Dear all,
Thank you for these helpful and good-humored responses. My students, future English teachers, share Gretchen's students' desire to know "the rules," even though they have now been indoctrinated, by me, in differences between descriptive and prescriptive grammar and sensitized to the issues of power involved in standard English and its grammar. Still, I share their angst over wishing to know the right answer for standardized exams and for all parallel acts of linguistic profiling. To wit, my English department recently received a letter from a local businessperson saying neither he nor his wife, a local schoolteacher and interviewer of teacher applicants, would hire our graduates because of their poor grammar; the irony, of course, was that his letter was full of grammatical errors. Given the persistence of the grammar police, I hope to point out to my students how and where the language is changing but, at the same time, tell them definitively what to give unto Caesar.
It was remarkably helpful to hear how current SAT questions are constructed. I am very grateful to all (feel free to substitute "you all," or, in my New Jersey dialect, "you guys") for your perspectives.
Natalie
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Tue 9/25/2007 3:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: more teaching questions on grammar (singular "they")
Gretchen,
I can't answer "It is me" either. "It is I" sounds almost Elizabethan. But what do you say if you contract the verb? I can't get "It's I" at all. With contractions, at least for me, only "me" works. And, of course, in speech we nearly always contract all the auxiliaries and copulas we can.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Gretchen Lee
Sent: Tue 9/25/2007 2:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: more teaching questions on grammar (singular "they")
In a message dated 9/25/2007 10:29:20 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
I don't care which system wins out, but I wish we'd hit a firm consensus
soon so I can stop worrying that I'll get my students in trouble by teaching
them the wrong
Bill,
In middle school, I teach this the same way you do, and I explain to my
students why the singular "their" is gaining acceptance. It drives them crazy.
They want to view language as a simple set of rules that they can learn and
be done. The idea that they have to take audience into consideration doesn't
seem "fair" to them - that they might someday not get a job or into a school
of their choice because they misjudge an audience really makes them angry.
My answer, "welcome to the real world," doesn't seem to help. I try to help
them sort it through, but they want me to give them set-in-stone answers.
~Gretchen, who still can't answer ""It is me" to the question "who is it?"
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