Championing a Worthy Ideal: No Retreat From Teaching Grammar at Milton

If a student can master the qualities of effective composition—clarity, unity, coherence, concision, correctness and energy—then clear, informative, perhaps even entertaining, communication is the happy, inevitable result. While many schools have retreated from the rigorous consideration of grammar, Milton’s English faculty is still devoted to the pursuit of excellent usage.

The gems set forth in “Key Concepts for Expository Writers” by David Smith (English faculty) include standard warnings to writers: Avoid clichés, for example. (The use of the work “gem” in the pre-ceding sentence might qualify.) Forgo the use of pronouns such as “it” or “this” unless they have direct antecedents. Know the difference between active and passive voice, and choose passive deliberately, only to effect ambiguity or enervation. Under-stand how a paragraph is made and the important contribution of each unit—the sentence, the phrase, the word and punctuation.

Practice unraveling sentences. Take this sentence from Tarim Chung’s Class IV English class: “I gave money to whomever I thought wanted it.” Well-educated readers who are not grammarians might rush to agree that “whomever” is in this case correct simply because it follows “to”; it must be the object of a preposition, right? Wrong. Take away the parenthetical “I thought”; identify what comes after the “to” as a noun clause; and realize that the subject of a noun clause must use the subjective “who.”

“Being a good mechanic pays,” says Tarim, who now heads the School’s weekly Class IV Writing Workshops, which bring together the entire class to diagram sentences and practice strategies for sentence attack. The workshop is in tandem with the Class IV English classes, which encourage familiarity with important literary genres and help students develop competence as readers and writers. Tarim joins the legendary ranks of longtime teachers Jim Connolly and David Smith, two of the workshop’s five leaders during its more than 30-year history. Former faculty member Jane Archibald, another workshop leader, wrote the course. (Tarim jokes that he’s also inherited an archaeology site: He bases his lectures and exercises in part on the hand- and typewritten notes from the workshop’s four associated file drawers—the equivalent of an Olympic torch.)

Jim, who led the workshop from 1991 to 2004, applauds Guy Hughes, retired English chair and leader of the department’s re-emphasis on the cognitive domain over the affective domain. An embracing of the affective domain in the 1960s, Jim says, had popularized “rap sessions” and “values education” above pure reading and writing; Guy standardized and formalized the Class IV English class experience and introduced the workshop, which meets 20 times during each academic year.

“Often, when grammar is covered nowadays, students have the sense that they can wait you out,” David says, especially if their teachers are not comfortable with the material. Milton combats the “waiting it out” avoidance with a thorough, highly structured system that relies on the quality, regularity and energy of the workshop, which is reinforced by in-class exercises. “For many students, the workshop codifies the techniques that they have adopted because they are intuitive readers—they find that precision is possible and desirable,” Tarim says. “The workshops give students a chance to get into the detail of writing.

“It’s a moment of real pleasure for me when students come into class and say, ‘Yesterday, I saw 20 grammar errors on the news and read 20 more in a magazine. Mr. Chung, I can’t enjoy a song on the radio now because I hear the dangling modifier or the pronoun reference errors.’

“I think that means that they really get it: Their world is composed of language, and now they have better access to the inner workings of their world. I liken the moment to the climax of the Matrix when the hero finally sees all the computer code streaming down the walls and realizes that everything, everything is composed of this simple but dominant code.

“I also tell students that they may not get all of the grammar all of the time, but one day they’ll be writing a paper in college and they will start to make choices about language that are just right, that they just know deep down hews to all mechanical laws of English that they studied way back when.”

Helping students become good writers is the goal, but good teaching must be accompanied by competent learning: David’s booklet on expository writing offers readers four appendixes, the first of which is an essay, “On Good Students and Bad.” Here, he wonders about the wisdom of asserting that any bad student must be bad only because his self-esteem has not been sufficiently puffed up. He offers a comparison between good and bad students:

“Bad students settle for the minimum every time. They have, at best, a ‘get it off my desk’ attitude, one which values just finishing an assignment above doing it well. They believe they have read something when they have merely passed their eyes over it. They tend to lack staying power and may go belly up at the first hint of fatigue or unhappiness. In contrast, good students manage to make the most of opportunities even when they don’t ‘feel like it.’ And they go beyond the minimum. They read until they have mastered the content of an assignment…they flesh out ideas and deliver rich illustrations. They take risks with metaphors. They edit out the dross and the grammatical errors. They proofread. When they put a paper on the teacher’s desk, they are not merely putting the ball back into his court but rather whacking a shot that they hope will knock his socks off.

“Every bad student is a good student waiting to happen, but the ones who actually make the transition are the ones who, instead of just waiting, work at it. They shake off setbacks, work from strengths, extend themselves to master the material—and emerge from the process with well-earned self-esteem.”

Taking inspiration from those who have earned their self-esteem before us, David exhibits quotations by Rilke, Mailer and Updike in his classroom. A Thomas Mann quote aptly expresses a truth for many of the world’s great writers. Mann wrote, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Milton sets out to help students who write become writers and embrace the difficulty.

Heather Sullivan

 

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