A professor had students craft poetry-generating programs. The children would feed the program verbs, adjectives, and nouns, and the computer would combine them into lines of poetry: MAD WOLF HATES BECAUSE INSANE WOLF SKIPS or UGLY MAN LOVES BECAUSE UGLY DOG HATES. The process of trying to get the program to work lent students startling insights into language. Jenny, a thirteen-year-old girl who had previously earned only mediocre grades, came in one day and announced, Now I know why we have nouns and verbs. She'd been taught grammar and the parts of speech for years without understanding them. But as Jenny struggled to get the program to work, she realized she had to classify words into categories—all the verbs in one bucket, all the nouns in another—or else the sentences the computer spat out wouldn't make sense. Grammar suddenly became deeply meaningful. This produced another effect: Jenny began getting A's in her language classes.