A series of blog entries inviting readers to contribute to

and comment on Wordworks’ second edition  

What was your motivation for writing Wordworks?

Boredom. 
Boredom from trying to teach grammar from sentences such as 

 Summer is my favorite season.
 Please leave a forwarding address with the postman.
 Do you know who invented the ironing board?

Those sentences are right out of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition, which was the required text when I first starting teaching grammar in the early 70s.  Students had to buy the 819-page Complete Course edition, which, incredibly, was the very same grammar book Sister Olympia foisted on me when I was in the 8th grade.

Like a bad dream, Warriner’s had returned. My only choice: revolt.

Warriner’s had sentences about Magellan’s trip around the world, but there was humor and drama taking place every day in my home and in my classrooms, rich material to create lively sentences. I took what was of interest to me and turned them into sentences that would interest my students: food, my adventures as a teenager, our cats, and , of course –them. There was an endless supply of material to make grammar fun because much could happen in just a few days: Max was serving detention for cutting off Mr. Paine’s paisley tie during study hall, Murphy (cat) spent the night in the dryer again, Adam and Gavin kidnapped Trevor’s Cabbage Patch doll and sent a ransom note. And the fact that nearly all the sentences were true increased my students’ demand for more. More grammar? It happened.

Could you give your readers some examples?

Students were always interested in themselves:

Find the appositive phrase and draw an arrow to the noun or pronoun it explains:

Two students of mine, Greg and Brendan, have been punished for dropping water balloons on the teacher’s head.

At other times I tapped into their macabre sense of humor:

Find the prepositions and put parentheses around the prepositional phrases:

1. Suddenly a decapitated mouse landed on my doorstep.
2. Murphy crammed the squashed mouse into her mouth. 

Stories from my childhood never failed to entertain and made it easier for my students to remember and use grammar rules:

Identify underlined words as the subject, verb, predicate adjective, predicate nominative, direct object, indirect object, or object of the preposition:

One of my earliest memories of my little brother is the day he smashed me over the head with a brick. 

The kids were always interested in my boys’ behavior: 

Find the relative pronoun and replace with one more appropriate:

Was it Adam or Gavin that stabbed Trevor with the plastic sword? 

By the early 1980s I had created enough exercise sheets, tests, and quizzes for a book. Wordworks: A Grammar Handbook for the Truly Desperate is an organized compilation of years’ worth of exercises created to get my students interested in grammar. The collection was accepted for publication in 1984, and the rest is history — and what a long history it’s been! Wordworks has been in continuous print since 1986.

Good News, Bad News

How cool to have a book in print for so long! But how out of date is the content? How many kids can identify a blender? What is the modern equivalent of Cabbage Patch Dolls? Do teachers still wear ties? Where are the girl characters? 

What does the passage of 26 years mean? When I wrote the book on a typewriter, no one had a cell phone, a laptop, a disposable camera, a pocket calculator, or a DVD. My husband and I were trying to decide if we should buy this new invention – an answering machine.

Updating the Second Edition: How You Can Shape its Future

Wayside Publishing is reaching out to its readers to contribute to the creation of a new edition!

The first order of business is to include a new chapter on punctuation and expand the section on usage. We need your help in deciding which errors to include. Because Americans are famous for turning nouns into verbs, are your students writing to Google, to facebook , or friend me?  Are your students still putting periods and commas outside quotation marks? Do they still say and write “anyways”?

Ÿ  What are the “usual suspects” in your list of punctuation and usage errors?

Ÿ  What cultural changes should be reflected in those lists or sentences?

Help!

Please use the comment function to write your contributions to the new punctuation and expanded usage sections. Make a list or include sample sentences illustrating the most common errors you find in your students’ writing and speaking. Your contributions will be published and reviewed in the next blog.

Each month I’ll write about one aspect of the new edition of Wordworks and ask again for your own ideas. 

