Correct Comma Happiness

I’ve never been into sports.  I’ve never played them or followed a team.  I was never on a debate team, unless you count the countless “debates” with my father.  And yet, I am a competitive person.  Growing up, I wanted to be the best dancer in my ballet class.  I wanted to be front and center.  I wanted teachers to ask me to demonstrate the moves.  I’ll never forget the day my instructor said I was getting the “Gold Star” for the day.  (We didn’t have “Gold Stars.”  It was just a phrase he made up on the spot to say I was doing well, but I could picture what that shinny gold star would look like on my leotard.) I wanted the teacher to use my paper as an example and

I wanted the AP to run my newspaper article.

Now that I’m a teacher, my competitive side seems only to be getting worse.  Of course, when you’re teaching all alone in your class, it’s hard to see who’s actually the best the teacher.  It’s hard to judge who has the best lesson and whose students learn the most.  When you’re a teacher, you have to judge yourself against yourself.  Today was one of those few-and-far-between days where my happy moment came from teaching and, for a few seconds, I felt like I had won.  I was the best and I had a student to prove it!

I’ve been teaching commas for over two weeks.  I noticed my students were struggling with them so I prepared some lessons: rules for commas, practice with commas, assessment of commas.  That last part didn’t work out so well the first time around so I restructured the lessons and tried again, hoping that students would fair better on the assessment the second time around. 

But then the snow days came.  And the weekends came.  And the lessons on commas were moving more and more slowly as the month progressed.  My students would stare at me with glaze over their eyes.  Where they getting it this time?  I just couldn’t get a reading on them.  I wanted to move on.  Fragments would be such a nice change; or, at least for me they would.  So I handed out the final review packet today.  (A nice fat packet in case of snow days this week.)  And I reviewed one or two examples on each rule before sending students home to practice and review on their own. 

I put the sentence on the screen:

“Johnny, returning to his locker to retrieve his English book, missed his bus.”

“Okay guys,” I said.  “There are two commas in this sentence and they are being used correctly.  What rule are they following in this example?”

I expected silence or “I don’t know!  (which usually sounds more like “knnnnoooowww”).”  I even thought maybe someone would answer that it was a “not-important clause.”  But none of those happened.  Instead, I heard a very quiet, “Oh… I know that.”

A single hand shot into the air.  I called on the student.

“Okay,” I said, “what’s the rule?”

“It’s a non-essential clause,” he said.  My hands shot in the air like he had just scored a touchdown.

“Yes!” I said, a victory-intonation in my voice.  (Think Elle Woods in Legally Blonde when she finds out she’s been chosen to work on the law case and says “Me!”)

Some students giggled at their adult teacher getting giddy over grammar and punctuation.  But for a moment, I felt like I was the best and my student was the best and my moment of grammatical happiness simmered in my chest.