Engfish

Paul started his first college class today. Well, that's not precisely true. Last year he took a class in electronics which was self-paced. (Essentially a self-taught homeschoolish class at the local tech school for which he got real live college credit.) But today was his first regular class with a regular teacher and regular students and regular assignments. Kinda sorta like Claire's first day of school. Only Paul is significantly older.

I predict he's going to do well in this class.

His huge whoppin' assignment for this week is to read a short article and figure out what "Engfish" is. I think it took him about 15 minutes. Whatever happened to that rule-of-thumb that a kid is supposed to spend at least two hours prepping for every hour in class???

After Andrew and Paul and I did grammar together, and after he had answered his parents' nosy questions about how his class went, I was curious. I wanted to read this article too! It was great. It was a homeschool mommy's dream! It was all about how writing should be about communicating ideas, about writing expressively, about interesting writing. AND the article was about how schools stomp this out, how schools teach boring writing, "proper" writing, dull writing.

Just an hour or two earlier, I had read over Andrew's writing assignment for today. It was interesting! I tried not to gush too much, but it was SO much better than last time we had officially worked on writing lessons. His exercises were not dull. He used interesting words (even if he couldn't spell them precisely). He used colorful (but not fakey) phrasing. I was so impressed with his writing! And it's because last year he was writing in "Engfish" (the "proper" school writing) and this year he was just "talking on paper." And then Paul brought home this article -- serendipitous!

Paul's writing IS charming. It's interesting. It makes a person laugh almost as much as Paul's witty in-real-life commentary. His spelling and grammar probably aren't quite what they should be. But even those have come a long long way in the last couple of years. But, oh!, the way he writes is just a joy to read. I think his prof is going to like him.

Now, if only she will teach him how to write a term paper and make footnotes!! I hate teaching the procedures on research papers almost as much as I hate teaching sewing.