Mom on Grammar: "You'd Better Tell Them"

Mom and Grammar Continued

            When Mom was still at home, and I was visiting her every Friday, I would occasionally take my students’ compositions along to read one or two to her.  As I said earlier, she thought I was among the luckiest of so-called professionals because, as she told people when she was no longer at home, “My daughter Tina teaches people from all over the world!”  I never told her that I was failing at it. 

But maybe she could tell because she would make those comments--“That’s not very good grammar”-- and sometimes she’d add, “You’d better tell them.”  I took them to mean the students, not the immigration authorities.

            That’s what I’m going to have to do now, as the semester comes to a close—tell them, the students. 

As I was telling a colleague who’s much more self-confident (and probably more competent) than I am,  after more than 30 years of teaching writing, I still wonder at the processing of the student writer...psycholinguistics...learning readiness...and my own attempts at being a solution to the problem instead of a contributing factor.  

            One of my hardest-working students (who got a B in her previous course but whose writing prompted me to send her to Early Alert at the beginning of the semester) accomplished some feats that are admirable, correctly using three gerunds in a row and even putting our much-practice “In spite of the fact that + Subject + Verb” lesson to use.  But I never convinced her of the logic of direct address:

            If you ask “me what do I think about using public transportation,” I would tell you I have two ideas in my mind.

            If Mother saw that, she might say, “Couldn’t she have at least left the ‘me’ out of the incorrectly punctuated indirect speech?”

            I told the students to look for changes in punctuation, word order, tense, and pronouns when they changed direct speech to reported speech.  I wonder where she was looking—in her mind?  I wouldn’t advise that if her mind is anything like mine!

            I always try to remember how I would be writing if I had the same time and exposure to Chinese that my student has had to English, and I know that she’s way ahead of where I would be, but I can still hear Mother agonizing, as I am doing now.

            I wish my student were here to clarify the sentence “The other thing is the theise all always labor during the people wait the bus.”

            Mother would say, “That’s not very good grammar.  You’d better tell her.”