You walk into your English class whenever you just so happen to have English, and your teacher hands out a paper that reads DGP.

“It works pretty well. I’m not, you know, I’m still not way too experienced with it because it’s been about a month,” said Ebb Dilley, a sophomore and a student of Amy Gregory’s English class.

DGP stands for Daily Grammar practice, and consists of a five day process of editing, diagraming, and labeling sentences. This is the first year it has been introduced to the school, and the results have been going well. Not everyone seems to love it, but most people seem to admit they’re learning something.

“I call it the daily vitamin of grammar,” said Linsey Kitchens, an English teacher at Sedro-Woolley High School. “Every year on the SAT, students report back to me that the grammar piece, they said that the language part was the hardest, and we have yet to find a good way to crack that code. I can almost guarantee that going through this curriculum will directly translate into higher results on that part of the SAT without a doubt.”

The English department is very excited to introduce this program to our school.

“I think it’s a good start,” said Charles Jensen, another English teacher at Sedro-Woolley High School. “I think there needs to be more discussion amongst my colleagues of how we want to use it and the effectiveness of it, and maybe even, well, I guess, is it the very best method to use? Because we want to come up with the very best method. So this is the first step.”

The school is accepting it at a rapid pace, and the students are getting excited and happy about it.

“DGPs are little things that we do in English, make me take on hard words and subjects, pretty helpful. Already I’m starting to understand really quickly,” said Duncan Weems, a sophomore at Sedro-Woolley High School, and a student of Anna Ferdinand’s English class.

The teachers are starting to see the students adapt to the new program

“What I’m seeing strongly from my students that I’m very happy about is that we’re starting to get the idea of phrases,” Jensen said.

Students are taking a lot away from this program.

“The most useful part for me is being able to dissect a sentence and figure out what the subject and things like that are,” said Abigail Evans, a junior at Sedro-Woolley High School, and a student of Jenny Johnson’s English class.

Some are proud of themselves, a common theme with the freshman.

“I started off genuinely not caring about it, and then it actually went okay. The last time, I got the last couple of them,” said Jude Lee, a freshman at Sedro-Woolley High School, and a student of Mr. Jensen’s English class. “So the third paper that we’ve gotten for it, I’ve actually gotten the majority of them correct. Honestly, it’s very helpful, because I’m actually, you know, understanding what certain things are.”

Although it has a lasting effect, it still can be a little confusing when you’re just starting out.

“There are some times where it’s hard to figure out, Okay, what does this connect to and what does this other thing?” said Avery Guellivor, A sophomore and a student of Linsey Kitchen’s English class.

There are also contradicting opinions among the students, with a lot of their opinions with how the thing is set up.

“Repetition, getting used to it more often, identifying all the stuff. It’s just a repetition of it, basically,” said DIlley. “That’s useful, yeah. I mean, I work on a more I’ve done this before. I can figure it out wavelength. And so with that, it’s been very useful”

But then, there’s the other side, contradicting Dilley’s expertise with her own brain with wavelengths of his own. 

“Sometimes it doesn’t stop repeating, and that doesn’t work with my brain,” Avery Guellivor said.

But as Kitchens said, the way teachers need to support their children is different each way.

“There’s a lot of background information that is assumed that the students have, which a lot of them don’t have,” Kitchens said. “We should have started with a smaller baby step, but we had to start somewhere, and we didn’t know the curriculum, so we just dove in at ninth grade, thinking everyone could tackle the ninth grade, but it assumes that students have done eighth, seventh, and sixth. Now that we’re in this deep, I think we should have started with the seventh grade curriculum.”

And the kids have somewhat realised this too, even though they thought the jump was just caused by changing English classes at the start of the year. 

“From what I experienced, it is a bit of a jump from when I was in Honors English ten going to just normal English 11,” said Dilley. “The level DGP expected me to have memorized was too much, it was a jolt.”

There are a lot of pros to this program, such as learning important things for the future, but there are cons, too:  the big jump, and not being able to give support to all the students that need it in the ways we need it.

“If there’s not a good teacher, the DGP just becomes confusing,”Weems said. “A teacher is able to fail in trying to teach kids, and if that happens, kids don’t know what to do, so they don’t know what’s going on.”

Having a teacher who explains the DGP wrong leaves their pupils more confused as they struggle in the dark trying to figure it out together, and using their cheat sheet, which has a lot of problems on its own.

“I honestly would like to change how the cheat sheet is formatted because it is hard for me to locate things when there is a bunch of writing all in black writing,” Evans said. 

This cheat sheet has been said to be poorly formatted and uninteresting to read, and as Evans said, hard to locate anything. In a lot of situations, the suggestion she made would help people with certain disabilities, like dyslexia and ADHD. Having a cheat sheet that is hard to read, combined with a bad teacher would be really bad for students.

 “You could get the teacher to work along with you, instead of waiting. So instead of leaving everybody to go do it, and then we’ll work on it at the end, be more of a thing where we all work on it together,” Lee said. “But it takes up a lot of class time, which is a good and a bad. It’s like getting your teacher to talk about something not related to school, but then also at the same time, you get in trouble for taking up time. You could definitely do more with the time compared to, you know, doing it and then have your teacher slowly do what you just did.”

So it’s slow, and time consuming. 

“The program gets a little confusing at times, especially on day five, but I know I will be glad in the long run when I finally know these things,” Evans said. 

The teachers are glad it’s complicated for their students. They know their students are learning and they’re happy to see it. 

“Students haven’t had this little level of rigor in English classes for a long time, and it’s tricky,” said Kitchens