Teaching Syntax Brett Favre Style

When I arrived at school this morning, I was determined to begin tackling the problem of students who don't know what complete sentence is.

One thing that's got me a little riled up these days is that I've discovered that one of the trends in Language Arts (over the past decade or so) has been to completely neglect the introduction of direct instruction in grammar until high school. Yes, it's true, it really appears that we language arts instructors are not expected to teach our students much of anything about grammar until they are in high school!

Frankly I'm a bit outraged at this. I know the research says that explicit instruction in grammar isn't always effective, but you know what, it DOES help to know how to use it BEFORE you hit the grades where suddenly your writing will be evaluated rather severely.

It is my own understanding of life that you tend to (as my students in Memphis always used to say) "get the understanding of things" when you have more time and practice with using them. Frankly at this point, I don't care what the trends are, and what my college professors say. After being completely appalled by the lack of knowledge that today's young students have in the areas of spelling and grammar, you better believe we're going to be doing direct instruction in grammar and spelling in MY classroom! I am NOT going to a contributing member to the problem of students who can't write because they don't know how to use the rules of grammar.

Having said my piece, I will get back to the main point.

I sat down at the computer. I was about an hour early and didn't have a whole lot of planning to do, so I started reading today's news online, when lo and behold, I learn that Brett Favre is retiring. Truth be told, I have two favorite quarterbacks-one is Peyton Manning, and the other is Brett Favre. I was quite sad to learn that Brett Favre is retiring, but I can't say that I'm really all that surprised to hear it. He's been threatening to do so for a while now. And thinking back a couple of seasons (when the Packers just had a terrible time of things), I thought maybe he'd retire then. He stuck it out though, and they had a great season this year, so basically he's retiring at the top of his game. I can't blame him for that. I'm going to miss watching him though because he is a pleasure to watch at work.

Then I realized here's the answer to my dilemma. There's nothing on earth the 6th and 7th grade boys at this school like better than football (and football cards) except maybe basketball. So I had just landed on an interesting topic to use for today's mini-lesson on recognizing complete and incomplete sentences (at least for the boys, but then again they're the prime culprits). Although it boggles my mind, I have several students in this group who wouldn't recognize an incomplete sentence if it showed up in front of them wearing a clown suit blowing bubbles in their faces. This is clearly something I have the power to change. So I whipped up a page full of sample sentences from one of the news articles (a nice mix of complete and incomplete sentences) and went over the ingredients for a complete sentence-subject, verb, punctuation. Go Brett Favre! When I got their papers back, most of them had improved considerably. I'll just need to do it again a few times and that should take care of some of the worst cases.