The noun game by dennis baron

Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It's one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn't quite fit the way we're used to viewing things.

That's exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school.

That's a lot to get from a grammar game. Anyway, here's how you play. Every student gets a set of cards with nouns written on them. At the front of the classroom are three buckets, labeled "person," "place," and "thing. Ganesh had a card with "horse" on it. Ganesh isn't his real name, by the way. It's actually my cousin's name, so I'm going to use it here. You might guess from his name that Ganesh is South Asian. In India, where he had been in school before coming to Ohio, Ganesh was taught that a noun named a person, place, thing, or animal.

If he played the noun game in India he'd have four buckets and there would be no problem deciding what to do with "horse. In India, Ganesh's religion taught him that all forms of life are continuous, interrelated parts of the universal plan. So when he surveyed the three buckets it never occurred to him that a horse, a living creature, could be a thing.

He knew that horses weren't people, but they had more in common with people than with places or things. Forced to choose, Ganesh put the horse card in the person bucket. You lose. The teacher shook her head, and Ganesh sat down, mortified, with a C for his efforts.

This was a game where you got a grade, and a C for a child from a South Asian family of overachievers is a disgrace. So his parents went to talk to the teacher. It so happens that I've been in a similar situation. We spent a year in France some time back, and my oldest daughter did sixth grade in a French school. Don't Make English Official--ban it instead. Letter to a high school English teacher. Grammar sticklers may have OCD.

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Grammar and Gender Yale Univ. Is the point of the noun game to see whether students recoginze possible nouns as nouns, or whether their view of the universe agrees with the teacher's? Is education fitting things into buckets, or wondering why the categories don't fit the facts? Does education consist of grading you on how well you can play a game? So what do I advise Ganesh's parents to do? Forget it, that's what. Ganesh has done more thinking about the nature of language than his teacher has.

His performance in the noun game won't keep him out of Harvard, or Ohio State. The teacher isn't going to change. The grade is not important. It's the thought, not the noun, that counts. This commentary is based on an actual incident that occurred more than a decade ago. An anxious parent called the National Council of Teachers of English for advice, and I responded with an earlier version of this essay that appeared in Inflections vol.

The parent, who received a copy of that response, discussed the issue with the school principal, who was moved to schedule a schoolwide assembly to increase awareness of cultural diversity among students and teachers. Already a subscriber? Click here to login. Sign up for email. Dennis Baron is professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois and writes regularly on linguistic issues at The Web of Language.

You can follow him on Twitter DrGrammar. Click here to read more articles by Dennis Baron. This article is fascinating. I would like to learn more about culture and grammar. Monday November 16th , AM. Im not a highly educated man. U can get the key words and have intellegent conversation on that subject. And remember is,is not allways is.

McConnell,learning every day!! The article on "The Noun Game" tells us what education and being educated is all about. It is about discovering those ideas that one did not know before; it is a call for openness and for humility at all times. Interesting article. I enjoyed it. And since you put the challenge out there If I am a flea, and I send a text to my flea buddy to meet me at the nape of the neck on the black lab at 3pm, that makes the dog a place, right?

Monday November 16th , PM. Good article! I have to agree with grades not being important. Often teachers and parents put too much emphasis on those and forget about the importance of thinking, problem solving ,and creativity.

I really like this article. I too, would have a problem thinking of a horse as a thing, but that relates to a lifetime of living with animals who became companions. I would hesitate and then get it "right" but feel that it was wrong.

But the point I get is that rigidity of thinking is a formula for blocking good sense and the learning process. Matthew O has it completely right in saying that education is a call for openness and humility at all times. I wish I could do that! A child in school can learn to figure out what his teacher expects the right answer to be. He can then give the answer this teacher expects or learn to express his own reasoning.

This recognition of diversity among the "powers that be" will later give the student an edge in dealing with bosses, landlords, committee chairmen and other figures of authority. I was very moved by this article having been the kid who got in trouble for 'thinking' lots of times! You have no idea how much I regret not having my parents talk to the teachers in elementary school, nuns about what they'd said and done! If they did talk to them, I was never, even as an adult when we discussed this, told so.

I do know that in High School the principal was called once to get a teacher to stop referring to me as a thief, and I heard my mother defend my decision to go to the University of Michigan where I would not, she said, become a Communist, any more than my dad who'd gone there had! But at the tender years in grade school, no one came to my defense. Later on I did learn that my dad wanted to take me out of that school, but I didn't know that! I disagree with doing nothing in Ganesh's case being the right thing.

I think the school was right to do some work on cultural differences. Kids aren't grown-ups just yet, capable of absorbing blows.

When he is an adult, perhaps Ganesh will, as I have, overcome the bitterness of not being treated fairly. I hope so. By the way, despite my parents' efforts in contacting the principal, and the finding of the stolen article a violin with someone else, I never did escape that label of thief Never did get into the Hourn Society.

Not bitter any longer, but I made sure that I never treated students that way! Perhaps that's the good outcome, the lesson learned.

Oh, and my husband was taught in France that there are only five continets. He was kind of surprised now when I told him there were seven! Great lesson about thinking in the column, even if I disagree with how to handle it! But it doesn't help him, Jane A, when he's a kid! That should be Honor Society in my post. It's a jiggling effort to post and when you get to the end of the box, the jiggling is harder to deal with!

Tuesday November 17th , AM. Since Dennis didn't mention this, and it is a horrible area of confusion for most people, I'll chime in and say that nouns aren't people, places or things at all; nouns are words! Actually Dennis said and I know this isn't his own understanding of the matter; he is just putting forth the understanding that most people have of the matter that nouns are names of people, places, and things. But, as he illustrated through the story, they aren't that either.

Nouns form a class of words, and classes of words are defined by their syntactic properties, not their semantic qualities! They can also be heads of noun phrases. If a word can do those things, then it's a noun! If it can't, then it's not.

Throw away the buckets! Another important thing to understand is that quite often, words do not have intrinsic parts of speech word classes ; it depends on their context. Is "horse" a noun in "stop horsing around"? Awareness of cultural diversity and differing perspectives is something to be promoted, but I don't think that's the main issue here. I applaud the teacher for accepting her mistake and trying to promote awareness of cultural diversity, but I would applaud her much more if she were to improve her own knowledge of the subject she was teaching.

A clearer understanding of grammar can only lead to clearer communication, wouldn't you agree? I definitely agree. The reason I stressed what happened to the child is the familiarity in my own life experience. If it were not for that, I might have dwelt on the same aspect as you did, Randy.

I notice you post from China, Did you enjoy snow recently? Both a verb and a noun! Tuesday November 17th , PM. I don't draw to this day due to the ridicule of a kindergarten teacher after teaching us to draw flowers.

She pointed out to the class how wrong it was that my flowers had the same color stems as the flowers themselves, instead of the proper green. I'd like to get with Ganesh and do some bucketing. I have no idea what that means.