. I think the main problem is that the teachers do not know grammar very well; the teachers do not carry a living grammar within them. Please excuse me that I am upset that you now want to use our meeting to learn grammar. I have to admit that I find the way you use grammar terms horrible. If I were a student, I certainly would not pay attention. I would be noisy because I would not know why people are forcing all of these things into my head. The problem is that you do not use time well, and the teachers do not learn how to acquire a reasonable ability in grammar. That, then, affects the students.
137 The instruction in grammar is shocking, literally. It is purely superficial, so that it is one of the worst things done at school. All the stuff in the grammar books should actually be destroyed in a big bonfire. Life needs to come into it. Then, the problem is that the students do not get a feeling for what the present or past tense is when they really should have a lively feeling for them. The genius of language must live in the teacher…. You torture the children with so much terminology. Do not be angry with me, but it is really so. If you used mathematical terminology the same way you do grammatical terminology, you would soon see how horrible it is. All your horrible habits do not allow you to see how terrible the grammar classes are. This is caused by the culture that has used language to mistreat Europe for such a terribly long time; it has used a language that was not livingly integrated, namely, Latin. That is why we have such a superficial connection to language. That is how things are.… As it is taught today, grammar is the most spiritless thing there is, and that gives a certain color to teaching. I must say there is much more to it than what we do. It is just horrible. We cannot always have everything perfect, which is why I do not always want to criticize and complain. You need a much better inner relationship to language, and then your teaching of language will become better. It is not always the children’s fault when they do not pay attention in the language classes. Why should they be interested in what an adverb is? That is just a barbaric word. Things only become better when you continually bring in relationships, when you repeatedly come back to the connections between words. If you simply make a child memorize and yourself have no interest in what you had them memorize, the children will no longer learn anything by heart. They will do that only if you return to the subject again in a different connection so that they see there is some sense in learning. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II (547–550) 11. Noun, Article, Adjective, and Verb I have already given you hints on how to help the children distinguish between nouns and adjectives. You help them see how a noun refers to something that stands outside in space by itself. You say to them: “Let us take the word tree. A tree is something that remains standing in space. But look at a tree in winter and again in spring and again in summer. The tree is always there, but it looks different in winter than it does in summer and different again in spring. In winter we say it is brown. In spring we say it is green. In summer we say it is many colored. These are its characteristics.” We first teach the children to distinguish between the characteristics that remain the same and those that change. Then we say: “If we need a word to describe what remains the same, that is a noun. And if we need a word for what changes on the thing that remains the same, that is an adjective.” Then you teach the children the concept of activity: “Sit on your chair. You are a good child. Good is an adjective. But now stand up and walk. You are doing something. That is an activity. The word you need to describe this activity is a verb.” In this way we try to lead the children to the fact, and then we make the transition from the fact to the words. By using this method, we will be able to teach the children,
138 without doing too much damage, the meaning of noun, article, adjective, and verb. It is most difficult to understand the nature of an article, because the children cannot yet grasp the relationship between an article and a noun. We shall have to flounder about in abstractions to teach the children the definition of an article. But they must learn it. It is better to flounder in abstractions (since we are dealing anyway with something synthetic) than to invent all sorts of artificial ways of explaining to children the significance and nature of an article, which is impossible. Practical Advice to Teachers (169–171) 12. Working with the Parts of Speech A teacher: Our proposal in teaching languages was to begin with the verb with the lowest beginners. From the fourth grade onward, we would develop grammar, and beginning with the ninth grade, we would do more of a review and literature. Dr. Steiner: It is certainly quite right to begin with the verb. Prepositions are very lively. It would be incorrect to begin with nouns. We also need to answer the question of what is removed from the verb when it becomes a noun.… In English, every noun can become a verb. [In German nouns are often formed by “substantiating” verbs. In English, a verb is often formed by changing a noun into a gerund, or “verbal noun,” for example, by adding -ing.] I know a woman who makes a verb out of everything that she hears. For instance, if someone says “Ah,” she then says that he “ahed.” Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II (488) 13. Working with the Pictorial Element in Grammar It should not be too difficult to present these matters pictorially in a language, if one thinks it is worthwhile to bring out the pictorial element in lessons. Really one ought not to miss a single opportunity to show even 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds how sentences are built up by, let us say, a main clause, a relative clause and a conditional clause. The actual grammar involved is not what matters most—it should only be a means of arriving at a picture. We should not miss the opportunity of giving the child what one could call a spatial picture of a main and a relative clause. Naturally this can be done in the most varied ways. Without wanting to theorize one could represent the main clause as a large circle and the relative clause as a small one, perhaps an eccentric circle. The conditional clause, the “if-sentence,” could now be shown by lines drawn towards the circle like rays indicating the conditioning factors…. It is really necessary, after preparation of one’s material, to come back to these matters again and again, and even with 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds to go into the moralcharacterological aspect of style made visible by pictures. This does not imply teaching syntax, for the pupil should grasp these matters in a more intuitive way. One can really go a long way here. For instance one can introduce a short story from the point of view of the temperaments, having thoroughly prepared beforehand. One can talk—not about the content, but about the style—about a melancholy or a choleric style quite apart from the content, even from the practical content. I am referring to sentence construction. There is not need to dissect sentences—this should be avoided—but one should cultivate this transformation into the pictorial element showing the moral
