Teaching grammar was proving to be a thankless, up-hill task. The Island dialect was something I had difficulty with and proper grammar was definitely a problem for my class. The English book I was teaching from was too advanced for my students and I decided to try something simpler.
One morning I wrote ten short sentences on the blackboard. Each had an obvious (at least to me!) grammatical error. I asked the class to copy the sentences using the correct grammar, carefully telling them that one word in each sentence on the board was incorrect.
My students bent to the task, one I thought would take ten minutes, perhaps fifteen. Half an hour later they were STILL at it and I started to get impatient. The grammar mistakes were obvious, what was taking them so long???
I walked around the room and peeked at what the students were doing. I was dismayed to see that they truly hadn’t been able to identify the grammatical errors in the sentences, so I decided to go through them orally.
I started with the first sentence. “She gone to the store yesterday”. I said the sentence aloud twice, emphasizing the word “gone”, then asked the class what was wrong with it. I was met with blank looks and fidgeting, no-one knew the correct answer. I pointed to one student and said, “come on, what would you say? Would you say I GONE to the store yesterday?” The poor fellow squirmed a bit, then blurted, “ I ain’t know Miss”. I pounced on that as a perfect example, saying, “ we don’t say I ain’t know, that’s bad English! What do we say instead of I ain’t know?” This produced more squirming, then he said, “ Me ain’t know”?
Well, this was getting us no-where! I said to the class, “I ain’t know and me ain’t know are not correct! Come on, what do we say instead? A hand shot up in the air, and with a triumphant expression my clever student said, “I isn’t know Miss!”
