Grammar Nerd

Something that I was a little shocked to learn about my own teaching lately is that my least favorite part of language arts when I was growing up, may be what I’m destined to teach. In elementary and middle school, I absolutely loathed learning about grammar. I didn’t like that it took away from the more creative parts of the subject and struggled to learn them. Now I find myself editing friends’ papers and silently correcting publications I read. I don’t know when it happened and I certainly don’t know why, but I’ve become an English nerd. The funny part is that I’m okay with it. Maybe I’m meant to teach others the lessons I hated as punishment for the torture I’m sure I put my teachers through. What I do know is that I’ll try to teach it in a more entertaining way than when I was in school.

Language arts are in everything from science to gym class. Without language arts skills, you wouldn’t be able to read this sentence – and I wouldn’t have been able to write it. It’s a subject that constantly touches our lives, whether it is reading the Iliad (reading), making a YouTube video (speaking and visually representing), or even watching Spongebob (listening). Without language arts, society as we know it wouldn’t exist. For this reason and more, I am proud that I have a passion for the subject. Even if a student doesn’t become the next great novelist, I can be assured that some of what I teach them will come in handy in their lives, in one way or another. And at the end of the day, if I can say that I made even the tiniest positive difference in someone’s world, I think I can say my life was worth it.