There was no lighting in the classrooms and no heat in the school. The kids had to sit in their coats in the gym, beneath emergency lighting that cast a small glow from on high.
With each break, the kids wouldn’t head outside. Instead, they put their heads down on the tables. Or went into the bathrooms to throw up.
Some didn’t last until noon, when the first round of testing was over. They told us, “Sorry,” and tottered outside into the wind.
“There go our hopes for decent scores,” I told my friend Lyle, the science teacher who later took over as principal when Mr. Bowling moved into the district office, eventually to become superintendent.
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Except I was wrong.
At least in grammar instruction.
I received a commendation for the highest increase in English scores in the district.
But it wasn’t me. It was the techniques I had developed over the past decade. The kids began calling it the Guthridge Grammar System (GGS), and it became an essential part of the Guthridge Writing System (GWS), which I also had developed. Though still in its infancy, it was a revolutionary pedagogy for teaching grammar. The system simplified grammar and eliminated nearly all the mind-boggling nomenclature that traditional grammar includes.
This website is for everyone to use. Its practice section, The Seven Wonders of the Word, includes exercises that enable teachers to place grammar instruction in short, interesting essays about history, geography, ecology, and other subjects. That way, kids don’t work grammar exercises with sentences that have nothing to do with other things they need to learn.
Later, when I again was teaching college rather than teaching high school, I co-developed RAHI, the Rural Alaska Honors Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It is a summer college-prep for high school seniors. Our students, almost all of whom were Alaska Natives from rural communities, became expert at the Guthridge Grammar System and the Guthridge Writing System. One student, a usually jovial Caucasian kid who grew up on a homestead dozens of miles from the next house, became red in the face and slammed his fist on his desk. “Do you know how hard I worked to learn grammar?” he bellowed. “And this makes it so easy!”
— Dr. George Guthridge