In next month’s blog about the future of Wordworks, I’ll ask you to visit the past: get ready!  

Those teachers who contribute most frequently and successfully will earn mention in the acknowledgement section of the new edition of Wordworks: A Grammar Handbook for the Truly Desperate.

Mary Collopy

Author, Wordworks: A Grammar Book for the Truly Desperate

Who can forget the experience of reading certain short stories for the first time: the sense of foreboding that gradually builds throughout “The Lottery” until it explodes in the horrifying climax; the shocking twist that rocks the reader at the end of “An Occurrence at Owl Cree Bridge”; the delicious irony that wraps “The Gift of the Magi” up like a well-tied bow? These are stories that reach out of their pages and take you in their grip and never let go. Many people can remember in vivid detail the time and place they first read “The Lottery.” Most of those people have never felt the same about the word “lottery” again.

Little Worlds was born out of our love of short stories and our frustration with the anthologies available for middle school students in the early 1980s. These anthologies were unsatisfactory in a number of ways. Some of them contained low-quality stories by unknown writers. Others contained a few good stories but not enough. In still others, the stories seemed dated in a way that truly great works of fiction never do, no matter how old they are.

Our goal in editing Little Worlds was to put together an anthology with a large number of stories that were both high in literary quality and accessible to middle school students. We wanted to introduce students to some of the best practitioners of the short story who ever lived, including writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eudora Welty, Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant, and Flannery O’Connor. We wanted teachers to pick up our anthology and find the classic stories they wanted to teach all in one place.

By creating a two-part structure for Little Worlds, we also hoped to make available an anthology with maximum flexibility. The first part includes stories that illustrate such basic elements of the short story as plot, character, point of view, and irony. After mastering these elements, students are ready to apply their skills to the more complex and often longer stories in Part II. But depending on the themes or writers they want to emphasize, teachers are free to move back and forth between the two parts.

Judging by the longevity of Little Worlds, we achieved our goal. The anthology recently celebrated its 25th anniversary and seems more in demand than ever. The feedback we have received over the years has been gratifying. One teacher called the two-part structure “a very useful teaching tool” and added: “I have used this book with eighth graders and have found it hugely successful.” Another teacher said, “I browsed the internet forever before finding this great anthology. It contains a wonderful selection of stories perfect for middle schoolers.” A third described Little Worlds as an “invaluable” classroom resource with “fantastic” stories.

 In the end, what pleases us most is knowing that, through Little Worlds, we have introduced tens of thousands of students to some of the most powerful and memorable short stories ever written. We hope that, in the process, we have instilled in them a love for the short story, what Eudora Welty called “a little world in space.” And we would like to think that every one of them remembers where they were sitting and what they felt when they read “The Lottery” for the first time.

Peter Guthrie

Author, Little Worlds 

Twenty-nine years ago when Peter and I first started work on Little Worlds, neither of us had been teaching for very long, and we didn’t know much. We did, however, know that we loved stories and that we wanted to give our students stories worth loving. Today I am a teacher with over 30 years in the classroom and I still love these stories. Now, however, I also love them for the many ways they fit into my classes, no matter what I’m teaching or at what level. I have used  “The Tunnel,” “A Visit of Charity,” and “The Fig Tree” at the beginning of an English elective entitled “Journeys” and later incorporated “The Japanese Quince” and “Miss Brill.” While teaching a unit on stories from the Bible, trees and gardens seemed to jump out from these stories. I chose “Marigolds,” and once again “The Fig Tree” but could have chosen “Japanese Quince” or even “A Visit of Charity” with its red apple in the final scene.

I find the stories to be excellent companion pieces to longer works and often pair them with books aimed at a young adult audience. “To Build a Fire” was the perfect complement to Into the Wild and led my students into a lively discussion about arrogance against nature. More recently I have paired “The Lottery” with Hunger Games to focus on rituals, a topic we pick up again later while reading the Odyssey. “Marigolds” and To Kill a Mockingbird both take place in the South during the depression, but present two different racial points of view.

