Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Grammar 101 a novel way to learn at Whitney Young
Classes write book to tackle 'boring' subject

December 20, 2006 BY MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA Staff Reporter

During 21 years of teaching English, Jay Rehak became familiar with the collective groans a grammar lesson brings. Even his brightest Whitney Young Magnet High students were, like most teens, less than enthusiastic when it came to learning about active verbs and ambiguous pronouns, prefixes and punctuation, conjunctions and contractions.

So Rehak came up with the Book of 101 Grammar Lessons, a unique publication over a year in the making, released Tuesday by Whitney Young, or um ... rather, by Rehak's Honors II and Creative Writing Classes of 2005-2006.

"I wanted to teach grammar in an interesting way, so I thought it would be cool to put together a grammar book to teach a subject we all know is boring," said Rehak, who with his 101 young authors held a book signing Tuesday.

The project, funded by a grant from the Friends of Whitney Young, a group of alumni and other supporters of the lauded Near West Side school, involved each student in Rehak's four Honors II classes and one Creative Writing class taking on one grammar issue to research and dissect.

The result is 101 grammar lessons, expounding on "the facts" of each grammar issue, "why it's confusing," and "how to remember" correct usage, followed by test questions and a back pages answer key.

"Just about everybody speaks incorrectly. Take 'its' vs. 'it's,' for example -- 99 percent of the world doesn't know the difference," Rehak said. "But you are judged by the way you speak, so I try to get my students to understand that when you speak, you want to be as grammatically correct as possible. However, nobody's perfect."

Readers invited to find errors In fact, Rehak and his students don't claim to have produced an infallible literary work. In their intro, they invite readers "to search for grammar errors. If you find any . . . please e-mail . . . in future editions . . . will try and correct them." The book, which will become a text for future English classes, can be ordered via the school's Web site, wyoung.org.

"My contribution was lesson 34, knowing whether to add an extra consonant to a word before adding a suffix," sophomore Christine Villanueva, 16, said proudly. "At first I wasn't really very interested in grammar, but as we got into the project, it became more fun. It's cool to see your name on the finished product, and it's helped me grammatically."

mihejirika@suntimes.com