A student from the Middle East asked Ms. Azar, “Why can’t I put a in front of water?’ As in ‘I drank a water.’”
Ms. Azar did not know the answer.
“I had never thought about it. I thought it was an absolutely wonderful question and from there on out, I wanted to know the answers to the questions that second language learners had about English. I went home and I looked in reference books. I found the answer. And the next day I went to class and I gave him an answer about count and non-count nouns, which I had never heard of. That’s how I started my grammar-teaching career.”