changing for the better

Filling the blank lines on the page with large unsteady letters, I was kept busy for hours as a child. I was enthralled with learning to write letters, which led to words and then sentences. There was still fun to be had with the basics of sentence structure, but at some point in my grammar past I lost the drive to know more than what was absolutely needed in order for me to get by in English. I recall daydreaming about my teachers just making up the rules as they went along, due to the craziness of the grammar laws that they drilled into my head day in and day out. Grammar revolted me; keeping me from fully enjoying reading and writing for a good deal of my education.
With college, came the feeling of liberation, as I found my professors more interested in the critical thinking and overall understanding of a text rather than whether or not a paper was grammatically correct. I felt free to do as I pleased on my papers, easily forgetting the red marks for grammatical mistakes in light of the overall high score given for the paper.
My grammar-free life was short lived. I started working at my school’s writing center and was flabbergasted by the total lack of any grammatical sense in one paper after another. Forget understanding the text or making an amazing observation within a paper, I couldn’t even understand what some of the people were writing about.
The time I spent reading and helping individuals with little or no grammatical training or understanding led me to the revelation that the lovely points and inquisitive thoughts would not exist if it weren’t for rules within the English language that allow for a level playing ground for all to write and read. I played with the idea that even these rules that we hold up so highly today were born from the imagination of individuals, but that following these rules should not limit our own creativity. If anything, being informed of the various parts of speech and how they work together to make a complete idea allows for these grammatical walls to be more easily broken.
It now seems to me that to deem grammar insignificant is simple-minded and lazy. I was perhaps one of these grammar bums. If it were possible to go back in time to the little girl that loathed the grammar lessons, I would hope that I would suck it up and learn what was being taught completely. However, beyond my control over how I handled information that was presented to me, I would have hoped that my teachers would have presented me with more to work with. Grammar seemed to take the back burner to reading and writing. We were basically taught what we would be tested over on the TAAS, which I think is a shame. I feel that standardized tests were a major reason that I was robbed of learning all of the things that I truly needed to know, because teachers were given a formula to teach rather than bestowing their students with a true understanding.
All blaming aside, I am now in control of my own grammar destiny, and I plan to make things right. While I feel that at this point in my education content does rank above grammar, as far as the classroom is concerned, there was a time when content was impossible since there was no basis for grammar. I am looking to improve that grammar foundation, which I hope will strengthen the core of whatever my imagination produces.