Question:
i am somewhat upset today. i went to my daughter's open house two days
ago and finally realized (duh on me for not watching more closely) that
no one has ever taught her a shred of grammar or the mechanics of
writing. i asked her teacher about it and she shrugged and said 'they
just don't do that anymore.'
ok, but in the meantime i've got a seventh grader whose essays have some
good thoughts and read as if written by a functional illiterate. the
teacher doesn't seem terribly upset about this. she's doing as well or
better than the other kids in her class. that is definitely not
reassuring.
her teacher said that of 200 kids in the 8th grade last year at the
school, only a handful passed the new california literacy standards
test. she said that 'well, we had worked for weeks to get them up to
speed on writing an expository composition and they went and changed
what they wanted. they wanted a persuasive essay, so with them changing
the rules on us what could they expect.' that ..really.. bothers me. it
means the kids are not educated enough to handle whatever they should
have mastered at that level without special coaching.
then she went on to say that the school had the third highest s.a.t.
scores in the district and that the kids would have taken the s.a.t. for
practice at the school at least twice before taking it for real. maybe
i'm a little naieve here, folks, but when i took the s.a.t. i went into
it cold without being coached on how to take the test and came out with
scores in the 700s verbal and 600s math, as did my friends. granted,
that was 20 years ago and styles of instruction change, but the thought
that the kids have to be coached to take a test so that they can get in
the low 500s is pretty astounding. the fact that the school seems to
think this is just fine and dandy, and does not expect beyond
it upsets me more.
i wish now that i could have home-schooled my child. she is in the top 1
tenth of 1 percent on 'the standardized intelligence' tests and so is in
the special seminar classes for the top g.a.t.e. students.
thank god, or who knows to what standard they'd be teaching.
but i was a single parent and doing 80 hour weeks until just a couple of
years ago. i trusted the school system to do their job. primarily they
have, but i've had to fight to get her into programs that didn't expect
her to 'dumb down' to the norm. this is the best they seem to have here,
and i'm not all that impressed.
she has a good desk and access to the internet, which i've taught her to
use. i made sure she was computer literate before she started
kindergarten. she is expected to complete her work on time and when i
have the opportunity i look it over now to see what/how she is doing.
her grades are good, and her citizenship grades are pleasing. she rarely
has more than a half-hour of homework a night, so i work on broadening
her horizons without her knowing it's instruction. she just thinks i'm a
trivia nut and humors me - though she does remember what i'm trying to
get across to her so i'm happy to be thought of as such.
so now i work 10 hours and day and come home to have to pick up the
slack and add to the instruction she is getting with enough to bring her
up to the level she ..should.. be getting at school. ok, if that's what
is necessary, that's what i shall do.
can anyone recommend, for starters, a good set of grammar/english
composition books and/or computer software. i bought the princeton
review middle school package with prealgebra and she took to it like a
duck to water. do you know if there's one for grammar and composition.
again, thanks for reading my e.e.cummings impersonation and letting me
vent. i'd appreciate any pointers toward good materials you can suggest.
Answer:
I am an English teacher and my stance on grammar is sometimes not what some
of the others may think. First, teaching grammar by itself, divorced from
the act of writing, is a useless exercise. Further, there is no connection
between knowledge of grammar and its usage and good writing skills. The
students who come to me have ten years of English instruction behind them
and I can see that this grammar badgering hasn't helped them one bit.
Here, briefly, is what I teach, when it comes to grammar. First, I tell
students that the more they read the better writers they will become. Read
constantly and write-- that's the best way to improve. Then I tell students
that what is important about grammar is to know that a sentence is a
structured thing and that each word has it's own slot. The ability to
recognize this and the skill to shift words or phrases from slot to slot is
very helpful. It helps the writer write effectively and the reader read
responsibly. This is the only time that I ever mention verbs, nouns,
adjectives, etc. I do stress that the verb is THE WORD.
After this-- a good many days of instruction-- I teach these skills--
1. Recognizing fragaments, writing them, and fixin' 'em
2. Recognizing run ons, writing them, and fixin' em
3. Knowing the importance of having clear antecedents-- number and gender
4. Subject-verb agreement
Three of these four have to do with meaning-- if you screw them up the
connection between getting meaning from the writer to the reader will be a
bit rough. The final one-- sv agreement-- will in most cases not mess up
the sense of a sentence, unless it disturbs the tense. For the most part
number four is important in formal writing-- if you have problems with sv
agreement (and a lot of students do) then the reader will think... well,
quite honestly... the reader will think you are stupid and probably go to a
public school. You might even be black or hispanic-- thus it can hurt, in a
social kind of way.
So that's my stance and more.
But to answer your question: grammar proficiency has nothing to do with
effective writing. To me, teaching grammar by itself without the context of
writing is useless. It's easy teaching, for sure-- but in my opinion it
does nothing. Parents and the lay people think that the reason students
can't write is because the schools are not teaching grammar. But the real
reason is because, ironically, there is too much teaching of grammar.
My system is, read, write, write, write-- work on the my four key problems--
write, write, write.
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