Knock, knock. Who's There? Humorous Approaches to Teaching Grammar
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I describe how Kate Ristau and I engaged first-year writing students by writing a lighthearted textbook about commas and creating a Choose Your Own Adventure / comma study guide activity.
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Knock, knock. Who's There? Humorous Approaches to Teaching Grammar
- 1. KNOCK-KNOCK. WHO’S THERE? HUMOROUS APPROACHES TO TEACHING GRAMMAR Maren Bradley Anderson CCCC 2015
- 2. The Reasons People remember more if they are laughing while they learn it Students hate reading about grammar I don’t love teaching grammar Seinfeld WOU is special Boss? Seinfeld’s grammar dragon is in the sandwiche s again.
- 3. The Comma Book Commas: An Irreverent Primer We wanted to write a book about the most common errors we marked We wanted it to be funny Fairies? Grammar dragons? Seems to work Yes, you need a comm a there!
- 4. The CYOA What’s a CYOA? I wanted students to have a bigger “stake” in learning grammar than just a test They turn explicative text into creative narrative text I asked them to have fun Grading Becomes the class’s study guide for the final exam
- 5. The How-To Create a world for the action Create a “you” character, a sidekick, and a nemesis—plus others. Make a quest Make one option for each adventure a generic lead into the next adventure. Optional: upload the whole thing to Google Forms or Twine. Please see the handout for URLs, etc.
- 6. Fun and Funny Humor helps engage students in core material Engaging, funny text Engaging, fun, narrative project
- 7. Thank you! Maren Bradley Anderson andersm@wou.edu www.marens.com Take a card Available on Amazon Ebook available on Kindle Smashwords for all other formats Ask me for a free ebook coupon Contact me: Commas: An Irreverent Primer
Editor's Notes
- Hello, I’d like to warm you all up with a joke. OK? Here goes: Knock, Knock. Who’s there? To. To who? No. To Whom! I’m Maren Bradley Anderson and I’m an adjunct Faculty member at Western Oregon University. My friend and co teacher/writer/editor Kate Ristau and I taught the same classes and shared a weird sense of humor. We have similar teaching styles—we are the goofy teachers, the ones that like the idea of the teacher as a troop leader. But we both struggled with teaching grammar. Our students came to us with a schmear of grammar understanding, and a deep opposition to learning it. Neither of us could find a text that explained grammar in a lighthearted, memorable way. Nothing we found engaged our first year writing students at all. So, we wrote our own. I have two parts to this talk. First, I’ll describe the book we wrote: Commas: an Irreverent Primer, and then I’ll talk about the Choose Your Own Adventure –Comma Adventure project. These two approaches, especially combined, have made a difference in my teaching and in the students’ retention. Fun and funny help me teach the otherwise dry core material.
- People remember more if they are laughing while they learn it Ok, I lied. This first slide is about teaching with humor. On your handouts (which will be online as well), you’ll find a longish list of research that connects improved learning outcomes with humorous teaching methods. To summarize: people seem to retain knowledge better if it is connected to laughter. More directly, Kate and I decided to make a humorous grammar book because we were frustrated with the expensive grammar texts that didn’t seem to focus on the errors that we observed over and over and over and over and over…and over again. But we had some challenges. First, Students hate reading about grammar They do. Most of them would rather have their toenails removed than read about a serial comma. Why? I think it’s because the people who write grammar texts don’t seem to have a sense of humor. Plus, there is a lot of anxiety about grammar because students don’t understand it, and they’ve been shamed by previous teachers for not understanding it. People avoid failure. Second: I get bored teaching grammar In my other life, I write novels and short stories and poetry. Even though I like grammar and syntax, I don’t sit around and think about them. I totally get why my students aren’t thrilled to dive in to a dry grammar text. So Kate and I decided to write something that we would like to read. Maybe then the students would like it, too. Third: Seinfeld. Composition classes are “about nothing,” just like Seinfeld was the “show about nothing.” Incidentally, I can’t use that joke anymore. The students don’t get it because none of them have ever seen Seinfeld. Yes, that makes me feel old. [I love your tone throughout her and your subtle use of humor] Anyway, the point is that the examples in class can be about anything. So can the texts. Voila! Free rein. Finally, WOU is special: WOU is a little state school that is populated by lots of students who are the first in their families to go to college. For many, it’s nearly a miracle that they got to go to college at all. However, for the whole 13 years I’ve taught there, there has only been one 10-week writing course required for graduation. Anyone who teaches writing knows that isn’t enough time. WOU composition teachers have to make decisions about what to teach in that one 10-week class that would help our students most. Fortunately, the school has approved a change that should funnel more students into a lower-level class, so this problem should get better. I hope.
