Thursday, December 13, 2012

I Had an Electronic Dictionary in 5th Grade

Prompt 10/15/2012 (Week 8):

So what kind of wacky grammar rules were you taught?

It wasn’t so much that I was taught wacky grammar rules, it’s that I feel I was undertaught. When you’re a kid, you soak up information at a ridiculous rate. I wish that the rules and guidelines i had been taught were adequately explained. I realize, now that I am a writing tutor, how insane this is. The rules in English are more difficult to navigate than a labyrinth. However, I feel that there were serious gaps in my knowledge. Why did it take 20 years for someone to finally explain how to use a semicolon? And who decided to put the semicolon key on the home row of the keyboard? Someone has some explaining to do..

I wish that someone would explain why the letter Y is only sometimes a vowel, and why I should care that it is only sometimes a vowel. Or how the prepositions in English work at all. I think it would be useful to give some explanation as to what an “article” is in English or how they work. I remember being a kid in elementary school who was known for having an impressive vocabulary for a fifth grader. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I also possessed an electronic dictionary, a trend that I maintain today by keeping the dictionary app on my phone. I was always asked by my fellow nine year olds to define tricky words using this handheld device. The only time my pocket dictionary actually gained me popularity was during vocabulary assignments where our only alternative was to manually look them up in the pages of the big dictionaries.

I don’t think that I was necessarily taught wacky grammar rules. I was just given a poorly defined list of them and not told how they properly worked. You know, education.


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