A, An, and The

Note: This blog entry was written last week on Monday, however, due to a variety of technical difficulties including a total of something like 30 hours without power spread over last week, the link for the internet via phone being down, and issues with the school modem … I was only finally able to post this today.

Over the past couple of weeks, I worked with the Form One students on this quirky thing called English grammar. Trying to explain why you use an a, an, or a the in the appropriate places is harder than it looks. Okay, maybe just as hard as it looks. I do not remember learning the specific rules and their exceptions as it has become almost automatic for me to say wait, that does not work in that specific spot, let’s shift that around, ah now that works.

It was an interesting process for me, trying to fit each rule to each automatic feel I had.

Especially to a group of eager students that grew up with KSL as their native language, a group of students who can weave a gorgeous and amazing story with their hands in minutes, but struggle to put the story into English. Additionally, how do you describe the rules of usage of articles, when there is no real equivalent in KSL? For example, in French, you have your le and la, in other written language there are usually corresponding words or concepts that matches up to the a, an, and the in English.

To make it all the more confusing to my students, there are so many exceptions to the rule that depends on the way they sound out and are just some more words that they need to memorize in terms of making sure they use it correctly. I tell them, hey, English is one of the weirdest and hardest language to learn, and sometimes in class I have to stop and pause for a couple of minutes and rack my brain on how to explain a specific rule for that one specific situation, why an a or an will not work for that, or why you don’t use a the for that word. And to make it all the more confusing, the English I am teaching is British English, rather than American English, so I had to think about using different vocabulary (petrol rather than gas, realise rather than realize, colour rather than color, for examples, in addition to a couple of different grammar rules), and it added an interesting facet to the whole teaching process.

Reading some books (and Write Source 2000 – a textbook helper of sorts I remember finding very useful in middle school), I relearned the rules of the usage of articles and sought for a parallel in KSL. I tried out several ways of explaining, and each time more and more students understand. Each time a student understand one new rule, it makes it all worthwhile. The process is painstakingly slow, but I realize that in the past, not that many people took the time to really explain the various situations and where, when and how to use specific words in sentences, especially using their native language.

One of my biggest thing is to really attempt to instill in my students the ability and skill to figure out words or sentences they do not understand. I compare it to walking into the middle of a conversation, and waiting it out until enough parts of the conversation comes up so they can join in – the students are having a hard time with the concept that they should take the time to read the sentence several times, trying to figure out the word in those sentences, maybe making a couple of guesses, and then going from there rather than just giving up and asking the teacher for the meaning of the word.

Over the last week and last weekend, I also had several very good conversations with a couple of other Deaf Eds, it looks that everyone is really doing much better this term, we are all more confident in our teaching abilities, and we are used to the students and now know what to expect. I also had a great conversation via IM last week with one of the fellow Deaf Eds, using each other as a sounding board on some ideas, and thinking about what we are doing here – I realized more or less that I am here to help out to the best of my abilities, even if that only impacts ten students, then that’s ten students who can make a difference in the future of Deaf education in Kenya.