I Know More Than You Think I Know

I remember 4th grade English class for one reason. My teacher humiliated me in front of the class. I was at the board and was writing some vocabulary words. The word was "people." This old lady, this tyrant with glasses and chalk almost fell off her feet.

"Pople?! Pople?!" she reacted.

I had spelled the word "p-o-e-p-l-e." Didn't that make sense? If there is a useless or silent "o," then where did I go wrong? What this teacher failed to recognize was my effort at spelling correctly, at awknowledging the "o." I reversed it, and that broke her intelligence rule. How could I be so stupid?

I remembered seeing a movie with Abbott and Costello called "High Society." I also remember playing with decoding rules in my mind: "High Soshity," I would say. English is that way. One word pronounces the "ci" the way it's pronounced in "social." That is, there is a "sh" sound. Another word preserves the soft s sound in "society."

So rules are inconsistent at best. But why blame the student. What the old tyrant did not recognize was that fact.

Chomsky argues that we are born with a complete understanding of language. Okay, perhaps we can qualify that: children have an idea in mind of what the work around them says. They also know what they want to communicate. They just cannot communicate it within a set of artificial boundaries - spelling and perfectly written grammar. Instead, their sense of grammar is internalized.

Mrs. Tyrant teacher (I forget her name), I know more than you think I know. So do other 4th graders.

Actually, this teacher's name is on the tip of my tongue. I know what I want to communicate about her. I can see her in my mind's eye. I just cannot name her.

So, do I fail in this brief essay? Or have I communicated my message? Is my and my readers' sense of her preserved, or does my message stand or fall on the rules of remembering a name?

Here is a way that we can perhaps look at student's work. Sure, they break the rules, but some rules are just rules of convention. They are important, but their breaking need not destroy the flow of thought.

So your toddler-baby marches into your room in the middle of the night, announces, "baba," and throws his bottle at you. Put his message in a poem, a summary, persuasive essay, or magazine ad. It's still a message worth looking at and filled with its own nuances.