English Grammar
There's a certain irony in the fact that I attended a grammar school but can't recall learning any English grammar during English lessons. Latin, French, and German lessons were where I first encountered subjects, objects, tenses, and cases, nominative, accusative and vocative. But English grammar remained absent from my English education. At least, as I recall.
English grammar became a live topic for me in my late teens and early twenties when I stumbled into teaching English as a foreign language. Suddenly, I had to understand and explain the mechanics of my native tongue to people learning it from scratch.
Fast forward several decades, and I find myself teaching English once more, but this time as a volunteer. My students span different ages and abilities, sometimes within the same class, so I've never followed a set syllabus. Instead, I've spent the past three years creating lessons tailored to their needs and questions.
It has been fascinating, instructive, and occasionally humbling.
Sometimes my students are the ones teaching me. It was a student's question that first introduced me to the formal names for grammatical structures I'd been using my entire life, such as zero conditional, first conditional, second conditional and third conditional. I knew how to use them instinctively, but I'd never needed to name them before.
Students ask questions that leave me momentarily stumped. Perhaps someone else would have a ready answer, but I suspect the vast majority of fluent English speakers wouldn't know either. Native fluency, basic rules of grammar and deep grammatical knowledge are, it turns out, quite different things.
Each lesson forces me to think deliberately about structures I normally produce with barely a thought. Each student question sends me researching, discovering rules I never knew existed, or exceptions to rules I thought were absolute.
As my "guru" Frank used to say, and as I now say to my students: "We are here for three things. To learn, to help others learn, and to have fun."