These days I primarily teach 9th grade with occasional side trips to the 8th grade. Students use Little Worlds in 8th and 9th grade. The 8th grade curriculum focuses more purposely on genres and incorporates Little Worlds as Peter and I originally envisioned it. Students work their way through the first part and learn the vocabulary and techniques they need to read short stories closely and to talk about them effectively. My 9th grade class is designed around essential questions such as “What is justice?” and “What do individuals and society owe each other?” For this class I rely on “Winter Night,” “Marigolds,” and “Sun and Shadow” to help my student explore the complex relation of individuals and society. When we explore justice. I have them read “Daughter,” “African Morning,” and the almost myth-like “Why Reeds are Hollow.” I now know that the stories Peter and I chose are also valuable guides leading my students to more abstract thinking and a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.

 Mary Page

Author, Little Worlds 

Can stress be good for kids? 

The upcoming new edition of How to Study recognizes good stress in today’s learning environment. Good stress includes getting oneself pumped up for an important game – or for a crucial test, for example.     

But it’s the bad stress that has destructive effects on students’ academic progress.  Some stress may originate at home and carried into school.  Some comes from peer pressures at school.

Both of these are harmful to learning and wellbeing but are psychological by nature and thus beyond our purview.   The new How to Study recommends that these concerns be dealt with by a sympathetic mentor or professional counselor.

What the new How to Study does address specifically is self-induced stress, particularly the current varieties.

Self-induced stress often stems from students without a thoughtful plan of confronting their work effectively and of willingly squandering their time, thus neglecting their academic duties.  The text of the revised How to Study is designed to provide students with steps to develop successful tactics of working productively.  The theme throughout is: “You are unique.  Find what works for you, and use it to master your academic life.” 

Today, it is the screen that beguiles our students, often leading them to stressful dead ends as they procrastinate, thus disregarding their work.  TV, hand-held tech devices, and computers present an attractive distraction for many students, enticing them to use their time frivolously rather than on schoolwork.  But – and here’s the big “but” – the screen is now in universal use in classrooms everywhere, and computers have become a must as a tool for studying.

The revamped How to Study suggests methods to reduce stress in general as well as ways to use computers fruitfully for academic work.  No book in the world can dissuade students from wasting their time. But the revised How to Study can surely help students achieve success in school by offering ways to succeed, replacing stressful periods of barren performance.

Confident and productive learners are just about immune from self-induced stress.           

David Griswold

Author, How to Study

 “My dog ate my homework,” “I am too stressed out for this,” “I’ve never been a good test-taker,” are all excuses most teachers have heard frequently. In fact, teachers have heard them all. Although excuses may seem real to students using them, the fact is that they have not faced their situation and taken responsibility for doing what they know they should do.

If we start asking, “Why are some students successful in mastering their work and others not?” we might consult various experts like professors, psychologists, doctors, and other professionals.  However, I approached this question in my original How To Study book by taking a unique perspective:  by interviewing and taking suggestions from students making excellent grades in school.  Nowadays, students have not changed significantly, but their outlook on school and approaches to studying have changed as technology has persistently intruded on their lives.

A new Wayside revision of How To Study is in the works that takes account of these changes. The book will adapt new ideas and new ways for students to take control of their work and be successful in school in an age of rapid technological change. There is no better time to start to learn to be a better student than in grades 6-9 when kids are beginning to mature. However, the new edition can also be used effectively by students encountering the intense pressures of high school and can help them develop the skills necessary to succeed beyond high school classes – it has been used successfully even by college students. Topics covered range from time management to homework, from concentration to managing stress, from quizzes to testing, from handling different academic subjects to making the best out of a trip to the library, as well as refining contemporary research skills.  Those using laptops or school computers for their academic work will be glad to learn ways to improve their grasp of subjects.

David Griswold 

Author, How to Study