Some of us oldsters were taught deductive reasoning; however, I prefer the
inductive approach.  Give sufficient very specific examples "good" and "bad"
and let the students come up with the general rule.

I used a sentence such as "Everyone walked to their car after the game,"
and illustrate by having everyone trying to get into a single car,
mentioning the clowns at the circus and singing to them a line from an old 
song, "There were forty-five men in the telephone booth last night."

When the students come up with the rule, they internalize more quickly and
easily.  With a very sharp class, I have even made errors on the
board--wittingly or unwittingly.  Any student catching me in an error
received an
extra point on the daily average for the six-weeks/semester, depending upon
whether the class was secondary or university level.  An incorrect
assumption subtracted a point--unless there was a sense in which the student
could have been correct.  I always seized the opportunity to demonstrate
ambiguity.

To conclude, I never taught specific concepts; instead, I "learned" them to
the students by having them generalize the rules for situations from the
examples.  Their "critical experiences" were of the "aha! genre.

I concur in the unusual problem of having parents who spoke "correct"
English at the dinner table and in social situations.  Not until 10th grade,
when I first encountered the colon as end punctuation for an independent
clause, did my punctuation based upon speech fail me--prompting me to study
the rules for the first time since grammar school (5th grade).

Scott Catledge

Quite simply, we can teach very specific concepts to our students, but
unless they care to learn and use that knowledge, the methods we employ are
ineffective or unsuccessful.  And so I can use a sentence like (or any that
Ronald posted):
 
Everyone walked to their car after the game

and I can point out the problem(s) with this sentence, and my students can
understand what I have told them, but they will continue writing and
speaking with the same error.  It seems that only with an appropriate
"critical experience" will they begin to dispositionally understand the
relevance of the concept and avoid committing the same error.
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