Language Arts

They always say that teaching something is the best way to really know it. But I can honestly say that I am not a good teacher. I was trying to do homework with The Boy tonight (my husband turned over the language arts section to me since words are my thing) and I found myself off on this tangent about punctuation and declarative vs. interrogative sentences and by the time I realized how far I had strayed from the path The Boy was looking at me as if I had truly lost my mind. It was pretty funny actually and just totally drove home the fact that I suck at teaching.

I started to realize this last year when The Boy was trying to learn how to read in Kindergarten. As you may remember he was having a hell of a time and I just could not figure out why. All things words have always come so easily to me that I just don’t get it when they don’t do the same thing for everyone else. And because they’ve always just sort of clicked for me, I don’t have the foggiest idea of how to break the whole thing down for someone else either. This fact in particular poses quite the problem when one is attempting to help their almost 6 year old son with beginning sentence structure.

Although in my defense the instructions on his worksheet were in all reality meant for the teacher. I mean there’s no way that someone could expect a first grader to read the instructions “Determine whether each sentence is declarative or interrogative and then add the correct punctuation mark.” I just took the material in front of me and ran with it. My guess is that these worksheets were meant to be done mostly out loud in class, but what with his school being closed for the last several days his teacher just sent the whole thing home with him.

She probably had no idea that one of her student’s mothers would be a crazy word freak hell bent on teaching her son the finer points of the English language before he could wrap his brain around it.