Pronounseason

I saw that word in an ELL student's writing a few years ago: pronounseason. Pronoun Season. A season of pronouns. I liked the idea, the image I saw, a big HE, SHE and WE floating over autumn leaves on a gray morning.

I read it aloud phonetically to figure out what the kid was getting at. Pro-noun-c-a-son. Pronunciation.

Something about his transcription gets me. In fact, the other day I was thinking to myself, "Remember that misspelling?" And I pushed my memory to find it, and it discovered it an hour later, an act that as more days accumulate in my lifetime becomes harder. Pronounseason. I can't remember most kids' theses or poems, but I remembered that spelling.

It sticks with me for the reason most things that stick, stick: it reveals something larger. What is it? The art of attempting, the miracle of taking a sounds and making them visual, the inventiveness of children, the informal origins of words that we have formalized.

I, as a Language Arts teacher and writer, love a well crafted sentence. I love correct writing. But as I get older, I also value error because often error isn't error, but error because rules have been set prior to the act. It's an error because we say so. Yes: 2+2=4, but it doesn't have to be fact that pronounseason is incorrect. In Spanish-speaking countries, again and again, I see misspelled words by the under-educated on their signs. But less of a fuss is made there than here because the meaning is clear. So, if the meaning is clear, why put so much import on the spelling? Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet vs. The Goddess, argues that our focus on written language has come at the expense of holistic thinking. We look at the small pieces instead of the whole picture. We see the spelling problems, not the kid's ideas.

Ultimately, to say one way is right and the other ways are wrong, is, by definition, authoritarian. Pronounseason is wrong; pronunciation is correct. Yes, it's true, but why? Tradition. And, philosophically, I am often uncomfortable with tradition and authoritarianism because, often, they don't mesh with humanistic values. My values. Saying something is wrong is often a poorly disguised trick of discrimination. The condemnation of Spanglish, for example: to say that a language thousands of people speak is "incorrect" is not the a grammarian's love for language; it's Eurocentrism.

Language changes, and to consider contributions to language a foul thing is reactionary and short-sighted and unnecessarily cynical.

Perhaps this is why I am not the teacher I always thought I would be: as an adult, I refuse to commit to a single method or idea. I am not the cantankerous grammar teacher; I am not the teacher who holds up poetry as the best of humankind. I am both; I am neither. I am more. "I am large; I contain multitudes." And I know this can be sort of unsatisfactory for students. "Riley, what is the correct way to do this?"Students feel a teacher is supposed to tell them exactly what to do and think, but I feel a teacher's duty is to show ways to do and think. Conformity of thinking, I believe, relates to the current state of the nation and globe, but that is a vast claim, I will, for now, leave unsubstantiated.

Here's what I think my job is: to help students find dignity, to find their style, to find their aesthetics. To discover themselves in the granite, for they are both the sculptor and the granite. I stand next to them while they chisel themselves away. It's a higher mission, a human one, one that accepts all individuals not as tabula rasas, but individuals who've accumulated experiences and are trying to figure all of this out, trying to figure out what the hell this existence is.

Keeping tradition and missions and grand purposes at bay, I do my best to not believe that there is any one thing higher or more important than the student in front of me at that moment.

Because there isn't.