Bill,
I found your message to be very disappointing. The two ideas that
you present, as if I might disagree with them, are, as I have suggested
repeatedly on this list, fundamental to the KISS Approach. Part of the
problem here might be my incomplete response to a previous question.
When I said that within KISS, students would explain "up" in Look up" as
an adverb, that is true. What I did not explain is that in the sentence
"Look up that word in the dictionary," students could explain up in one
of two ways. They could still explain it as an adverb, or they could
explain it as part of the verb phrase "look up." Such alternative
explanations appear regularly in KISS exercises. In addition, within my
explanations, I often note that grammarians diagree about the point in
question. Why then, do you write as if KISS were a "my way or the
highway" approach to grammar?
How many times do I have to respond that my problem with this list
is not with the theoretical discussions but with the lack of almost any
connection between those theoretical discussions and what should be
taught in the schools? You mention "teaching tips," but teaching tips
are not enough. If I understood her correctly, even Johanna agrees that
instruction has to be spread across several years. Thus, the question is
what can effectively be taught at which grade levels? This should not be
left up to individual teachers. I just posted a question about
subjunctive mood being taught to second graders. Now I know that there
are some people out there who think that everything can be taught to
second graders. In practice, however, that won't work. It is simply too
much, too fast. Thus, it seems to me that ATEG is the group that would
be most qualified to discuss what should be taught, at which grade
levels, etc.
Ed
>>> [log in to unmask] 01/13/04 06:51PM >>>
Ed,
The pedagogical necessity of providing information at a level students
in a particular age range can understand is, as you have pointed out,
undeniable. As teachers, though, part of our job involves worrying
about
the distinction between simple and too simple, and that's a
distinction
that has to be reevaluated for every age range and even every specific
class (and frequently has no definite answer).
I don't think middle-schoolers have particular difficulty with
understanding the following two ideas, although I'm open to
contradiction by you or anyone teaching middle school:
(1) Different kinds of words or sentence elements have different
basic "jobs," but sometimes an element can fill a job that's more
commonly filled by a different kind.
(2) While most elements fit firmly into established categories,
there are some cases that are in grey areas, and people working on
grammar argue over these.
Both of these match the students' everyday experiences, and it is easy
to set up analogies with non-linguistic domains them. If they
understand
#1, they will have little difficulty understanding those of us who
might
want to say that the "up" of "He looked up" and the "up" of "I pushed
the sack up the chimney" are in one sense the same "up,"
(preposition),
but performing different functions. And if they understand #2, they
can
be open to the idea that some grammarians might disagree with that
characterization. I find I have a lot more trouble telling students "X
is true" when I don't really think it is, than telling them "For now,
we'll treat X as true, and we'll deal with some complications later."
What I really *don't* want to do is give students the impression that
there is exactly one accurate description of language. That doesn't
mean
I think we should focus on all the debates and minutae associated with
them (although I think that as their teachers we should at least be
familiar with the broad outlines of these debates), but rather that we
should acknowledge, simply but at regular intervals, that "doing
grammar" is a process that can yield different results. In other
words,
we don't need to concentrate on the grey areas from #2, but students
need to know that they're there, that we know that they're there, and
that that's o.k.
Despite its obvious attractions, adopting a single descriptive
framework
without acknowledging to the students that it's a position rather than
"fact" is, I would argue, dangerous. It looks too much like a power
move
- a kind of, "do it my way or be damned" system, of the type that
adolescents perennially find inflammatory. Again (I'm probably being
annoyingly redundant) I don't think that means we shouldn't use a
particular descriptive framework in class - only that we should tell
the
students that any such framework has some holes in it, and not
everyone
will agree on how to fix those. For later grades (10-12), I don't
think
looking at a few of the debates would be harmful in any way. Schools
certainly do that in other areas; I distinctly remember that part of
my
11th grade history class focused on the competing explanations for why
the Great Depression occurred. In fact, thinking about some points of
grammar in terms of argument involves practicing higher-order thinking
skills than simply labeling the units according to "accepted practice"
does. I already have too many students who think reality is a list,
and
that education consists of memorizing portions of it.
As for theory-wrangling on the ATEG list, I've already pontificated at
length on the topic, but I'd reiterate that I think lack of such
debate
would be odd, and intellectually unhealthy. Does posting a theoretical
thread *prevent* people from posting teaching tips? If not, we need
more
people posting teaching tips, not fewer people arguing points.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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