ABSTRACT
I herd my students through Evergreen, a grammar-to-paragraph workbook-about which I can still say, years later, it was the best of its kind-but I sense this is not the best I can do. We struggle to identify verbs and subjects before we build sentences before we build paragraphs before we build (maybe if we're lucky) a five-paragraph essay in English composition that sometimes seems as strange to me as to them. Navajo rodeo, highway crashes, and grandmothers replace ski-vacation stories and basketball finals as topics. I fake it-pretend I know what a gerund or a predicate nominative or a transitive verb is, although I am relying on my native speaker's ear (my son and my daughter have learned not to trust me on elementary school grammar exercises-"You missed two," my son Tait said to me recently in a rather put-out voice).
