Dear All:

 

Every semester, I ask students in my Pedagogic Grammar course to pick a topic that comes up in K-12 “grammar” (loosely defined) – like “subject-verb agreement,” or “prepositions,” or “the semicolon” – and write a comparison/contrast essay based on examining the way six school texts and two reference grammars deal with the topic. They get to pick texts, and I ask them to choose topics and texts related to the age level they plan to teach. I’m trying to get them to practice the kind of thought processes involved in choosing a good textbook, and also trying to expose them to the fact that there’s variation.

 

As a result of reading these essays semester after semester, I’ve started (inevitably) to notice recurring examples of what I’ve taken to calling Stupid Textbook Tricks. Examples:

 

·         Defining a preposition as a word that connects a noun to another word in the sentence. Verbs and conjunctions do that too.

 

·         Telling students a fragment “doesn’t represent a complete thought.” Students who write fragments think they do, so the comment is absolutely useless to the students it’s directed at – and who among us is certain that our thoughts are ever complete?

 

·         Telling students that “nouns are necessary for a sentence to be grammatical.” Not only is that wrong (“Run!”), when did you ever have to tell a native English-speaker to use nouns in a sentence? They may not know what to call them, they may use the wrong ones, and they may well misspell them, but forget to use them without prompting?

 

·         Asking students to use exactly ____ (fill in number here) adjectives, or adverbs, etc. in a paragraph. Now that’s a naturalistic writing practice. “Why did you write that essay, Mr. Thoreau? “ “Well, I had this set of six hundred and twelve adjectives I needed to use….”

 

As you can tell, I’m partly writing this as an exercise in ameliorative venting. However, it occurs to me that there is something ATEG could do that could achieve a rare mix of utility and total, refreshing obnoxiousness: Create a list of these that ATEG’s membership agree are annoyingly bad and post it outside the textbook display at conventions.

 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University