My 7th grade (middle school) “GT” English teacher, Mrs. Curry, made us commit to memory a poem she wrote to help us, by rote, learn a bit of grammar that she felt necessary to the sanctity of the English Language, and perhaps (she acted like), for the goodness of all Humankind. At the time, I thought it was a bunch of useless bunk, another lame classroom teaching that would serve no purpose in the “real world.” To me, it was just another teacher asserting her power over helpless kids, who, by no fault of their own, were being held captive by society in the confines of a public school classroom. Naturally, like a good little pre-teen sheep (or lemming, however you choose to look at it,) I learned her poem; and then I went on to graduate from high-school, and then from college with my Bachelor’s Degree in (of all things) English.
Surprisingly though, in all those years of school, there was just about ZERO classroom instruction in the rules of English grammar. That was then. I was eleven. This is now. I am thirty-two. Thank goodness for the old school, rote memorization and recitation style of Mrs. Curry. She actually made us stand up, one by one, to recite her little verse. And of course we all did, lest we endure the nerdish humiliation that only occurs among those consigned to the Perfect Storm of Geekdom…a “GT” classroom, the adolescent need for peer acceptance and the desire to “obey,” still lingering in the sunset of our waning childhoods. All was not lost to the vacuum of short-term memory. So, burned indelibly into the brain of a fledgling writer was the poem titled simply:
Helping Verbs
And here it is…
Be am is are was were been,
Has have had,
Shall will should would,
Does do did,
Must may might can could.
Being.
AhHA! I’ve STIL got it!
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