This is a Personal Touch. A chance to check in with ordinary people making an extraordinary difference in the world. I’m Rebecca Cressman and today our guest is Sam Beeson.
Q: You have been a teacher of English at American Fork High School, now for a dozen years. Does your role as a teacher define you? Do you feel that way when you leave your house at the beginning of the day: I’m a teacher! I’m changing kid’s lives!
A: Yes, I really do think that...and by the way, thanks for having me on this, Rebecca, you’re the best.
Q: Well you’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.
A: After I served a mission, I was wondering what I should do and I thought; I read something by Henry B Irving, actually, and he said, “If you have talents, you are required to use them,” and I remember where I was when I read that in an Ensign and I just thought, “I need to do what I love and that is teaching.” So I went into teaching. I was never really good at English but I thought I could be. So I started teaching at American Fork High School here in Utah, and it has been really good.
Q: When you say you weren’t really good at English—maybe when you were a teenager—you brought that, I guess, in with you in the classroom and decided, ‘Okay, for those kids who come into my classroom, I want them to have a different experience.’ Tell me about that?
A: Yes. I think if there is one strength that I have it is: I can connect with the kid who doesn’t like school and let them have a good positive experience in the classroom. And let them know, and I don’t want to sound cheesy or anything, but if they know that they are loved and... You just smile at them and say, “Hi,” they will sit in the seat and then we can do some grammar. We can do some reading, and it can be rigorous and they can do it. There is no kid out there with a brainpan dull enough that they can’t get difficult concepts but a lot of them need nurturing, and unfortunately a lot of schools are left to nurture because families fall apart and things. But I really believe that I have been blessed in my career, definitely.
Q: Well watching it, and there are these interesting websites, ratemyprofessor.com, and you look on there and you see that you have been rated so highly. And the comments that the students make is that you truly care about them, plus you make learning fun. ‘The learning fun experience.’ You actually took probably one of the scariest parts of the English language, grammar, and you helped create something called Grammar Punk. Tell us about that.
A: Grammar Punk was designed because when I started teaching at American Fork High School one of the requirements was: Every kid needs to pass this grammar test with 80% or better or they don’t get a grade for their first term of Sophomore English. And I was intimidated by grammar. And you are totally right, Rebecca, when people think grammar and punctuation it just gives you a little stomach ache. It is grody and it is a pain. And so we would slug through it and I would say, “We are going to get through this; we are going to take the test, and then if you don’t pass it, you’ll take it again. And if you don’t pass it, we’ll take it again, and we’ll just get through it so we can get on to the fun stuff like writing and reading great things.” So in the end of 2003 – 2004, I thought of a concept to make grammar fun, and it sounds kind of silly, but Grammar Punk is a dice game and a card game. It is intended to be played ten minutes a day and kids learn two grammar or punctuation rules per day. They roll the dice and they correctly write a sentence that fulfills the dice requirements. And so when I started playing it with the students they just said, “This is so much more fun than what we were doing!” And so I was looking at it and kind of tweaking it and I was playing it with a colleague of mine here at the school. Then we were so confident in its abilities, I just started showing teachers. I showed my Mother-in-law who taught second grade. I said, “Hey can I come play this game with your classes?” And she said, “Sure.” I went over there; it is just a couple of miles from my school, and I went in there and I played it. The kids were laughing, and they just totally enjoyed themselves and it was kind of a funky funny phenomena. Then I started teaching at Utah Valley University and I taught there for three years before it became the University and I just started playing it with them too. And they said, “This is so much better,” and the value of Grammar Punk is: Learning does need to be fun; it needs to be engaging. And the cool thing about it is it can be from second graders to college students because their understanding of language is different and the dice help that. It is kind of a simple, weird, fun concept.
Q: Well even in its name, Grammar Punk, is a cool name.
A: Thanks!
Q: Congratulations for a guy that is not a teenager anymore to come up with something: All right! I’m a punk; I’ll give this a try. When we talk about how you have actually taught English for a number of years and part of that is a creative writing facet. At what point did you see yourself as a writer because you have now published a couple of books. You have, The UnValentine, you have, Kissing Kringle. At what point did you decide I would like to see myself as an author?
A: I don’t know. My parents used to have us memorize stuff when we were little kids. I had written a few little things before I went on my mission. When I got back, I started writing things solely for the Christmas party. I would write kind of big, long, epic poem/stories that I would recite to the family. And then pretty soon people were saying, “These are really good, you ought to have them published.” And I said, “No you are just saying that because you like me.” And they said, “No really, these are good.” I presented them to some local publishers and they picked them up and they are illustrated. There is Kissing Kringle, and there is Santa’s First Flight, Laughing All The Way, The UnValentine, and then there is a Halloween one coming up.
Q: And that one is around the corner for the Halloween Time; Halloween Holiday?
A: Yes it is. It will be for Halloween. And I think it is going to be called Scared Pink. I think.
