Every word in this sentence has a job to do. It has a job title, a place in the word value hierarchy, and is part of the overall product of the sentence. We are nouns. I am. You are. My kids are. We are also pronouns. I call my(possessive pronoun) daughter (noun) “she” (pronoun) when I tell the story about the time she decided that if she wasn’t going to wear sandals to school in the middle(preposition) of January (proper noun), in Connecticut, during a blizzard, then she wasn’t going to school at all!

Verbs. Prepositions. Adverbs. Conjunctions. Adjectives.

It’s beautiful, when you think about it, if you let it be. (Complex sentence) In every language on the globe, we have shaped our ideas into words that we grow in our brains until we are developmentally ready to give those ideas a physical shape using our lips, our breath, our tongues. We form each one, and send it waving into the air around us, where it will hopefully find a friendly ear to hear it. And that is just the spoken part! (fragment for emphasis). BILLIONS of words have been written down, guided into form by the artists of language. Every book, every letter written between friends or lovers, every song and poem – they have all been molded carefully from the deep wells of individual language, and put together in infinite iterations by individuals so that others could feel them touch their souls. Their souls. (The Spanish word for “soul” is “alma” and I think it is my favorite word.)

I am trying to find a way to uncover this beauty for a bunch of eleven and twelve year olds. It is challenging, because this is the time in their lives when adult maturity is having its brakes pumped constantly by the still developing brain of a child. My students have grown up and matured (a verb I use very loosely in this instance) in a world where their every interest has been curated by strangers. I know that now I am one of those people who says stuff like “Kids these days…!” and “Back in my day, we would never have…” Which is all, of course, a lie. We totally would have. But now that three generations exist since mine was named (Gen X-ers in the house RISE UP!), I am facing the same frustration that my parents faced, that their parents faced, and so on and so on since time immemorial. It is just a fact: sixth and seventh graders (with obvious exceptions, guys, calm down) don’t see the beauty made real by words yet. Their world is a virtual snow globe full of plastic glitter. They haven’t seen the way the word glisten looks like, sounds like, and feels like what it means. The “g” sound gets your attention, and your tongue draws in the listener with the “lisss” before the silent “t” puts a gentle stop to the sound so the “en” can be liberated, like a sigh of pleasure. In the formation of the letters, you can see the shine of light off of a smooth surface, if you look carefully. How do I crack open that finite bubble of interest and reveal the artists set they have to work with – the articles that tell them how important or unimportant something is, the interjections that can put emotion on to a two dimensional surface, and the stunning, startling, bubbling fountain of adverbs that will allow them to accessorize their verbs and adjectives with splendidly dazzling class.