A Grammar Exercise

I write poetry late at night after my wife and the children have gone to bed.  I teach English at a school that still believes in grammar, at least as an exercise in logic, if not to help students to learn how to write.  Grammar textbooks are deadly, their sentences bland like the food forced upon the elderly in nursing homes, who also have no choice but to chew with however many teeth they have left, swallow and digest.

So in the evening I sometimes compose poems for my students, sometimes disguised as exercises, like this one on the beauty of fall and the tenses of verbs.

Directions:  In the following sentences, underline the main verb (including any helpers) and identify its tense by writing the name of the tense in the space above each sentence.

1. The sunlight drifts across the field on this cloudy day like smoke from a chimney.

2. The air has felt crisp and cold all week.

3. I had tasted the same crispness before in the freshness of apples.

4. The geese will fly south for the winter in enormous wobbly V’s.

5. The squirrels have been building huge nests in the tops of the oaks.

6. The walnuts dropped from their branches onto the ancient tennis court.

7. By morning frost will have covered the ground in the northern hills like powdered sugar on the feathery crust of an apple turnover.

8. The leaves on the maples are changing their colors from green to yellow and red and orange.

9. The frigid water on the lake was lapping against the edges of the old, wooden dock.

10. Mist will have risen off the water like dreams gone to nest in the clouds.

                  

                                      ~ Harper Follansbee

By Way of Introduction

        When I was learning to write essays in high school English classes in the middle 1960’s, I used a typewriter. If I made a mistake, I remember having to retype the entire page of my essay.  Whiteout hadn’t been invented yet, and “word processor” was a term that would have been applied, if it were used at all, to an electric typewriter.              

       For each of the four English classes I took at the private boys’ boarding school I attended, I was required to purchase the designated hardcover copy of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition.  In one of those courses, the teacher would highlight any grammatical mistakes his students made by simply noting the page number and the number of the rule that particular student had violated in the left-hand margin of the essay.  For instance, if Jerome used a semi-colon incorrectly, he would find “238.12a” scrawled in the margin, and he was supposed to turn to page 238 in his text and read the following: “12a. Use a semi-colon between independent clauses not joined by and, but, or, nor, for, yet or so.”  Propping his Warriner’s open with one hand, Jerome would then dutifully copy the rule out five times in longhand on the back of the page where the transgression had occurred.

       When I graduated from college in 1971 with a B.A. in English, I took a job working at a furniture mill in southern Massachusetts, gluing pieces of planed pine together for what eventually would become tabletops.  Having grown up at another larger, more prestigious boys’ boarding school than the one I attended and having spent far too many of my twenty-two years living in a dormitory, I decided I had had enough of education. I wanted to experience something different.

       Over the next seven years I would move from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, where I had been living while I worked in the furniture mill, to a subsistence farm in China, Maine, to an apartment over a real estate office in Manchester, Vermont, back to Massachusetts, back to Maine and finally back to Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, working variously as a farm hand, a carpenter’s helper, a house painter, a finisher in a cabinet maker’s shop, a deliveryman for a florist, and finally as an auctioneer’s assistant.

       Along the way I got my teaching certificate in secondary English from Keene State College, and in the winter of 1977, I began applying for teaching jobs to any private school in New England that would have me.  I readily accepted an offer from one of the two schools that would and began preparing for the first, full-time job of my life. 

       Not surprisingly, one of the first books I ordered for myself was Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition: Complete Course.  The head of the English Department had mentioned that I would be responsible for covering a certain amount of grammar in each of my classes, using, of course, a Warriner’s workbook. I figured I had better refresh my memory.

       Thirty-four years later, looking back on my career, I realize that teaching grammar has not only been one of my strengths as an English teacher, but ironically enough, given my early exposure, one of my greatest joys. 

       During my first few years in the classroom, I quickly realized that to teach the amount of grammar and usage a student should master would take up far too much class time and would also bore me and my students to death.  I decided to focus on parts of speech, parts of a sentence, phrases and clauses, administered, like caster oil, one spoonful at a time in separate doses. To disguise the medicinal taste, I abandoned Warriner’s, creating my own highlight sheets and my own exercises.

       My highlight sheets have always been pretty standard.  How entertaining can one be in defining an appositive phrase after all?  Grammatical exercises are an entirely different matter.  First off, I decided to connect the sentences in each of my exercises so as to create a storyline, not about some historically significant incident like the Battle of Hampton Roads where the CSS Virginia (a.k.a. USS Merrimac) and the USS Monitor, two lumbering, turtle-like, ironclads, fought each other to a draw in March of 1862.  In fact, I refused to enrich my students’ minds with any information that my friends in the history department might regard as significant.  Instead I wanted to make my students (and myself) laugh, or at least chuckle. 

So here's an example ...

Four Parts of Speech

Above each underlined word, indicate whether it is a noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb by writing the following abbreviations:  noun (n.), pronoun (pron.), adjective (adj.), or verb (v.).

This exercise is based on events reported to me by my neighbors.
 

1. One day in late November, a wild turkey appeared in our neighbor’s back

yard.

2. It must have been looking for food, either birdseed from the many

birdfeeders located near the house or dry cat food from the bowl sitting on

the deck.

3. A large gray neighborhood cat sat watching the turkey from the deck.

4. He had never seen something like this before, and he imagined that the

gawky creature with its red wattles, long neck and bony legs must be some

sort of threat to his safety.

5. Suddenly he leaped onto the turkey’s back, and the bird started spinning

around the yard like some demented ballerina.

6. Eventually the cat, whose name was Smokey, went flying off of the

turkey’s back and landed in a heap on the ground.

7. The terrified turkey staggered into the nearby woods and disappeared

from sight.

8. Smokey picked himself up off of the frozen ground and sauntered back

onto the deck where he sat quietly waiting for something else exciting to

occur.

9. When nothing happened, he took a long drink of cool water, chewed on a

mouthful of food from the bowl, curled himself up in a ball, and went fast

asleep.