Herb,
    I wonder if they let slip by a standard like "explain phrases and
clauses and their roles within sentences" precisely because many
people don't know how much knowledge is involved in that. It sounds to
me like a pretty good semester's work at the college level. (It's also
close to what I was taught in seventh and eighth grades using the
Reed/Kellog diagramming, which attempted to be comprehensive and to
work with real sentences.)
    I agree with what you say. On the other hand, when I introduce would
be teachers to a deeper knowledge about language, they uniformly want
to pass that on and feel constrained by the anti-knowledge about
language stance of their teacher educators. Maybe this will give some
support to those teachers we do win over. Maybe someone in ATEG can
work it into a curriculum.
    (I guess that's a half full glass.)

Craig>


Craig,
>
> I've read through some of it, and as a linguist I like much of what
> they've done.  To teach effectively to these standards, teachers will have
> to know, understand, and teach a fair bit of English grammar.  Therein
> lies the problem.  We don't have a core of language arts teachers with the
> training or disposition to do this.  Their training is still fundamentally
> anti-grammar, and they get very little language content in the teacher ed.
> curriculum and even less language teaching methodology, for L1 or L2
> speakers.  Standards can't get set out in such a context and hope to be
> adopted.  School boards, teachers colleges, language arts faculties, etc.
> will continue to do as they've been doing, paying lip-service to the
> standards and in most cases not even being aware that they're flouting
> them.
>
> I hate to sound so negative, but without the governors also investing in
> training, curriculum revision, and monitoring, I don't see how much will
> change.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 5:16 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: common core standards
>
> The National governor's Association's Common core Standards have been
> released and can be accessed at www.corestandards.org.
>     Though they still don't go as far as they ought to in that direction,
> they seem a radical shift in favor of knowledge about language (not
> just language behavior) throughout the grade levels. This, for
> example, is from grade 7: "Explain the function of phrases and clauses
> in general and their function in specific sentences." This seems to me
> the sort of thing that can't happen solely "within the context of
> writing" or through mini-lessons.
>      Check it out. If I am reading this correctly, they are calling for
> far more conscious attention to language from K-12.
>
> Craig
>
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