- Commas: An Irreverent Primer So, Kate and I wrote the Comma book, and we self-published it. I’ve been using it in my classes for a year now. We wanted to write a book about the most common errors we marked We actually needed a small book given the amount of time we have with our students. We decided only to focus on the errors we saw the most: mostly errors associated with comma splices and run-ons, introductory clauses, introductory phrases and words, and a couple others. You know, the errors that make your hand cramp up after a while and make you wonder why you ever thought teaching writing was even possible. Those errors. We wanted it to be funny b/c we wanted the students to actually read it. That seems to be working, too. Plus, we wanted to write a book that sort of reflected our personalities. So why is it filled with : Fairies? That’s KR’s doing. The grammar dragon? Me. Kate is a folklorist and has a fantasy novel coming out in May. She[’s] all about the fairies. I’ve been writing and reading about dragons and unicorns since I could hold a pencil, and though the novel I have that’s coming out this year isn’t fantastical, two of my other manuscripts are. Oh, and my daughter is convinced that I’m going to buy her a unicorn for her birthday. The upshot is that the book: Seems to work. Anecdotally, our students do better with the commas discussed in the book. I think b/c they read it. They tell other people that it’s funny and worth reading. Plus, they don’t seem to sell it back to the bookstore. And, it’s cheap!
- One way we tried to engage our students is with the Comma book—a silly, informative text. The other way I tried to engage them with the material was with the CYOA project. I wanted students to have a bigger “stake” in learning than just a test. CYOA explanation Choose your own adventure is a form of literature, mostly Middle Grade, where the reader chooses what the POV character does and turns to the appropriate page. This way, readers can have different adventures each time they read a book. Today, kids encounter this most often in the form of video or online games. I broke my students into groups of 3 and gave each group responsibility over a chapter in our comma book [hold it up]. I wrote the first two “chapters” of the CYOA book and told the students to continue the adventure in the same world with the same characters. During their adventure, they had to explain the concepts in the chapter and then generate a quiz of three options at the end. Two of the options would be wrong, and they were to write “creative death scenes” for those. The correct answers would lead to a door to the next adventure. They write the adventures, thus turning explicative (though kind of wacky) text into creative narrative text I don’t have time to go into how changing modes, etc., helps learning. If we accept that people do learn more by changing something explicative into narrative and vice versa, then this project is sinking commas even more into their little brains. Plus, CYOA books are all second person, and present tense (sneaking in more grammar!) I asked them to have fun I asked them to make the deaths/failures as exciting/gruesome as possible for the fun. And fun = laughter = retention. That’s the theory, anyway. Grading Grade only on the usefulness of the explanation/quiz they make, not the writing. I don’t actually teach creative writing in this class (see time issues above), so I just give them freedom to be weird. Accurate, but weird. Study guide. Ultimately, this is the class’s study guide for the final exam [insert grammar exam results, study guide stuff here]
- [this might have to go into the handout for the sake of time] This is a totally doable project for one quarter or semester. Create a world for the action My CYOA is based in the grumpy-unicorn filled land of our Comma book, but anything will do. Remember, Seinfeld. Create a “you” character, a sidekick, and a nemesis—plus others. The POV character I made was just a gender-less college-aged sorcerer's apprentice. There was also a Grammar Dragon and a Unicomma. Make a quest, i.e. the lost “spelling book” in our CYOA Yeah, I totally stole that idea from a PBS kids’ show. Shoot me Make one option for each adventure a generic lead into the next adventure. In my case, I just wrote the “doors” for the right answers. Optional: upload the whole thing to Google Forms. Or twine or any of the other options for CYOA programs. Please see the handout for URLs, etc.
- The takeaway here is that fun and funny helps. A spoonful of sugar helps the introductory clauses go down, so to speak. Humor helps engage students with difficult material whether we use a funny text or a creative writing project. Or both.