I read the posting that posed the question "How do I get my College English
Ed students to want to learn grammar?" (Or something to that effect - I am
sure it was originally stated much more eloquently.)

I am a first year Middle and Secondary English teacher in Midwest Missouri
- and as such I only WISH that I had had someone, somewhere, teach me
grammar before I was facing classes of students to whom I had to teach the
same.

My h.s. grammar lessons were either very poor or simply long forgotten, and
I am learning everything over as I teach it to my students. I have already
found myself in a pickle where the student asks a legitimate question that
I don't know how to answer. How's that for undermining one's own authority
on a subject?

So, while your justifications are academically sound, it might do good to
tell your students that they're going to have to teach the stuff - they may
think that they know it, but teaching it is something else. Secondary
students today are absolutely terrible in their grammar. Many of them don't
even have an "ear" for what sounds like. My h.s. kids are now learning the
4 principle parts of the verb (believe it or not, it seems that they never
have, but then again, I'm teaching at-risk students) - and some of the
irregular past participles sound completely ridiculous to them!

Learning grammar and how to teach it would have been such a help to me.
Instead, I am forced, with careful tread, to teach my students that which
they wrongly assume I know inside and out.

My college didn't offer such a program or I would have taken it. In fact, I
did voice such concern even at that time, but it came to nothing.

Good luck!

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Kimberly R. Thompson
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"Never let a problem to be solved become more inmportant than a person to
be loved."              -Barabara Johnson
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