Punctuation! The Day I Thought My Teacher Invented a New Letter

Can you remember learning a punctuation symbol for the first time? Maybe I’m odd because I can remember that. But at first, I thought it was a new letter.

OK, I can’t remember the day I first learned about using periods. Not even question marks? Or exclamation points! Let, alone, my, beloved, commas. But one memory does stand out.

What on Earth Is That Thing?

One day in first or second grade, our teacher wrote something on the chalkboard. As she did every day.

It was going fine at first. Until she wrote what looked like a whole new letter.

I had learned the alphabet, and this thing wasn’t in there! I knew I had learned to read. But I didn’t recognize this new letter. I wasn’t the only one taken aback. Students called out in alarm. Things like, “Wait a minute!” and “What’s that?”

Then, she wrote some words I recognized. And another new letter — the opposite of the weird new letter.

As you might have guessed, the first “new letter” was this:

(

And the next one was this:

)

Yup. All that poor woman had done was written parentheses on the chalkboard. That’s all it took to send the class into … mass hysteria. (“Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!”)

The issue? No one had thought to teach us about parentheses.

How Did the Teacher Handle This?

The teacher was a champ! She caught on right away. Very quickly, she admitted she hadn’t taught us about parentheses. And she fixed that oversight right away.

It could have gone very differently. Imagine being in a class but with a teacher who didn’t get it, one who yelled at the kids for not somehow magically figuring out what parentheses were. Now that would have been the wrong message to send.

Or imagine being with a teacher who never realized the kids didn’t understand what she had written. One who never stopped her lesson to teach the class about parentheses. Talk about confusion!

Learning Is Weird and Cool

It’s strange learning things as a child. Everything is new. People forget how much the children they are teaching don’t know yet — because they haven’t thought to tell them.

Some people get impatient with children when they don’t know something basic.

Uhm, don’t do that. Hello? Take a step back.

Were you born knowing about parentheses and how to avoid spilling your milk? Nope!

Most of us forget we had to learn those things before they become basic knowledge. When dealing with kids, we have to remember that they weren’t born knowing everything.

And neither were we.

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