When did a pronoun become a noun?

Super Bowl weekend wasn’t about football for me. It was about getting away from the laptop, the plots and characters in my head, and the chilly high desert weather.

Southern California beckoned.

I answered.

I won’t go into the details of the trip except where it concerns the writer side of me … and that side was totally confused.

I was staying with friends, a lovely couple raising three grandchildren. Grandma volunteers at the elementary school once a week. On an uncharacteristically rainy day, she sat with the teacher to discuss an in-class assignment.

Students had been given a paragraph and asked to find ten nouns. Grandma read the paragraph but could find a mere seven … and she’s well-versed in the English language. So she asked the teacher what she was missing.

To her surprise, the teacher pointed to two words – we and I.

“Those are pronouns!” she exclaimed.

The reply? “Yes, but we teach them as nouns.”

A heated discussion produced no results. As far as the teacher was concerned, we and I are nouns!


With no little frustration, Grandma relinquished that part of the argument and asked about the tenth noun.

“Bike,” the teacher pointed out in a sentence that read, “We bike to the park.”

“But in this sentence bike is a verb.”

“Yes,” came the explanation, “but the children recognize bike as a noun.”

This is an accurate account of the event that makes me wonder … a lot.