Sometimes there are concepts that seem entirely foreign to you class. We talk a lot in our class about the eight parts of speech. We’ve underlined verbs and nouns in sentences. My students can tell you all their verbs in the form “to be”, they have even written poems of nothing but prepositional phrases. We’ve removed all the pronouns from one of their papers and given them a better knowledge of the language they are using every day. Still when it came to teaching interjection I knew that things would be more difficult.
     Luckily, for me, this lesson came at exactly the right time. It was the second week of February, the Superbowl had been last Sunday and my students were still talking about the commercials that they had seen that night. I admit I enjoy the commercials even as much as the game, but I had no idea that they could be as powerful a teaching tool as they were on this day.
     When we take quizzes in class, I often give the students extra credit if they can answer a question about whatever I feel like asking them. This afternoon I decided to get the last part of speech done so I asked them to name an interjection for me as their extra credit. I looked around the room to see what they were writing, but all I got were blank stares.
     When it came down to the time to correct the quiz and we got down to the bottom I asked for volunteers to share answers. I got a couple of ands and some buts, but nothing that I was looking for. Finally I had to give them the definition. “It’s a word or a phrase that gets put into conversation, like cool.” Still the blank looks. I gave some more examples dating myself with each one, but one by one I saw the lights going on in their heads. Then, in unison it seemed the all said, “What are you doing?”
     There was a hearty round of laughs and some people followed up the ones who had already spoken with random “whassups” from different corners of the room. I couldn’t help but shake my head and laugh knowing that my students had a firm grip on this part of speech, even if they had come about it in a hilarious way.