English....

English is an interesting language.  Maybe all languages are but teaching English has definitely put it in a new perspective for me.  Hopefully sharing these thoughts of my frustration and lack of understanding with English grammar won’t incriminate me as a teacher.  Sometimes I think I get more frustrated than the kids when I try to explain a grammatical rule.  I often find myself telling them I don’t know why you need to say it this way you just do.  Maybe that makes me a bad teacher and I shouldn’t be sharing this…  But overall it has made me much more interested (albeit extremely frustrated at times) with my own language and I find myself constantly wanting to learn more about why things are the way they are in the English language.  I find myself researching how to explain exceptions to rules and why you need to use an article here but not there.  The “just say it like this because I said so” method works with my little ones but not so much with the older ones.  I don’t know if American schools should focus more on teaching the rules of grammar or not.  If they did I think I would need a few grammar courses myself before I could teach it properly.  Unless you are teaching grammar to other people does it really matter if you funny understand all the little rules and exceptions?  Using proper grammar in writing and speech is one thing (and one of my ultimate pet peeves now!).   Explaining rules and exceptions to students who are not fluent in English, and rules that I don’t even fully understand myself, is not nearly as easy as I once thought it might be.  I’ll be honest I don’t know the difference between a short action verb and a long action verb.  I don’t know why you put –ing on the end of a verb after the word ‘is’ (no you may not say ‘he is wash the car.’) or an –s after “he sits” but not “they sit.”  You just do.  There are countless more examples I could give of grammatical questions that come up with my students all the time that I just can’t explain to anyone, let alone an ESL student.  Sometimes I think I am learning just as much as my students, but I suppose that’s often what happens as a teacher.  At least I hope it is because I sure don’t know much now!