My cartoon game panel Word Pile, a word creation and spelling game. Click to enlarge, print, and play!

My seventh grade English teacher at Greenview Junior High was Mrs. Kosmerl.   She stressed two things.  Spelling and grammar.  Every Thursday, we were given a list of ten words which we were required to learn to spell.  On Friday, we were given a quiz on those words.  Mrs. Kosmerl would grade those quizzes and hand them back at the end of class.   Every misspelled word had to be correctly rewritten ten times and handed in by Monday morning.

I remember not being serious about  that first quiz.  And, my slothfulness resulted in my only getting two out of ten words correct.  I had to rewrite eight spelling words ten times!  You can bet that when the next quiz rolled around, I was ready and scored a perfect ten out of ten.  And just about every quiz after that saw me become a spelling ace.  Hey, when you’re 13, the last thing you want to is sit at home all weekend to rewrite a list of spelling spelling words.

(Perhaps the love of spelling that Mrs Kosmerl instilled in me is why I created, many years later, my cartoon game panel Word Pile. Feel free to download, print and play.)

Spelling was stressed, but the main point of instruction in Mrs. Kosmerl’s English class was proper grammar. We really learned proper grammar and sentence structure. We learned this by diagramming sentences. It was a highly instructive tool and, once I understood the process, I loved to diagram sentences.

Through this teaching method, students can visually break down a sentence into it’s smaller parts. It’s then quite easy to see which words are nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. It also becomes easy to see how all the parts of a sentence work together (adjectives modifying nouns, adverbs modifying verbs, etc.).

When writing this blog, I know I don’t always follow a lot of the grammatical rules I learned back in seventh grade. However, I think I’ve retained enough that, even though I may not recognize the grammatical rule in play, if I doesn’t ring quite true to my ear, I know to edit or rewrite the sentence.

I’m not sure if students are getting this kind of instruction in schools anymore. I hope they are because it’s invaluable. Especially in this day and age when more and more people are communicating through the written word (blogs, email, instant messaging, etc.).

I really enjoy writing and blogging.  I think it comes easy to me all because a  seventh grade English teacher stressed the basic building blocks of written communication.  I just wanted to say, “Thank you, Mrs. Kosmerl.”