IN THE CLASSROOM -- Trip down memory lane

Danette Goulet

If you even hear the word “participle,” you must be visiting a

classroom.

I’d venture to guess that many adults don’t even recall what a

participle is.

So as seventh-grade students in Kathleen Vanmoorlegham’s class at Our

Lady Queen of Angels School in Corona del Mar did a quick review of the

verbs that can act as adjectives, their being able to spot one in a

sentence was more than many can probably accomplish.

The English class was tackling the wonderful world of conjugating

verbs -- something that will seem like second nature to the students in

no time, but while it’s being learned is a rather confusing proposition.

As they moved past the participles and onto the discussion of tenses,

Vanmoorlegham related the perplexing grammar rules to those that many

students are learning in Spanish classes.

While the infinitive form of a verb in English would be preceded by

the word “to,” in Spanish the infinitive form would end in either “er,”

“ir” or “ar,” she told them.

What a fabulous idea relating the two, I thought.

I don’t remember struggling with conjugating verbs in the English

language, but Spanish was impossible for me.

While they were working on regular verbs -- those that would be the

same word in past, present and future, and not irregular -- I was quite

sure students knew that the past tense of “leave” was not “leaved,” but

“left.”

So isn’t conjugating verbs really just learning terms for what you

have learned to do in your speech already? Terms I venture to guess most

of them, if past history holds, will forget.

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot education

writer Danette Goulet visits a campus within the Newport-Mesa Unified

School District and writes about her experience.