139 and characteristic quality. One will find that it is possible to teach children aged 10, 11, 12 and 13 in a stimulating way if one struggles hard enough with the necessary preparation. Erziehungsfrage im Reifealter translated in Karl Stockmeyer’s Rudolf Steiner’s Curriculum for Waldorf Schools (26) 14. Enlivening the Study of Grammar and Punctuation The main problem now is that if the children go to their final examinations with the punctuation they now know, it could be very bad. They use no punctuation at all in the 9b class. Teaching them punctuation depends upon discussing the structure of a sentence in an interesting way. That is something you can do well in the course of teaching them literature. For example, if you begin with older German language forms, you can show them in an intriguing way how relative clauses arose slowly through the transformation of writing into Latin structure. That could provide the basis for studying commas. You can teach the use of commas when you first show the children that they need to enclose every relative clause within commas. It is interesting to discuss relative clauses because they did not exist in older German. They also do not exist in dialect. You could go back to the Song of the Niebelungs and so forth and show how relative clauses began to come into the language and how it then became necessary to bring this logic into the language. After you have shown how relative clauses are enclosed with commas, you can go into a more thorough discussion of the concept of clauses. The children then need to learn that every kind of clause is set off by some sort of punctuation. The other things are not so terribly important. From there, you can go on to show how elements of thought developed in language, and thus arrive at the semicolon, which is simply a stronger comma and indicates a greater break. They already use periods. There is certainly sufficient time to begin that in the ninth grade. You need to develop it through a positive structuring of language, by going into the intent. It is something that you especially need to do with some excitement; you cannot do it in a boring way. Grammar alone is one of the most boring things. When you speak in dictations, you must make it clear when sentences end and begin. You should not dictate the punctuation to them. The children will have more when they become accustomed to learning punctuation by working with sentences. It would be erroneous to dictate punctuation. I would never dictate punctuation, but instead have them hear it through my speaking. It would be much better, however, if we could do something else. It would be better if we could divide things as was done in old German, but is no longer done in our more Latin writing—they wrote sentence per sentence, that is, one sentence on each line. You can discuss the artistic structure of a sentence with the children in an unpedantic way. You can give them a feeling for what a sentence is. You can make them aware of what a sentence is. You should also make them aware that well-formed sentences are something positive. You could, for instance, do something like using Herman Grimm’s style to show them the form of a sentence, how a sentence
140 is pictorially formed. Now, he really writes sentences. You do not find sentences in the things most people read, just a string of words. Sentences are completely missing. Give them a feeling for well-formed sentences. Herman Grimm writes sentences. They must learn to see the difference between Grimm’s style and the things we normally read, for instance, normal history books. You can do that in the ninth grade by giving them a certain kind of feeling for the difference between a complete sentence and an interjection. The curriculum contains something else that would be very helpful, which is poetics. That is completely missing. You are not taking it into account at all. I have noticed that the children have no feeling for metaphor. They should know metaphors, metonyms, and synecdoches. The result will be wonderful. That is all in the curriculum, but you haven’t done it. Teaching the children about metaphors helps them learn how to construct a sentence. When you bring metaphors and figures of speech into the picture, the children will learn something about sentence structure. You can explain these with some examples. You could explain, for example, the meaning of, “Oh, water lily, you blooming swan! Oh, swan, you swimming lily!” That is a double metaphor. Through such examples, young people gain a clear feeling for where the sentence ends, due to the metaphoric expressions. With those who have good style, it would not be at all bad to try to frame the sentences rather than using commas and semicolons. You can do this well with Herman Grimm’s sentences and a red pencil. Circle the sentences and then circle twice the things that are less necessary for content, once with red and then with blue. In that way, you will have a nicely colored picture of an artistically formed sentence. You could then compare such sentences with those that are normally written, for instance, in newspapers. The weekly Anthroposophie was no exception to this. It used to go on and on just like some boring German, but now it is better. This is something we most definitely need to do. You should teach the children punctuation to give them some feeling for logic. Such things can also be quite exciting. If you first get the children used to enclosing relative clauses with commas, then everything else will fall into place. You need to go far enough that they understand that a relative clause is basically an adjective. You could say, “a red rose.” You need no punctuation there. But, if you say, “a rose, red,” then you need to place a comma following rose because red is an appositive. If you say, “a rose that is red,” it is quite clearly an adjective. If you give them such enlivened examples, learning will not be so boring. In dialect, people say, “the father what can write.” The relative clause is an adjective, that is, the clause as a whole is an adjective. This view of relative clauses is also very important for learning foreign languages. Well, that is what we want to do, to begin with the relative clause and go from there into clauses that are abbreviations or indications of an adjective. Beginning with that, which is something we need to emphasize, we can then go on to the semicolon, and finally arrive at the period, which is simply an emphasis or a pause. It is easy to
141 convey a feeling for colons. The colon represents something not said, that is, instead of saying, “the following,” or instead of forming a boring relative clause, we use a colon. We express it in speech through tone. For instance, the way every student should name the animals is, “The animals are: the lion, the goose, the dog, the Bölsche,” and so on. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II (645–649) 15. Grammar in the Ninth Grade In German, I would recommend that you not go too deeply into grammar in the first semester.… In the essays, I would recommend that you handle historical themes. The students should work primarily with the material you gave them last year in history. You will certainly have adequate opportunities to discuss grammar and syntax in connection with corrections. Before you have the children write an essay, though, you should have the children from last year orally discuss the theme for the new children in the class. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner I (176–177) 16. Grammar in the Tenth Grade Everything connected with language is interesting. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II (486)
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