by Buck Johnson

In last summer’s Orientation English (OE), a six-week language-arts brush-up for rising sixth graders, Captain Sybanof and Sergeant Owfladfs were familiar foes. They wrangled within parts-of-speech and parts-of-sentence lessons, the captain sporting tights and a cape, his nemesis dressed in black. “Sybanof,” originally an acronym for remembering the seven coordinating conjunctions, preceded Owfladfs. Summers prior he had morphed in my imagination from memory aid to superhero, animated to resuscitate slack-jawed eleven-year-olds rendered comatose by umpteen textbook iterations of “Find the adverb and what it modifies in the following sentences.” A Captain Gramerica for the Sponge Bob set, Sybanof had home-grown appeal. Kids liked the silliness of his name (also his name’s utility); they also liked his dweeby mission to rid the world of grammar ignorance.  And most appreciated that he lived to make their lives easier, to spice what previously had been rather bland fare—so bland, in fact, that some had refused to swallow it, which explained their enrollment in OE.

But this cohort of OE students, five boys and one girl, differed from their predecessors. They were more rambunctious and differently able, and I met their singular needs by retooling lesson plans, slowing my delivery, and upping my assessments—to varied effect. What they also needed was a bad guy they could comically boo on occasion, someone who embodied their individual OE frustrations (and mine, for these kids were challenging to teach).  Thus was born Sergeant Owfladfs. Like Sybanof he began as a memory aid; unlike Sybanof, he was grassroots creation, the brainchild of an ADHD-afflicted, pint-sized pistol whom I’ll call Ben. On his own, Ben arranged the first letters of some hard-to remember prepositions, those you can’t “do to a cloud” (you can fly in a cloud, over a cloud, through a cloud, etc.). The result was o-w-f-l-a-d-f-s (of, with, for, like, about, during, from, and since), which Ben said was easy to remember because it sounded weird, like sybanof. Weird works, as any sixth-grade teacher knows, so I and Ben’s classmates enthusiastically adopted his creation, first as a mnemonic, then as an expletive and finally as Captain Sybanof’s antagonist, prompted by my dubbing him Sergeant Owfladfs.  

Because it was therapeutic, the Sybanof-Owfladfs pairing seemed to boost student achievement. Sentences like “During their grudge match, Sergeant O. walloped Captain S.” (from a subject-verb-complement exercise) helped ameliorate student grudge matches with the course material. In addition, Ben and his peers enjoyed seeing how the match evolved within the context of a lesson; consequently, they paid attention. Other make-believe oddballs inhabited last summer’s teaching (Puffy the Hamster, Harry Potter and his cohorts), but they were surrogates for when the imagination necessary to conjure the duo ebbed. Owfladfs and Sybanof, however, were the perennial favorites. One boy, not Ben, was so smitten he brought a black-clad World Wrestling Federation action figure to class and announced that this was Sergeant Owfladfs. The doll stood in the chalk tray until summer school’s end.

As pedagogy, Sybanof and Owfladfs worked for another reason: they stole the show by co-opting the drama that was OE ‘07. Teaching and learning are inherently dramatic, given learning-style variety and our obligation to address it. Stage directions abound—Mel Levine’s program is one—mandating we accommodate the Bens of our world. To the degree that I was able, I did this. However, it occurred to me that each class as a whole deserves a novel approach, a narrative crafted for a particular body of learners who have landed in your classroom at a particular stage in their development and schooling. This crafting occurs not at a class’s beginning, for the elements are hidden, but later on, perhaps weeks into a term. Even then, the elements tend to be sketchy; you get a sense that the class needs something, but what exactly? The answer, of course, lies with your students. They’ll tell you what they require, not in explicit terms, but in how they behave, and in what they say. Ben provided the answer with an original term, which grew into an original character who shared center stage in a virtual drama that became a metaphor for the class.

A certain vibe energized last summer’s teaching, the result of a harmonious convergence of real and imagined personalities. This was an accidental blessing, one that I can’t replicate. Granted, I can resurrect the superheroes, have them don tights and square off (and I have), but absent Ben and his classmates, the slapstick falls flat. This said, however, it occurred to me that what I achieved, albeit unintentionally, was a student-subject synergy, something I might harness in my August-May gig, eighth-grade English. Again, my aim was a novel approach, one suitable for each section of eighteen students, so I literally took a novel approach, using popular characters from novels we read (and short stories and plays) to tailor grammar, usage and vocabulary lessons. Here’s an example from a comma-usage exercise incorporating people from To Kill a Mockingbird: “Dill hopped a train joined a circus and proposed to Scout who eagerly listened to his tall tales.” (Student directions: “Place commas where needed and specify the applicable comma rules.”) And another from an appositive-phrase lesson with Great Expectations characters and select vocabulary words (“callow,” in this case): “A callow boy, Pip was flummoxed by Estella’s beauty.”

Middle grades English instructors regularly combine the discipline’s various aspects—grammar, vocabulary, writing, literary analysis--into daily lessons, and such holistic pedagogy benefits learners.  Language arts artistry (and fun) lies in uniquely mixing these elements, adding ingredients from your own repertoire (“sybanof” and “flummoxed,” for example) while capturing the inherent nuttiness pervading a middle school classroom. Time and class size are limiting factors. You need time to muster the energy and imagination necessary to craft comprehensive lessons incorporating classroom novelties--or novels. And, as a general rule, the ease associated with infusing a class’s personality into a particular lesson, or series of lessons, is inversely proportional to enrollment. Small enrollment also facilitates tapping the richness of a Ben-like personality and sharing his wealth. In a sense, you leverage the class clown.

Recently I shared my OE teaching with a colleague, a thirty-year English veteran and acknowledged grammar guru. Sharing with her the Owfladfs phenomenon, I was fishing for a pro’s affirmation. “You know,” she said, her tone noncommittal, “there’s another preposition mnemonic, one that reminds kids of the nine most common prepositions. It’s waffotibo.”  I mimicked her pronunciation, “waf-oh-tee-bo,” accenting the third syllable. I repeated it to myself, silently paring letters with words: with, at, for, from . . . Characters began to coalesce: Colonel Waffotibo? Private Waffotibo? Maybe General Waffotibo? I sat at my desk, imagining the possibilities.

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