Michael,
   It may seem like shameless self-promotion, but you should give her a 
copy of your fine book.(I don't mean to shortchange Edith.) You bring a 
knowledge about language to the task that she may very well be unaware 
of. (Not just unaware of what you know, but unaware that you know it.) 
It would be useful all around to see what might happen if you tried out 
some of that material at that level.
   I know how you feel; it gets tiring to tilt at the same old windmill.
   I made some of the same observations looking at standards for various 
states. For reading, it's often a matter of what they know. When it 
comes to grammar, it's all how they behave.
   Keep at it. If it helps, here's one person who feels it would be a 
crime not to acknowledge what you bring as a volunteer and make use of it.

Craig


Michael Kischner wrote:
> This will be old hat to many readers of this list, but I have to unload.
>
> I've volunteered to tutor at my local public middle school.
> Yesterday, I went to meet a seventh-grade teacher who said she might
> be able to use me in her classroom.   Before talking to her, I sat and
> observed a reading lesson she taught.  First the class looked at a
> list of "think aloud strategies" strategies for readers and checked
> off the ones they use.  Then the lesson turned to one of those
> strategies -- "visualizing." The teacher read to the class out of a
> Gary Soto book while they followed along in their own copies and then
> asked them to talk about things they visualized as they listened to
> the passage.  Next they read silently  for twenty-five minutes in
> whatever books they were currently reading and wrote down some of the
> things they visualized.  It was a well-run class in which most of the
> kids remained fairly well engaged.
>
> After class, there was time only for a five-minute conversation with
> the teacher.  I said that I would like to tutor especially in the
> subjects of writing and language.
>
> "Language?" the teacher asked.
>
> "Sentence structure, for instance," I replied.  "I don't know if you
> do anything specific with that."
>
> "Well," the teacher said, "we usually infiltrate those topics into the
> actual writing instruction.  Best practices show that drills and such
> don't work with seventh graders."
>
> I went home depressed.  So the choice is between "infiltrating" work
> on sentence structure – people my age associate the word with the
> Vietcong --  and "drills."  How much work we still have to do if many
> teachers think those are the only alternatives!
>
> Note that the teacher had just taught a lesson on "visualizing," a
> sub-skill of reading.  She didn't rely only on "infiltrating" it ad
> hoc into reading instruction.  She thought it worth spending a
> dedicated hour on, and she put it into the framework of other reading
> strategies.  "Framework" is the word Martha Kolln used in her ATEG
> 2006 keynote, in which she argued so forcefully that the mini-lesson
> proposed by many grammar-in-context proponents can be as "isolated" as
> the drills many of these proponents have in mind when they decry
> "teaching grammar in isolation."
>
> So we still confront the uphill battle of persuading teachers that
> systematic grammar instruction does not mean drills, does not mean
> isolation.  I don't know if I'll ever have a chance to make the case
> with the teacher I met yesterday.  She was supposed to email me about
> days she could use me, and I haven't heard from her yet!
>
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>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
>   

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