I must confess I haven't always loved discussing grammar issues and marking errors with a red pencil. In third grade, I would stick my head in my desk every time my teacher told my class to take out our English workbooks. They were purple books by Houghton Mifflin (see how much I hated them?) and I just couldn't stand doing the boring exercises. As I've gotten older and started enjoying grammar, I realize that I don't remember learning about many of the grammar issues I've encountered in life. I remember learning punctuation thoroughly (we were taught to use the serial comma in second grade), having the differences between their/they're/there and you're/your hammered into my head, and learning all about contractions. However, I just figured out the difference between who's/whose a few years ago and I remember being astounded to learn that "10 Items or Less" is gramatically incorrect!
After sixth grade, I never heard another word about grammar and punctuation from teachers (except when papers were being corrected). In seventh grade, we read excerpts from The Odyssey. In eighth grade, we read The Outsiders and The Diary of Anne Frank. Ninth grade was spent reading Shakespeare and Greek tragedies. Tenth grade was the worst - our English book was all poems and works from the 1700s and 1800s. English was completely boring to me at the time! Eleventh grade was only slightly better than tenth; I must say I hate The Canterbury Tales with a passion after hearing it read aloud in class. Twelfth grade English was great -- I had a wonderful (very talented) student teacher and I discovered Ethan Frome that year.
Are we doing students (and the world) a disservice by cutting off these lessons in fifth or sixth grade? To me, the way grammar and punctuation were taught (at least in my district) says, "this stuff's not all that important, so we won't be talking about it anymore once you hit junior high." That attitude seems pervasive these days -- many people I talk to don't understand that these errors reduce their credibility and make their communications confusing or ambiguous.
What do you think? Did you learn about grammar/usage in junior high and high school, or did all of your grammar lessons end with your transition from elementary/middle school to an upper level?
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3 comments:
At the literary conference I just attended, we got into a discussion about sentence diagramming. All of the older folks were taught this artform while most of the younger attendees were not. I fell on the bubble. I learned how to diagram because my 8th-grade English teacher was in her last year of teaching. Thus, she was old-school and kept the tradition alive. All of us who were fortunate enough to have learned how to diagram agreed that we loved it. How nerdy of us!!
We never did sentence diagramming in school, so I think you were lucky to have one of the old-school teachers. I have learned a lot of grammar rules just by reading books on grammar and usage, but sometimes I wish we had done more in school (I'm sure most of us use grammar rules more than our knowledge of symbolism in The Odyssey, unless you're a Greek literature major or Jeopardy! contestant or something!).
Leigh, great blog! I can relate to a lot of your experiences and thoughts in this post.
I loved grammar too, and was disappointed when it disappeared by high school. I was an English major in college and only got to take one true grammar course. How frustrating!
I'll definitely be dropping in regularly. In fact, I'm saving this to my favorites right... now. :)
If you have a minute check out my blog, I'm Not an English Teacher But I Play One Online - http://notanenglishteacher.blogspot.com
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