Teaching English-ish

It’s the beginning of the year – Happy New Year, everybody! – and, as with the beginning of every year, we’re supposed to be resolute. No, actually, we’re supposed to be the opposite of resolute.

A resolution, and those apparently only come in early January, is a pledge to change something, usually for the better. Resolute means nothing of the sort.

English, it turns out, is hard.

I know how hard because I spend a good bit of time these days in college classrooms teaching it to wide-eyed, AI-using cheaters – I mean, students looking to improve their skills with my gentle guidance.

Minus their computerized tools, they’re not very good at English, which makes them perfectly normal. As mentioned, English is hard.

My students benefit from my savant-like grammar skills, which developed under the watchful eyes of a pair of Mrs. Smiths, Mrs. Tucker and another teacher whose name escapes me, and which were honed through years and years of practicing the craft as a writer and later an editor.

It wasn’t until my second career, the one as an English professor – technically I’m just a lecturer, but my students call me professor, even doctor, all the time, and I spend so much of my time correcting them that I’m not going to do it over a title – that I began to really sharpen my English skills.

Coincidentally, the start of my English teaching days overlapped with the beginning of my Dear Old Dadding days (that’s the first time, by the way, I – or anyone – ever attempted to use the word “dadding” and it got no red squiggly under it, so it is, in fact, a word; English is hard).

Because of that coincidence, close to 100 percent of my examples explaining various concepts revolve around my son (as opposed to revolving around the sun). For the first decade of the second career, that was not an issue.

Then, one day last semester, a young lady – extra young; she was a 16-year-old College Credit Plus student – piped up and pointed out, “You talk about your kid a lot.”

I credited her for not missing a thing, especially the obvious. She’s a product of my high school alma mater, so clearly they’re still bringing the best out of their students.

I apologized for the constant references but cautioned her and her classmates to hold on to that thought, for they too – some of them anyway – will have kids of their own one day. And they will suddenly be out of other things to talk about.

I tried to explain how parenting causes one to have a healthy obsession and that your child being the first and foremost thing on your mind literally every second is the sign of a good parent, one with priorities correctly aligned.

My students look at it as an unhealthy obsession. Oh, to be young and naive. But they weren’t necessarily wrong, and we discussed it, as good critical thinkers do.

I told them I know more parents now than I ever have and don’t know many at all who don’t love talking about their kids’ exploits. I also told them I have a unique forum in which I can discuss mine with thousands of members of my community (that’s you) and hopefully bring a speck of joy to their mailboxes every other week – until the bossman lets me start doing this weekly.

So along with my sincere Happy New Year wish, I also raise my now-empty flute (the champagne variety, not the woodwind – English is hard) and say here’s to entertaining you with tales from the parenthood for another year.