Commas are Important
PEOPLE! Actually, no. Commas are not people. But they are important, people! JUST ASK SARAH CHAN, sixth-grade English teacher. Or perhaps her sixth-grade students—who have often returned to Peck after graduation, thankful that her infamous “Comma Study Sessions” have set them up for writing success in high school and beyond. Chan is amused by the thought that her simple comma lessons, and the culminating study sessions and test, have made such a large impact. “I’m shocked you’ve even heard of this test, and more than once!” she exclaimed. In reality, Chan’s comma unit is a defining moment of the sixth-grade experience—so much so that a recent lunch table conversation covered nothing else, with sixth graders offering punctuation advice to fifth graders with near-gleeful exultation! We wondered: what’s the story behind the comma?”
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In an English class known for delving deeply into creativity, commas seem entirely contrary. They’re anti-creative. They’re persnickety. They bring an entirely new—and perhaps even unexpected—challenge to a middle schooler’s brain. “I think commas challenge a middle schooler to be detail-oriented,” says Chan. And at this age, speed is the name of the game—they speed from one activity to another, class to class, and they’re multitasking all the time. Being detail-oriented isn’t fully in their nature yet. So this unit forces them to slow down and pay attention.” At the same time, proper comma usage in writing is an abstract concept. Students need to understand different parts of a sentence and their function in order to place commas correctly. While comma usage isn’t new to sixth
graders, Chan dives deeper into the hows and whys of the comma than the younger grades, demonstrating usage in both the creative and the practical. “Addresses really throw them for a loop,” says Chan. “They’re not used to writing letters, and it’s a new way to look at a unit of information.” This is where Chan has often started her comma lessons, equipping students to look for information within written language, beginning with the concrete before moving to the abstract. Chan prepares a list of essential comma rules for her students, covering things like proper usage in dates, appositives, prepositional phrases, clauses, and more. Each rule is a lesson which Chan delivers using creative examples, mnemonic devices, even improv acting! Over the course of about six weeks, students shed the common habit to simply “put commas where they sound right,” and instead begin to see commas as deliberate elements of grammatical construction. “I’m trying to help them see that there actually is no official pause rule,” says Chan. “They have to be able to recognize the units of information; whether it’s a phrase or a clause, that’s where they’re putting a comma. Not because they happen to be pausing there.” At the end of the comma unit and before the test, Chan offers several study sessions—and this is where things get exciting. Students share tips and tricks for remembering the comma rules, catch their errors, share their knowledge, and end up deeply internalizing the huge impact of the humble comma. “I went to the study sessions every day,” said one of the seventh graders at the aforementioned lunch table. “We told the fifth graders, study a LOT and go to the sessions!”
