Word Balloons

I wrote this short piece for my new class called Creative Nonfiction.

Word Balloons

How can he not know? I ask myself as he hands me the paper. I mean, his name isn’t even capitalized.

I start to point out the little things about the paper that I notice at first glance. Without even actually reading it, I have seen half a dozen errors. All I asked him to do was write three complete sentences, one telling me his name, another his age, and the last what town he lives in. There are no periods anywhere.

Seriously, without reading it, just by glancing at it, I have seen several errors. I wonder how a seventh grader has gotten this far without ever being able to capitalize the beginning of the sentence. He has spelled name without an “e.”

I relax for a moment. I was never meant to teach elementary or rudimentary levels. My training as a teacher has been in secondary English and language arts. Let’s dissect Shakespeare. Let’s diagram a compound-complex sentence. I know the difference between a participle and a gerund. I know that facetious is the only word in the English language that uses all five vowels in alphabetical order. I know what the subjunctive tense is. I know my English.

As I sit there, looking at this kid, I realize that he must see the world differently than I do. I make him read his sentences out loud, hoping he will sense the natural pause between the sentences, or at least where they are supposed to be. As the words tumble out of his mouth, I see them. As if he were a comic book character and a word balloon hung out of his mouth, I see the words. They escape spelled correctly. His words are properly punctuated—even with dashes and semicolons and hyphens. The sentences may be incorrect but even his interjections come out with a set of ellipsis attached to them.

Briefly, I remember the couple of linguistics classes I had back in college. They were introductory level, but I loved them. I was the best in the class at establishing what sounds came from the palate or from the teeth. I could see the slight suspiration that was the difference between the “t” sound and the “th” sound. I should have gone into linguistics if that had not meant adding a year of college as I was already into my junior year.

This is my first nature. I have always understood language and its formation. This does not come easy to my student. I take the paper and help him see some of the errors, knowing that the only way he sees them as errors is by the red ink encircling them.