Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here!

A Building Block Of Jess: Grammar Rock


Schoolhouse Rock has given me so many wonderful gifts - from teaching me how a bill becomes a law, through opening my eyes to just how cool zero is. Perhaps the most special thing Schoolhouse Rock gave me, though, is Grammar Rock.

Grammer Rock is the specific set of short films that introduced me, at a toddling age, to sweet words, their many uses, and (not least affectingly) the grammar-Nazi bug, which lives with me to this day.

Not to toot my own horn, or anything, but I was always what I guess they call a gifted child, so it’s possible that the intricate love of word usage may have come to me with age. As it is, though, Grammar Rock presented me with nouns and prepositions before I could even read - and I taught myself to read when I was three! (Side note: I taught myself to read by memorizing The Biggest Cookie in the World as told by Cookie Monster, and using the words I learned from it to figure out how to read other things.)

My little sponge brain absorbed all those sweet, rockin’ tunes, which preached about conjunctions and things of the like.

Grammar Rock taught me - before kindergarten - the difference between an adverb:





And an adjective:






Later in life, not only was learning about anything at all word-related a total non-issue for me, but I also became a self-proclaimed grammar-freak, and I am convinced that it has only helped me along the way.


One week in second grade we wrote short stories which we made into books. Everyone had five days to write five books. There was a specified time with which we had to work on our books, and as soon as we were done, we could go outside for recess. If you didn’t finish your book that day, you didn’t play.

I missed recess every day that week.

It wasn’t that I was stumped for ideas, or that I had a difficult time piecing my thoughts into words and sentences. It was the exact converse of that situation, actually.

My slightly-bigger, still-tiny, mushy sponge-brain was flushed with ideas, influenced by my favorite books and movies, and, of course, a couple right out of my imagination. I was just meticulous in choosing exactly the right ones to grace the pages of my first-ever story collection.

And even while my thinking lent itself freely to my writing, it didn’t speed things along. I wrote and re-wrote every sentence.

Carefully, I worked each piece, ensuring their super excellence.

I took the assignment very seriously - much more so than my 8-year-old classmates. They hurriedly assembled their own books, some even leaving their drawings bald to save however many precious few minutes of recess they were able.

Sure, I was the only one who needed every minute we were allowed, but I was hurrying too! Especially once my desk and me were both still positioned into one of five book-writing stations of four desks each, but my desk and my station were the only ones with a person still at them. When it was just Mrs. McKenzie and me.

My thoughts would be constantly pestered by the suspicion that my teacher would much rather be outside on such a fine spring day, but all it did was make me hurry more. I was deeply invested in my writing/illustrating.

All week I had to work furiously through recess - practically wore my pencil and crayons to nubs - but at the end of the week I had the most glorious, wonderfully-imaginative set of books I felt like an 8-year-old had ever created, and I was over the moon about them.

My love for words and the art of stringing them together kept growing quietly within me all through my school years.

In high school, I proposed a running offer to proof-read any of my friends’ papers, absolutely free of charge.

Even now, in college, I’ve just positioned myself on the school paper, and I could hardly make it through the day without pushing a pencil or dancing my fingers on the keyboard.

I can trace this ever-widening love for all things wordy that I foster all the way back to those Pull-Up-pulling days, when my mom would pop Grammar Rock in the living room VCR and sit me in front of the TV so it could watch me play with my toys. All I had to do was just sit there playing with my toys, and let my brain do all the listening and remembering. I did, and it did, and here I am - a word-loving grammar-freak!
Go, Mom! Go, sponge-brain! Go, Grammar Rock!