What I Think About Grammar


Grammar, or rather, my understanding of grammar, is as elusive as a hummingbird. It flits in and out of my vision much the same as this gentle creature flits from petal to petal. Like the hummingbird, grammar means well. The hummingbird is doing a great service for flowers everywhere, much the same as bees do. Yet grammar, like the bee, can sting you when you least expect it, and like the hummingbird, you have no idea where it is, when it will show up next or why it works well in some places and doesn't in others.

I confess that I remember nearly nothing about grammar from grade or high school. I vaguely remember a small English book we all carried in senior year. It was red, it fit in my purse and it had sentence diagrams in it. OK, I guess I remember "subject" and "predicate". The visuals were very helpful for me with my own writing at the time. Yet beyond sentence structure, I don't think I ever read a single page in that little book. I definitely remember playing poker in study hall, rather than reading or writing. I'd write my essay about five minutes before class and I just wrote what the teacher asked for. I got good grades so I never thought much about it.

Flash forward to today and my aspirations to be an English teacher and I still can't tell you anything about grammar. I know what good grammar looks like, but I'm sitting in the middle of it. I literally cannot see the forest for the trees. I know it exists, I know what it looks like, but explaining how to make it is as foreign to me as astrophysics or hummingbird flight patterns. My hope is that, as I begin to tutor, it won't sneak up on me like a hive of angry bees and sting me into a coma.