What I learned From Sentence Diagramming

I hate grammar. There is no way around it. I despise it! I am not good at it. I don’t have a big desire to work harder at it. I hate it. I hate it so much that I don’t bother to proof read my posts.  Rather, I send them off my wife or to an editor to proofread. That being said, I learned something amazing from sentence diagramming.

While in between teaching classes at Artios Academies one day, I stumbled across one of our amazing teachers tutoring a 9 year old child in sentence diagramming.

Now, before I continue I want to say something about narration. Narration is a method of education that requires the student to take something they have learned and communicate (or narrate) it to someone else. It’s a great method of education. It shows that the student not only heard the material, but synthesized it in such a way that they can communicate it back to another person in a way that is different than how the material was presented to them. It shows that the student didn’t just memorize the material, but rather completely grasped the concept. 

So this grammar teacher, knowing my disdain for grammer, had me sit down beside the student.

She told the student, ”Do you know Mr. Lane? Mr. Lane hates grammar and sentence diagramming. In fact, he doesn’t know how to do it. So, can you teach him how to diagram this sentence?”

As I sat beside the student, he proceeded to teach me more about sentence diagramming than I have ever learned before! The student walked me through each process in a manner that was different than how his teacher taught him, but in a way that proved that he grasped the material!

So, what is the moral of this blog? Children, even at a young age, are much more capable of understanding concepts than we give them credit for. They should be taught in a way that not only focuses on memorization, but on understanding, grasping, and communicating concepts.