Q: I am curious, since you began writing and decided to take these poems and take it one step farther, do you find that is motivating your students? Do they say, “Huh! You know what, if he can do it, maybe me too?”
A: I think so. If I was sitting in the class and the teacher was talking about something and then they said, “Oh and it works because look!” That would empower me. I would say, “Oh this isn’t just the teacher talking.” I really believe there is a strong disconnect between the institution of education and real learning. And I think students see that and they say, “Oh when am I going to use this? What is the point of this?” But there is a value to sitting in a classroom and seeing the real world application. And in fact what is funny is, back to Grammar Punk, when I started doing Grammar Punk, the next year I started doing it, I made a little packet and I Xeroxed it and gave it to everyone. We just went through basic rules for the comma, and the colon, and the semicolon, and the parts of speech and things, and a kid came up to me at the end of that year and he had just gotten his ACT score back. I said, “Hey, how did it go?” And he said, “I did really well on the English section.” I said, “What did you get?” And he said he got a thirty five. And I said, “NO YOU DIDN”T, YOU DIDN’T GET THIRTY-FIVE!” And he said, “No I did.” And I said, “Good job!” And he said, “It is because of the primer, the Grammar Punk primer,” and I said, “NO!” I said, “Would you say that into this microphone right there.” And it was cool, though, because he was saying you can have fun with language and even with the rules, and this is a kid who scored really well in math. He was a math kid. When I saw that he, by playing a little game every day could learn his grammar and punctuation, it was cool. And so I have shared that with other teachers. And honestly I don’t make any money off this. It is funny, but teachers hear about it and I have kind of criss-crossed the country and shown it to little institutes like there is this grammar institute called, The Assembly of Teachers of English Grammar and these guys are the serious grammar geeks of the nation. I went to Oregon this last summer and talked to them and they just said, “Do you know how brilliant this is? This is really cool.” And I thought the students really, really liked it. And then I went to Stanford and taught them a little, kind of like an in service, and they said, “This is really, really good; Do you know that?” And I said, “Well yes, but students like it more than you, I promise.” It is kind of funny.
Q: Well it is interesting because you mentioned that you see as a teacher, a disconnect between the institution of America’s educational schools and programs and the real learning process of a student. And so for you, you have connected that back, I mean, do you feel that sense that you are working to bridge that connection by…?
A: I think so. The neat thing about Grammar Punk, and for those of you who haven’t heard of it, if you are listening to this or reading this, it explains it a lot on the website and I think it will be on there—it’s at grammarpunk.com—it is students learning grammar punctuation in the contexts of their understanding. So what that means is they come to school and they have their lives and they are bringing their baggage or their wonderful wits to school. And we roll the dice and a kid will write a sentence correctly that is in the context of his understanding. If he has had a crappy day, he is going to talk about the bad things. If he has had a good day, or if he is creative, or if he is simplistic or if he is a wordsmith, they all write the sentence. If the sentence is correct and it fulfills the dice, they are saying, “Oh I just connected because the content is mine but the rules are kind of universal.” Rules don’t change, but people change, so it can be every grade level. But yes there is a disconnect and I love it when I can be in a class and I can bring me to the class as a student if I am attending a class and then it fits into the context of the core curriculum or these universals that they try to say, YOU GOT TO KNOW! You know what I mean?
Q: And I am curious as we are wrapping this up and it is so hard because there is so much interest. I am so interested in what you have done because it is fantastic. Say, “Okay we have a challenge, well why don’t we meet it in a new and creative way?” What about the essay? What could you invent to help the creative process of writing an essay?
A: This is so funny; we didn’t even rehearse that question. We didn’t rehearse anything. And that is the perfect question! Because really the reason we learn grammar and punctuation is so we can write. And Grammar Punk doesn’t stop with just learning the rules, but the focus of Grammar Punk is to say, we need writers. I just got done teaching a class for police officers. Thirty-four police officers in a room who want to become clearer, concise writers. And often it comes down to: idea, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, convention; all these things coming together. And so part of Grammar Punk, is one of the things that we created, was something called GP creative which is Grammar Punk. It is a creative writing curriculum and it deals with expository writing, essay writing, and the creative element like: characters, emotion, location, and setting. Yes, grammar and punctuation you can kick that because once you have the rules down than you can kind of break them and be creative or organized and get across your opinion in a good essay.
Q: Interesting! And become an essay punk, I guess according to you?
A: Totally! Essay Punk! Baby Yeah!
Sam Beeson, thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on creating a way to help even those who feel like they are the most intimidated by the English language that there is a way for them to explore it and to enjoy it. Thank you.
Thank you.
I’m Rebecca Cressman and we want to thank you for joining us for this week’s edition of A Personal Touch. Be sure to check your email next week to find out who else like Sam Beeson is making a difference in our world with A Personal Touch.
End of interview.
