I’ve been trying to start this column for weeks, but each time I do, I remember something in my yard that needs doing. The serviceberry tree I just planted needs watering. I need to prep the garden beds so I can plant the greens. The lawn, after so long in suspended animation, suddenly needs cutting and weeding. 

Such is life in May. Summer’s gravitational pull suddenly becomes inescapable, both in the garden and in my classroom. In class, students who’ve been as steady as metronomes all year start missing readings, I find myself veering into more tangents and taking up my whole prep chatting with colleagues, and everyone is just a bit more distracted and somewhere else. 

As a teacher, it can be tempting to embrace the May vibe, let off the gas, and coast into summer. I’ve been there and admittedly done that some years. Even still, I’m going to put forth what might be an unpopular opinion: May is quietly one of the most important months of the school year and one that we should be really mindful about. Hear me out on this one. 

When writing Good Grammar, I read through hundreds of years of grammar and writing instruction books, and a main theme connecting these teachers across time and location was  frustration over how little writing and language lessons tended to stick. In their own way, each author pondered over why lessons concerning commas and parts of speech and topic sentences tend to slip out of student memory like sand through a sieve.

It is worth noting these frustrations aren’t just grumpy grammarians being grumpy grammarians either. National studies regularly find writing skills to be heartbreakingly low. For example, the most recent Nation’s Report Card found that nearly three-quarters of 8th and 12th grade students tested were not proficient in writing—this despite the likely hundreds or thousands of hours of instruction they’d received concerning writing and language instruction.

So why is it that writing and language lessons don’t stick? A few months ago, I read a piece by Carl Hendrick called “The “Embarrassingly Parallel” Problem: When Students Understand the Parts But Not The Whole” that helped me to better understand a potential cause. Hendrick was specifically writing about why large learning apps often struggle to scale, and in it Hendrick explained that most large apps are built in a way that is not dissimilar to how we build our curriculum: Experts take a big, complex topic and use their expertise to break it into logical, manageable chunks. For example, one might get the umbrella of “grammar” and break it into various logical parts: types of sentences and clauses, modifiers, parts of speech, etc. 

Each part is then broken into manageably-sized modules that introduce a concept (say verbs or adjective phrases), ask students to do something to strengthen their understanding of the concept, and end with a check for understanding before students move to the next module. Here is how Hendrick presents that:

This is all pretty logical, and yet, as Hendrick points out, even when students show understanding of all the information in modules—or to continue Hendrick’s wonderful metaphor, they have all the puzzle pieces—they often struggle to use that information to reassemble the puzzle. Many decades of research show that just because a student knows what a verb or clause or noun appositive is, doesn’t mean they necessarily know how to (or will) use that information to improve their writing and reading. 

That is where May comes in. The point Hendrick makes about online modules is similar to a point that I make in Good Grammar about why so many approaches to language and writing instruction over the decades didn’t work particularly well: It isn’t just enough to just give the pieces; we need to actively help students to assemble them. 

Teaching students conventions or parts of speech is an important step, but equally important steps include expansively framing these things, helping them to make connections between the topics, and directly teaching them how to use that information to improve their writing. 

In thinking about this, I like the metaphor of a tailor because all suits have the same basic pieces, much like writing teachers often teach about the same topics. What separates a good tailor from a less-than-ideal one is that the good tailor carefully and thoughtfully assesses the individual for whom the suit will be made and then artfully adapts the material before carefully stitching everything together.  

May is the perfect time for such tailoring because we’ve likely already shared most of our go-to lessons and core ideas. Now is the time to strengthen key ideas by revisiting them, to think of ways to stitch together different ideas, and for us to have students use those ideas in their own writing and speaking. 

Because it is May, which is a month more about practical needs than philosophical pedagogical notions, I wanted to give you specifics of what this looks like in my 9th grade English class. Here are some of the ways that I seek to act as a tailor in May:

• I posted about this last year, but my students make old-school-style grammar book zines in May that bring together all of the lessons from the year. I encourage them to hold onto the books and use them throughout high school, and I indeed see a number of them in use by upperclassmen as I walk through the school.
• My students’ last project is a multi-genre response to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Both its rubric and its process focus heavily on revisiting writing and language lessons from throughout the year and using those lessons to make their writing as strong as possible.
• I have a number of lessons that are overtly designed to help students remember the information for next year. For example, I have them do an assignment where they come up with their own mnemonic devices to remember the tricky conventions we cover and another where they write a letter to themselves next year where the spring version of them shares the key lessons from this year with the fall version of them (I also email these to them at the start of the next year with a note wishing them luck).
• My second semester final is now a portfolio that asks them to do a number of things (read and respond to a piece, define their idiolect and voice, etc.) and to annotate and narrate the approach they are taking. 

All of these happen in May, and while I find ways to May-ify my approaches so they fit with the summer-is-so-close-I-can-barely-take-it energy, we are still doing real work. Scratch that, we are doing some of the most essential work of the entire year—work that will hopefully mean that all of our sweat and thought and work from the year will pay off for the students the next year and every year after that.

Happy May to all of you and yours in teaching,

Matt

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