I have always thought that English was an ugly language. It was awkward and uncomfortable to the tongue, rough to the lips, and hard on the ears. I wished that my language was a young, beautiful lady like Italian, chosen as the national language for being the most beautiful of available native dialects. It was to be admitted that English and myself did not have the best introduction, being raised on an old farm with a big redneck family of thick southern drawls. I disliked so much about it, the way my mother’s S’s whistled, the way the men’s voices crackled from the smoke and tobacco deep in their lungs, the way Grandma’s vowels strained with her missing teeth, and the way my own voice was pitched so unusually high in contrast. But everything shifted in perspective one sunny Kindergarten day when our small private school taught us how to read.
Suddenly everything was so beautiful when it was reverberating from the pages of the well-worn books overflowing from the bookshelves of our modest country home; making its way into my young mind. I was reading books far beyond my appointed reading level. I was in love with books, and constantly reading something. I moved in third grade to town, where all the fancy people and their high expectations of perfection managed to force me into a somewhat antisocial lifestyle as I buried my nose deeper into my books than one would think possible. My closest friends where my relic of a PlayStation One and any book I could get my hands on, and it was about this time that the public education system began to fail me.
“No Child Left Behind” always seemed like a silly notion to me. I never fully understood why I somehow never managed to learn my multiplication tables (an exclusion of curriculum that would later hasten my learning ability immensely), but my AR was over 300 points of the required. Also, somehow, in my primary education, although my reading comprehension advanced proficiently, my writing proficiency was never legible enough to be comprehended or evaluated. My fourth grade teacher exploited this, but never corrected it. One day she called me to her desk after a journal entry that we had been assigned. It was some silly, impractical narrative we had been required to write about some nonsensical topic, of which my fourth grade mind had produced a page long story. She asked me, “You are in fourth grade, didn’t your third grade teacher ever teach you how to paragraph?” I skittishly replied that I was not sure what she meant. She sent me back to me desk with my tail sunken heart, convinced I was good at nothing. How could someone who claimed to love books possibly not have known how to paragraph?
In sixth grade I joined band. This would seem unrelated to literacy, at least, perhaps, to the normally wired mind, but it would be an assumption that you may deem incorrect if you consider what it did. Learning how to play an instrument rewired my brain, completely changing the way I thought and turning it inside out. It began to majorly alter the way I did anything and everything. It was as if I had learned a language that was in a constant state of grace and beauty, and I desired to make the only other language I could fabricate and understand to be in such a state of consistent eloquence and perfection. As my comprehension of music grew, my understanding of literacy continued, and they slid together like corresponding shapes; tessellations that somehow fulfilled each other. I took honors classes with some of the best teachers this public school system has to offer, all of which helped me closer to achieving my lifetime goal of making the English language beautiful; as melodious and complicated as the poetic, musical words that flowed so easily from paper into my mind or to my instrument.
Maybe all of this has just been an attempt to justify my path to becoming what one might consider a “Grammar Nazi.” I was recruited into an army of rogues, considered by a majority of the population to be a ruder, lesser type of people with too much time on their hands to do anything but criticize the slightest fault in grammar, making elaborate attempts to glorify themselves in the process. But, somewhere along my path to make the rough, Germanic language that is my native tongue as beautiful as I could manage, I became fond of these rogues. The reason being, words have never been more beautiful in any language than when eloquently inscribed upon the paper for only one’s imagination to hear; the same inner ear that they taught me to listen with for carrying out a pitch or frequency of perfect harmony. It is in this way that band and my music education was always the strongest influence on my writing career; English, commonly flawed in the public school system, was only secondary to this. I have continued my quest to make beautiful a language that is as flawed as the methods of teaching it, and, because I have still come nowhere close to achieving this goal, I have made a decision to continue upon this path throughout high school, in both the language of music and of English.
