I'm forwarding this from Johanna Rubba - her school's firewall is on the "kill anything that moves" setting. -- Bill Spruiell -----Original Message----- From: Johanna Rubba [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 8:06 PM To: Spruiell, William C Cc: Johanna Rubba Subject: Re: Paul's Solution to Re: Grammar Terms Definitions Bill, I'm picking on you to ask to forward this, so as to spread the burden I'm imposing on my fellow posters. I hope you don't mind. It states my views, not yours. Phil Bralich is obviously of the same school as Ed Vavra and, in many of his past posts, Eduard Hanganu -- their main agenda seems to be to deliberately misinterpret and belittle the beliefs, aims, and aspirations of the people in ATEG (not all of its members, I might say) who are engaged in a very long-term, and very, very young program to revise the way grammar is taught as part of language arts education in the USA. Ed keeps hammering away at the terminology issue, ignoring the information that Herb has been asked to lead a group in settling on a set of terms for the proposed revision. He also ignores the efforts that many of use are directing towards improving method -- Amy Benajmin and Rebecca Wheeler in the lower and middle grades, Bill Spriuell and Paul Doniger in high school (hope I got that right) and numbers of us at the college level, training teachers. Eduard started out making all kinds of claims based on his credentials in linguistics, only to back off from them as strong evidence was produced that countered them (at least he shows some willingness to admit that he might be wrong about some things). Phil simply says we're wrong, and does not respond at all to explanations of our position, valid criticisms of his positions, and the FACTS I have set out about the dooming of whole populations of schoolchildren despite some very promising changes in method that we should be cultivating and exploring. (In general, I am disappointed that more people have not responded on this very crucial issue. See below.) Phil, in an extremely brief response to my messages, which make substantive comments about several of his claims, fails to distinguish between the ubiquity of a term and how many people really understand it or have very habituated beliefs about it. He goes on to make predictions about how people in general will respond to a change in terminology. I can just as well predict that "word class" will be a welcome change. People dislike grammar partly because of its obscure terminology. Why "perfect"? Its grammatical meaning has nothing to do with the way the word is used in everyday English. Yes, we will have a tough road with terminology, but it is because of the ignorance of the powers that be, not their knowledge. Who can respect someone who refuses to respond to a direct request for a response? Who can respect someone who just flames people with characterizations like "delusional", "not playing with a full deck", and equates the quest for a solid grammar curriculum with more-accurate terminology to a "need for entertainment", a fourth-grader complaining about homework, or the so-called political correctness movement (with his comment about a possible change in math terminology). His arguments are also internally inconsistent, since, on the one hand, he keeps saying all this grammar is no big deal, while, on the other, saying that having more than one term for something will hinder the enterprise. He claims at first that eight parts of speech are fine, then decides Quirk and Greenbaum's ten (or whatever) are fine. I know that the level of rhetoric on many supposedly science-oriented blogs and listservs is rude and adolescent. That kind of rhetoric has not gone over well on this list in the past. I challenge people on the facts -- thousands of children ARE failing in school. Our workforce IS ever more incompetent. Can't we get past ego? As to the "see below": I was cruising CA's Dept. of Ed. website this morning, looking at 2004-05 scores on both our new high school exit exam (which passes a student with 9th-grade competence) as well as scores on the standardized tests for grades 1-11. The scores for African Americans were abysmal. In all subjects, the great majority were at "basic" or below, with about a third at basic. The numbers of "proficient" students (one level above basic) were horrible -- percentages in the single digits, teens, and twenties in all subjects. The highest figure I saw was 34% proficient in 9th-grade geometry. In language arts, the majority of scores were still in the basic and lower levels, with percentages in the teens and twenties at the "proficient" level of language arts. Scores for whites are in the 60-85% range. Black kids are not failing school. SCHOOLS ARE FAILING THE KIDS. Doesn't anybody care? Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics Linguistics Minor Advisor English Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo E-mail: [log in to unmask] Tel.: 805.756.2184 Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596 Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374 URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/