In a message dated 1/4/2006 10:43:31 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Is our insistence on case endings still a throwback to overvaluing latin?
These prescriptions go on making people distrust their own language. Rather
than improving writing, I think they have the effect of shutting it down.
People don't need a new language, just practice in the genres of writing.
We don't have to be prescriptivists to have strong values and high
standards.
Craig,
I totally agree with you and many others about prescriptivism. To bring
this discussion down to the mundane, however, I'd like to cite my lesson plans
for December. I spent the three weeks before break going over and insisting
on my middle school students memorizing pronoun cases. They made pronoun books
and illustrated them on the computer. They wrote poems, etc. about cases and
when to use them. They chanted "it is I" and looked at linking verbs. (The
French teacher, by the way, went out of her way to stop in my classroom to
shake my hand in gratitude!)
Why did we struggle through all this? Do I not understand that the pronoun
cases are eroding? (There's an old joke about people in line at the pearly
gates; when St. Peter asks "who's there?" the people who answer "It is I" have
their own line labeled "English teachers.") Of course I do.
But questions on these sorts of things are one more way of sorting and
assigning numbers on standardized tests. If I want my kids to get those extra
points that make such a difference nowadays, I have to teach it. And if they
don't get those points, guess who they come to?
Doesn't make it right. Doesn't make it fair. But we often have
prescriptivism forced on us by politicians and test writers.
Grumpily,
Gretchen (wonderful discussion, by the way)
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