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[personal profile] akashiver
This Death to High School English has received a lot of flack from my Facebook f-list. I agree with its basic, agonized complaint: I see an appalling number of college students who can't write a basic sentence, and I've now been around long enough to see that there's a correlation between Bad Writing and Joblessness After Graduation.

If I had to choose between having high school students a) know how to write and having high school students b) know the plot of a Shakespeare play, I'd go with option A any day.

But teaching grammar does not guarantee that students will learn it.

As many commentators on this post point out, teaching the basic elements of grammar should not be a high school teacher's job. Nouns & verbs can and are taught in Grade 1 in many schools. If a student had access to a "decent" (whatever that is in the USA) education and attended classes in which these rules were taught, then teaching those rules again, using the same methods of instruction, is unlikely to produce different results.

The most difficult part of teaching grammar, I find, is getting students to transfer the skill to their writing. You can teach students a rule and then test them on it, and have them get 100% of their answers correct. But when you look at their writing the next day, there's no transfer of knowledge. The same student that could put a comma in the right place on a worksheet will show absolutely no improvement in comma-placement in their independent writing.



This is the real challenge of teaching grammar, and it's one I have no clue how to solve.

Penalizing students for grammatical errors in writing can go some way towards producing results, but all too frequently it just encourages students to only write in simple sentences. If they never need to use a conjunction, I cannot possibly mark them down for using it incorrectly. And realistically, much of the teaching philosophy of recent years has advocated ignoring grammar and focusing on students' development of ideas. This sounds silly if you're focused on teaching grammar, but at higher levels of education students are supposed to have mastered grammar and instead be working on things like how to construct a persuasive argument. If you aren't teaching students how to construct an argument in Grade 8, and that's the curriculum, then as a teacher you aren't doing your job.

The other, obvious factor in students' ability to use grammar is reading. Students who learn grammar but don't read might as well be learning a foreign language that they have never heard spoken and  for which they have no use. Students who read usually have good grammar, even if they've never seen a worksheet in their lives.

Would teaching things other than Shakespeare improve students' grammar? Yes. But most students aren't reading Shakespeare in their grammar-learning years: they're reading books like James and the Giant Peach and Underground to Canada. "Too much Shakespeare" is not the problem here. 

The fact is, reading in school is not enough. Students need to be reading a lot of books -- and hearing good grammar used in the speech that surrounds them -- to pick up an intuitive sense of the language.

Maybe even that isn't enough. Some people just don't have a facility with language -- any language. And I'm not sure how I can turn those students into "good writers."

Date: 2011-05-19 03:47 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vschanoes.livejournal.com
Nouns & verbs can and are taught in Grade 1 in many schools.

If only this were the case, at least in NYC. Most of my graduate students are primary or secondary school teachers, and they say, to a woman, that they are not allowed to teach grammar.

Date: 2011-05-19 04:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mindstalk.livejournal.com
man what

I don't know when my grammar started, but I remember diagramming sentences somewhere between 1st and 6th grades. Chicago gifted program.

Date: 2011-05-19 05:09 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] swan-tower.livejournal.com
So when does it get taught? Or do kids just not learn what a verb is ever anymore?

Date: 2011-05-19 03:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] akashiver.livejournal.com
Good question. The answer is, "when" probably varies between states and between curriculums.

For the record, I looked up the NYC school system's performance standards for Grades 1-3, and they *do* have a separate section covering grammar:

Conventions, Grammar, and Usage of the English Language

a Demonstrate a basic understanding of the rules of the English language in written and oral work.

b Analyze and subsequently revise work to improve its clarity and effectiveness.

(http://schools.nyc.gov/offices/teachlearn/documents/standards/ELA/es/23overview.html)

Translation: they *are* instructing teachers to cover grammar, but they are also implicitly acknowledging that in some classes, it won't be covered. A teacher struggling to teach inner-city Grade 3 students the alphabet is not going to get to nouns and verbs.

The school system is leaving themselves loads of wriggle-room when it comes to students who Just Don't Get It. "Must be able to identify nouns and verbs in a sentence," would be specific and measurable; "must demonstrate a basic understanding" is usefully vague. It allows them to wave-on-by students who are struggling with basic literacy because, after all, they got 51% of their answers right on a grammar worksheet.

And now we're back to the realities of an education system where we do not hold students back if they fail to master the curriculum of a given year.

Date: 2011-05-19 03:31 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] akashiver.livejournal.com
The NYC performance standards include a separate catagory for grammar, so they do claim to cover it in their curriculum. (http://schools.nyc.gov/offices/teachlearn/documents/standards/ELA/es/23overview.html)
When your students say they aren't allowed to teach grammar, was that an instruction received from the principal? Or was it simply a response to the reality of the classroom (i.e. most students couldn't read or write, so grammar was way beyond them).

Date: 2011-05-19 03:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vschanoes.livejournal.com
According to them, instruction received from the principal.

Date: 2011-05-19 03:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] akashiver.livejournal.com
Oh, those poor, hard-working principals who are unable to fire those lazy, union-protected "bad" teachers. What would our children do without them?

I'd be curious to hear the principal's rationale. I suspect it's: "we need more class time to drill our students in standardized tests."

Date: 2011-05-19 08:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] moonandserpent.livejournal.com
Jeebus. Sometimes my backwoods un-fancified, poor-ass education comes in handy. I can't think of a year in school (admittedly, I don't know much about high school as I skipped most of it) we *didn't* cover grammar. And if you didn't pass, you didn't go on to the next year - period. There was a 17 year old in most of my Freshman classes.

Though that said, I'm 33 years old and an occasional professional writer (tech writer, that is) and I still struggle with grammar. I'm told that's because my brain thinks punctuation is math - and thus fails to process it - but I'm not sure how much I believe that.


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