Grammar

I love grammar analysis, and all fall I’ve been teaching it to Mr. TOF. He, unfortunately does not share my passion for it. Usually we lay sentence strips all over the floor and place grammar symbols next to each word as part of our homeschool morning, but the past few days we’ve also been analyzing some Christmas Carols. I found this to be incredibly enlightening! It was so fun for me that I could have spent a few hours doing more carols. It has probably been my favorite Christmas activity of the season. There is something so special about slowing down and identifying each word and how it functions in the poetry that makes me process the words even more deeply. I also love how beautiful and colorful the page looks in the end! My study buddy, however, calls symbolizing “Torture Time” and gets rather grouchy about the process.

This doesn’t phase me, however, because sometimes learning is, well, a bit painful and unenjoyable during the process, but the knowledge in the end can be so lovely. For example, I did not enjoy eleventh grade English, when my ancient (and somewhat spacey) English teacher insisted on grammar, grammar, grammar every day. She was obsessed. In the end, though, for the first time I really understood all the parts of how grammar worked, and when I had the big picture, it all became so fascinating. It served me well when I was learning foreign language. It served me well all throughout college when I needed to understand writing handbooks. For goodness sake, one time I even needed to write a five page paper about how grammar was utilized in a piece of literature. It sounded impossible when I started writing, but in the end, I actually had a lot of fun writing that paper, and it was clearly memorable because I am still thinking about it more than two decades later.