EDUCATION: Living Grammar

He that ne’er learns his A, B, C,

For ever will a Blockhead be; But he that learns these Letters fair Shall have a Coach to take the Air.

So ran The New England Primer, one of the earliest and most popular U. S. readers. Most of it was in verse, illustrated by quaint, sober drawings. Colonial moppets were taught the letter O thus:

Young Obadias,

David, Josias,

All were pious.

Later U. S. school readers and grammars became more prosaic, duller. Recently schoolbook readability has been on the upswing. Last week many a delighted moppet began the fall term with a quaint new grammar, full, like The New England Primer, of verses, pictures and homely illustrations. Unlike the Primer, however, A Living Grammer* takes for its theme not piety but fun.

The authors, Winifred Watson, a St. Paul public-school teacher, and Julius M. Nolte of University of Minnesota, acted on the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson to “smuggle” into grammar teaching “a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought.” Their defense for trying to teach grammar painlessly: modern children not only find grammar study dull but arrive in high school and college knowing wretchedly little about it.

Their little 99-page book is illustrated with pigs running, boys fishing, trapeze artists swinging, clocks walking (“time marches on” = present tense). This is the way A Living Grammar teaches children to remember the parts of speech:

NOUNS are just the names of things,

As rice, and birds, and snow, and rings. . . .

PRONOUNS take the place of nouns,

As she for woman, they for clowns.

ADJECTIVES describe the nouns,

As quacking ducks, and pretty gowns. . .

Strong-feeling words are Ouch! and Oh!

They’re INTERJECTIONS: Ah! Bah! Lo!

A pronoun, the book explains further, is a “stand-in” for a noun; adjectives are “gossips” that “tell on” nouns and pronouns; a verb is the engine that makes the sentence go. Sentences have stop and go signals: a capital letter at the beginning is a green light; a dash, comma, semicolon or colon is a yellow light to make readers hesitate, a period, question mark or exclamation point is a red light. Suggested classroom game: a punctuation court for trying traffic violators: e.g.: “John Jones, you are charged with the serious offense of passing a period.” Another game: a row of pupils, each representing a part of speech, stands before a blackboard holding sheets of white paper over their heads. As a sentence is read, each part of speech jumps, like popping corn. A pupil who fails to pop at the right time goes to stand on the sidelines with an eraser on his head.

A Living Grammar makes short work of the attribute complement, the subjunctive mood, the future perfect tense. Say the authors: “Why should anyone be tense about tense?”

* Webb Book Publishing Co., St. Paul, Minn. (75¢).