Sunday, June 15, 2008 Estremera: Start 'em young By Stella A. Estremera Spider's Web
I'M chomping on books as usual, this time, grammar and punctuations and stuff, plus my regular books on Mindanao. There are just so many new books out there, but so little time. And thus I have a whole mountain of them both in my office and beside, all read halfway through, and I've learned how to jump from chapter to chapter, zeroing in only on the areas that interest me for the day, and oftentimes returning to a favorite chapter.
This is one practice I've perfected because of my long-time affair with romance books -- Mills and Boon, Harlequin, etc. All those definitely happy ending stuff that's guaranteed not to make you think. I love them, and so do some of my serious journalist friends. Tee-hee! Since you know what the ending will be, so you just jump right into the ending to see if the whole book is worth reading. When it is, then you go to chapter one. After you've finished the book, then you just jump around to whatever portion it was you enjoyed the most until the book becomes too weary, its glue gives up and you have loose leaves instead of a book. Time to junk.
I guess that's how it will be for as long as this computer in front of me determines how much I can spare for my dream bahay kubo. ("Work, you slave!" the computer screams.)
Chomping through all these grammar books of late, however, has left me even more mystified than ever before. Mystified along the line of... Darn, what the heck are all those conjuctions and participles and premodifiers and quantifiers and infinitives, and... (Invectives!!!! Millions of them!)
Much as I try to recall grammar classes in elementary, I can only remember that there are parts of speech and that the first in the list is the noun.
I can't recall the name and the face of the teacher who walked us through all parts and made us figure out the conjunctions (both subordinating and coordinating), the parenthetical elements, the gerunds, the participial phrases, the collective adjectives and collective nouns and noun and the infinitives, the transitive and intransitives, the simple, compound, and complete predicate, the predicate adjective and predicate nominative... etc. etc. ad nasueum.
But even while I can't recall anyone beyond my Grade 3 English teacher Mrs. Adelina Rex (she must have been really good because she's all I remember when English or even Literature is mentioned... her image is glued into my consciousness that cannot even recall who my World Literature teacher in college was, and there is one whole generation between third grade and college), I only have praises for those the unremembered.
Imagine... How on earth where they able to make sense about all these to graders who may even find it difficult to spell all that they are talking about. (Class, spell predicate nominative!). Oh dear.
The bottom line, I guess is to start while the brain is like a sponge that can absorb everything. And start with a solid base. I'm sure I learned all about these parts of speech that I could barely remember, since I can write and write (ehem!) well, I guess. But make me break all that is written here into pieces and analyze how each word went together to form a phrase and a sentence and a paragraph and the whole article, I will not be able to do that. I'd even find it hard to find that darn adverb.
But it's all there, inside the brain that's feeding them toward my fingertips that are now tapping my thoughts into the computer. Magic.
A sad reality to all those children we now have in schools that can barely accommodate them all, manned by teachers who cannot even figure out how a verb can become a noun. It's time to hit the books again, teach! You should, because even I have to, and I'm not earning my keep from teaching at that.
