Nouns

My first word was doy-doy, which technically isn’t a word at all. My parents discerned that it meant horse. My second word was dada. This makes absolute sense to me because I was pretty much obsessed with horses as a child and my dad was my hero. My early language acquisition was the stuff of family lore. My mother referred to horses as doy-doys for the rest of her life, much to my irritation. One of our last conversations included me saying, “I’m forty-six years old; I can say horse now. “

As a writer, a teacher, and an avid reader, I am probably more interested in words and the acquisition of words than the average person. When punctuation started becoming emoticons, like– 😉 and :(,–I was fascinated. I also love slang, because to me it’s living proof at how language morphs and changes.

I remember being introduced to the poetry of e.e. cummings in grade school. Someone asked why he could be a famous writer if he wasn’t following the rules. Our teacher said only someone who really understood the rules could understand how powerful Cummings was in breaking the rules. Poetry, powerful? That didn’t make a lot of sense to me when I was nine years old, but I never forgot it.

I have been having my students write. You would think with tools like spell check, grammar check, kids would be better writers. Not so much. They know that periods come at the end. Not the end of a sentence, the end. I often get a document with ONE period in it. All other punctuation is apparently obsolete. Capitalization reminds me of seventeenth and eighteenth century letter writing, when people capitalized nouns for emphasis, such as–“Today, I was introduced to the vile devil known as a Porcupine.” Sometimes nothing is capitalized, not I, not the first letter of a sentence. Wait. There are often no sentences, just words run together. I look at their writing and don’t even know where to start.

I tried having my students do some old school writing, meaning pencil and paper writing. Here’s what I learned–spelling is very weak. I guess spell check isn’t a great tool if the spelling of the word isn’t close. The spell choice suggestions could and do lead down the wrong paths in those situations. And while kids have plenty to say, they format their words in phrases and jumbled stream of consciousness. It’s like kids have been given the toolbox of writing with a three minute tutorial on how to use 300 different tools.

For the last few weeks, I have been on a perilous journey with my students to name some of the tools in the writing toolbox and give some rudimentary review on how to use these tools. We watched all eight episodes of grammar rock–“Conjunction junction, What’s your function?” and took notes. Then we used magazines to look at text and find examples of parts of speech. Then I had the kids make an updated video of a part of speech. I used a video making app called Wevideo. It was pretty complicated with adding text and images and transitions and I spent about ten hours on my example. The students caught on to the technology faster than I did and were invested in the making the video part. I saw a lot of growth in the understanding of how words work as parts of speech, but more importantly I finally felt like I was connecting writing in a way that made sense in their lives.

Words will always be my jam, but I sometimes question investing so much of my soul to building competent writers in young people. Won’t AI be writing the future? Maybe, but, it’s impossible to know. Tools are only helpful when wielded correctly.

I am helping prepare children for a world that hasn’t been invented yet. Language continues to grow and evolve, but the basic building blocks remain unchanged. Hopefully, these lessons will be of value down the road. Meanwhile, I learned a hell of a lot about making videos.