The Moral and Medical Imperative of Teaching Writing and Grammar in Context

For the  concluding activity on Day 9 of the Abydos institute, I was inspired to write down what I needed to use for our concluding activity. This writing expresses my deep conviction about why it is so important that we teach writing and grammar in a constructivist and progressive manner. We had just studied the brain and the implications on writing instruction. Then we completed this activity.

The Moral/Medical Imperative of Teaching Grammar

Concluding Activity for Day 9: Brain Day at Abydos

Topic: The link between education (writing) and health - from Aging with Grace: What the Nun Study teaches Us about Leading longer, Healthier, and More Meaningful Lives, by David Snowdon, PhD. 

The prompt: 

“...on September 22, 1930, Mother Mary Stanislaus Kostaka, the Superior for North America, sent a letter to all the convents requesting that each novice write an autobiography before she took her vows. The letter called for a short sketch of their life: 

This account should not contain more than two to three hundred words and should be written on a single sheet of paper...include a place of birth, parentage, interesting and edifying events of childhood, schools attended, influences that led to the convent, religious life, and outstanding events,” (Snowdon, 2002, pg. 66-67). 

The discovery: 

Vocabulary: “When these women were in their twenties, just a few days before they took their vows, they all wrote autobiographies...We’ve discovered that those who had the richest vocabulary, the most complex sentences, the most ideas in their sentences - sixty years later those were the sisters…” who were aging with grace. They used more multisyllabic (particularly, privileged, and quarantined) vs monosyllabic words (girls, boys, sick). Those that developed Alzheimer’s used common multisyllabic words (religious), while healthy controls used more rare words (grandeur). Simply, “healthy sisters had a richer vocabulary in early life and may have read a more diverse section of literature as children,” (Snowdon, 2002, p. 107-108). 

Grammar: There are many ways to measure language: “morphemes, left- and right-branching sentences, conceptual propositions, lexical repetition, and anaphora,” (Snowdon, 2001, p. 108). There are two concepts here worth noting: idea density and grammatical complexity. 

• “...idea density reflects language processing ability, which in turn is associated with a person’s level of education, general knowledge, vocabulary, and reading comprehension”

• “Grammatical complexity...is associated with working memory capacity” (Snowdon, 2002, p. 109).

The examples: 

These are the excerpts from the nuns with the highest and lowest scores for idea density.  

Introductions: 

Sister Helen	Sister Emma
I was born in eau Claire, Wis., on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in St. James Church.	It was about a half hour before midnight between February twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of the leap year ninety-hundred-twelve when I began to live and to die as the third child of my mother, whose maiden name is Hilda Hoffman, and my father, Otto Schmitt.

Grammatical Complexity: 

Sister Helen	Sister Emma
My father, Mr. L.M. Hallacher, was born in the city of Ross, County Cork, Ireland, and is now a sheet metal worker in Eau Claire.	My father is an all around man of trades, but his principal occupation is carpentry which trade he had already begun before his marriage with my mother.

References to Siblings (Depth): Note the connection to meaning, purpose, and audience from the prompt. 

Sister Helen

Sister Emma

There are ten children in the family, six boys and four girls. Two of the boys are dead.

Already two, a brother and a sister had begun the family which would gradually reach the number of eight...When I was in the fourth grade death visited our family taking one to whom I was very particularly attached, my little brother, Karl, who was but a year and a half old. He was called to his “Home” after three weeks of very much suffering on Good Friday early in the morning. The pastor was willing to have the funeral services conducted before Easter, but I was hoping and praying that my parents would not consent, for I thought since he died on Good Friday he might be in our midst, living, on Easter Sunday. The services were held on Monday morning which I was privileged to attend since we were quarantined.

Conclusions: 

Sister Helen	Sister Emma
I prefer teaching music to any other profession.	Now I am wandering about in “Dowve’s Lane: waiting, yet only three more weeks, to follow in the footprints of my Spouse, bound to Him by the Holy Vows of Powerfy, Chastity, and Obedience.

Upon Aging: The excerpts are so different. Yes the backgrounds for each nun were similar. Both nuns went to school for 12 years before writing these excerpts. Both went to college and received a bachelor’s degree.  There the similarities end. Sister Emma earned a master’s degree. Yet, somehow, what and how they composed at 22 became a stark predictor of who would struggle cognitively as they aged. 

	Sister Helen	Sister Emma
Mini-Mental State Exam (1992)	0	30, the highest score for overall cognition
1993	Died at 80; autopsy confirmed Alzheimer’s disease	“alive and mentally intact”

Another sister’s results encapsulate another astounding relationship to the importance of writing and grammar. (There are also other variables for such results such as: staying active, continued cognitive pursuits, emotional support, attitude of gratitude, faith, diet, lack of heart disease or stroke, etc.) Sister Mary’s results confounded the researchers. 

