I have encountered secondary school English teachers at conferences who considered grammar as a worthless hold-over from the days of grammar school. I was arguing the point and describing my personal experience as a freshman college student in Freshman English in a writing-based curriculum that stressed recognition and avoidance of grammatical errors (1st quarter), usage errors (2nd quarter), and rhetoric/description/argument (3rd quarter). A careful listener in the group, who had been taking notes while I was then identified himself as an assistant professor who had been desperately seeking such a curriculum for his university freshman program. Upon learning what school I had attended, his face sank and he responded, "That's where I teach now." Apparently the standards at the school had dropped in the decade since I attended in the'50's. If teachers do not learn grammar in school, how can we expect them to teach grammar. Florida required a course in advanced grammar for its English teachers. I just reviewed the synopsis of a History of English course that quickly ran through the history of English and its grammar so that the students could spend the second half of the course on the equality of their dialects and on the English spoken in the rest of the world. A note to the course assured students that the course met the FL requirement for advanced grammar. Imagine the fun that these students will have if their school is so backward and normative as to require them to teach grammar. Scott Catledge (I never met a sentence that I could not diagram). Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 19:03:44 EDT From: Bev Sims <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Silly, rewarding grammar period -------------------------------1189206224 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Gretchen, How delightful to read your e-mail. You, obviously, have made learning parts of speech fun. That's terrific! I think you have a book in you here--many need to learn from what you are doing. I have found that my students almost crave learning about parts of speech and other "grammar-type" things. I'm wondering if it is partly due to teachers before steering away from such teaching, and the kids know they are missing out of something. I don't know, but I DO know I like your enthusiasm and theirs. Keep up the good work. Teddy 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/