Staying Curious about Language

This curious little face recently turned 28.

 Quick—tell me right now: Is the book you are reading narrated in present tense or in past tense?

Stay with me for a minute—I haven’t totally geeked out. 

This question occurred to me because last week’s grade 4/5 inductive grammar lesson was on verb tense. I immediately assumed most stories are told in past tense, but I opened the book I was reading (When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller) to check, and I read, “‘You should stop the car,’ Sam says to Mom. Except Sam actually says this to her phone, because she doesn’t look up” (p. 2). 

I was in shock. Not only because it’s in present tense, but because I’d actually read that very paragraph to the 6th and 7th graders the day before as an illustration of how vivid verbs can paint a powerful image. The next sentence continues, “She’s sitting in the passenger seat with her feet slammed against the glove compartment, knees smashed into her chest, her whole body curled around her glowing screen.” Then I’d asked students to scan their independent reading books for a vivid verb to share. And I’d never even noticed the verb tense.

I decided to involve the 6th and 7th graders in some quick research, since that was my first period class. At the end of our initial 10 minutes of independent reading, I asked them to check the verb tense of their story: past or present. Sure enough, most of them were past. In fact, all but one. Some students thought theirs were in present tense, but on closer inspection, it turned out that while the dialogue was in present tense (“I love chocolate”), the tags (she said, he replied) were past. But one student still ventured that her book was written in present tense. I looked over her shoulder to verify: 

We pretend
the monsoon 
has come early.

In the distance
bombs 
explode like thunder,
slashes 
lighten the sky,
gunfire 
falls like rain.

It was, indeed, in present tense. It’s a novel in verse, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, a fictionalized memoir of the year her family immigrated from Vietnam to the US. It makes a certain kind of sense to have poetry in present tense. I wonder if more novels in verse are in present tense than prose novels. I'll have to check out that hypothesis via my classroom library when I'm back in my room on Monday. I wonder why those authors chose the immediacy of present tense for their novels when most authors choose past tense?

I’m so glad that trying the Patterns of Power approach to teaching grammar at the intersection of reading and writing is keeping alive my curiosity about language—the choices writers make and the effects those choices have. 

How do you sustain curiosity? What effect does it have to be the “chief wonderer” in your classroom?