[2021-10-04] Influential people
Most people think that I learned grammar in university when I studied journalism. In truth, I owe my grounding in grammar to my grade 5 teacher.
My elementary school―Sacred Heart in Lanark Village―was very small, with a total student body of about 60 students from kindergarten to grade 8. Each teacher taught children from multiple years, such as grades 4 and 5, with very different levels of academic ability.
Perhaps to keep me from being bored, my grade 5 teacher allowed me to learn at my own pace. Once I finished the curriculum for an entire year in a given subject, she would give me grammar exercises to do. It was here that my love of grammar was born.
These extracurricular activities were instrumental in my subsequent academic and career choices, from studying journalism, to becoming an editor and writer, to blogging, to ultimately becoming an assistant deputy minister of communications.
I thought of my grade 5 teacher today when reading an interview with Adam Grant, author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. In the interview, Grant references research that looked at people who were world-class in their fields, such as athletes, scientists and musicians. People who achieved greatness didn't necessarily start out as prodigies. They practised their chosen activity extensively. But Grant was most interested in what motivated these elite performers to invest time in deliberate practice in the first place. Grant states:
It turns out that actually most of these world-class performers had a first coach, or a first teacher, who made the activity fun. If you excel at something, and you experience mastery, it often does make it more fun and enjoyable to do it. We’ve overlooked the reverse effect, which is that often interest precedes the development of talent. It’s having a coach or teacher who really makes something exciting to be involved in that leads you to often put in the practice necessary to become an expert at it.
I doubt that I would have become as interested in grammar as I did had it not been for my grade 5 teacher.
We can probably all think of people―parents, siblings, teachers, friends, coaches―who turned us on to a particular subject. If you have a way of reaching out to someone who influenced you to let them know of their impact on your life, do so. They'll be tickled pink.
