This is one of the best responses to the necessity of teaching English
grammar that I have ever seen.  I hope that it is all right for me to use
your analogies or some similar with my students (and some colleagues).

Thanks,
Mary Mocsary
Southeastern Louisiana University


At 03:28 PM 12/20/03 -0800, you wrote:
>I am coming in late on this discussion, but one thing has struck me about
>all of the responses is this:  it's not a debate that would occur to
>teachers of most school subjects. In other words, grammar instruction is
>held to much higher levels of "usefulness" than any other subject I can
>think of.
>
>Consider:  I spent a great deal of the first semester of my junior year in
>high school learning about the War of 1812.  I have never "needed" a single
>thing I learned, but I don't regret learning it--and it would never have
>occured to anyone to justify the instruction.
>
>Adult life has never required that I calculate the volume of a sphere,or do
>anything at all with conic sections.  But I spent much time learning how to
>do this in high school.
>
>If anyone had thought it was a good idea to respond to cries of "but I'll
>never USE any of this stuff," the reponse would have been on the order of
>Flannery O'Connor's riposte:  "Your taste is not being consulted.  It is
>being formed."  And it seems to me that this is largely true.  No one
>knows, in high school, exactly what course any life is going to take.  A
>responsible education prepares a student generally in a number of directions.
>
>On another point--no one has answered a question I've had about the
>teaching of writing for some years.  If a student is not acquainted with
>the basic vocabulary of sentence structure, how can you explain to a
>student what is wrong with a sentence (beyond the unhelpful "it doesn't
>sound right")? Or, if you want to be very radical, and explain how
>information is structured in a text, if you actually need to explain to a
>student that an indirect object that contains new, highly salient
>information tends to be at the end of the sentence, how do you explain that
>without using the term "indirect object"?
>
>KMW
>
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