At 101, her cognitive tests and mental acuity were impressive. When she died of colon cancer at 102, no one had suspected any kind of dementia of Alzheimer’s disease. Yet, her brain weighed 870 grams. Of the 117 brains in the study, only five of them had weighed less, and all of them exhibited extreme symptoms of cognitive decline. Sister Mary’s nurses hadn’t noticed cognitive declines over the ten years in their care, nor did the assessments given by the researchers. 

Activity: Place participants in a large circle. Begin with a large ball of yarn. Stand in front of a person across from you in the circle and ask the participant to hold the ball of the yarn while you hold the end. State something you learned from your exploration of the Brain Research Stations as you walk back to your position in the circle. The person across from you now takes the ball of yarn to the person to your right, and explains/shares something they learned from the research. The person then takes the ball of yarn to the person to the right of who previously shared. (This will make a criss-cross pattern in the circle. People will need to hold the strings above their heads as others walk through. 

Once everyone has shared, have participants shorten their strings to make a compact circle. Place balloons between strands to represent glial cells. Place lotion on the strings to represent myelination. Pop the glial cells to represent what happens to the support/framework when the cells die. (The string dendrites can still support the network.) Add a tangle of yarn to an area. (The thoughts can still be accessed through another route.)  Pop some of the glial cells to show the impact of aging. Show that the complex weaving of our strands still holds up some of the strands and how we can still get to thoughts/memories through other pathways.

Implications: A diagnosis of Alzheimer's requires a scan at the autopsy to determine plaques and tangles that interrupt and collapse neural networks. Sister Mary’s brain had “three times the average number of tangles in her hippocampus seen in the other sisters. Intriguingly, however, she had very few tangles in her neocortex, and she had no infarcts that marked a stroke; this may explain why she was spared the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease,” (Snowdon, 2002, p. 206). 

Conclusion: Can we help develop the infrastructure of the neocortex to be more dendritically dense? Grammar and cognition and contextual memories are stored in the neocortex. The frontal lobe. As teachers of writing, we know how to teach introductions and conclusions similar to what Sister Emma wrote. We understand the grammatical constructions of complex sentences and how to use them to create depth and connection between ideas in ways that Sister Emma used to convey her experience and intentions. 

What we don’t see is that our work is building neural networks across the glial cells of our students. We don’t see the additional dendrites crossing and weaving between and among brain cells of our scholars. We don’t see how these connections travel the ladder of glial cells to the proper storage areas of our apprenticed thinkers. We don’t see the myelination of connections between synapses that solidify and protect the pathways of thought for storage and retrieval of information for our students who are those who will contribute powerfully to our future. And after they leave our classrooms, we do not see the continued cognitive and medical benefits of a life well thought and well written.  

Excerpts from Nun Study Biographies

Introductions: 

Sister Helen	Sister Emma
I was born in eau Claire, Wis., on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in St. James Church.	It was about a half hour before midnight between February twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of the leap year ninety-hundred-twelve when I began to live and to die as the third child of my mother, whose maiden name is Hilda Hoffman, and my father, Otto Schmitt.

Conclusions: 

Sister Helen	Sister Emma
I prefer teaching music to any other profession.	Now I am wandering about in “Dowve’s Lane: waiting, yet only three more weeks, to follow in the footprints of my Spouse, bound to Him by the Holy Vows of Powerfy, Chastity, and Obedience.

Grammatical Complexity: 

Sister Helen	Sister Emma
My father, Mr. L.M. Hallacher, was born in the city of Ross, County Cork, Ireland, and is now a sheet metal worker in Eau Claire.	My father is an all around man of trades, but his principal occupation is carpentry which trade he had already begun before his marriage with my mother.

101Depth: Note the connection to meaning, purpose, and audience from the prompt. 

Sister Helen

Sister Emma

There are ten children in the family, six boys and four girls. Two of the boys are dead.

Already two, a brother and a sister had begun the family which would gradually reach the number of eight...When I was in the fourth grade death visited our family taking one to whom I was very particularly attached, my little brother, Karl, who was but a year and a half old. He was called to his “Home” after three weeks of very much suffering on Good Friday early in the morning. The pastor was willing to have the funeral services conducted before Easter, but I was hoping and praying that my parents would not consent, for I thought since he died on Good Friday he might be in our midst, living, on Easter Sunday. The services were held on Monday morning which I was privileged to attend since we were quarantined.