I've been watching with some interest the diagramming discussion last week.  I
didn't jump in because it was exam week.  So I was caught up in grading
papers, etc.
 
My concern with the diagramming discussion relates to a larger issue that I'd
like to see the members of this list-serve take up--the issue of why we should
teach grammar and what we should teach when we teach grammar.  I think the
diagramming dscussion may be a segue into that discussion.  Rather than
comment on diagramming myself, I'll begin with a response I received last week
from a student in her portfolio for my junior-level college class (mostly made
up of teacher education majors).  The assignment she's responding to is the
following:
 
>>Take one of the concepts in these chapters (hierarchies, constituents, the
analysis of the AUX system, etc.) and show your high school/junior high
teacher how it "opened your eyes" to what she had been talking about lo those
many years ago.  Or explain how her rendition of grammatical structures and
functions was less confusing than the one in these chapters.    Or write on
anything else you'd like to say to her.  about grammar. <<
 
Here is the response:
 
>>The only experience I can definitely remember is diagramming sentences in
Mrs. Doe's class [I've changed the name].  At first it seemed easy, but as the
sentences grew longer I remember feeling that the diagrams were more
confusing, more of an eyesore than a function of understanding grammar.  I
would like to tell Mrs. Doe that this was a waste of my time and I would have
learned more if she had approached grammar from an analytic perspective.  I
wish Mrs. Doe had allowed me to see that grammar is based on hierarchies, that
smaller constituents fit within larger constituents.  Diagramming gave me a
visual image of all the parts of a sentence flying off in varying directions.
Given this visual image, it never would have occurred to me to think of
grammar as hierarchical or as a system.  Sentences that were diagrammed seemed
to be an explosion.  Explosions are not systematic.
 
Diagramming was a maze. . . . By the time I had traced the lines to the right
places, I had no clue to the meaning behind the exercise of diagramming.  If
Mrs. Doe only would have told me that grammar is a system and that the parts
fit within one another in a systematic manner, I would have truly learned
something.<<
 
I don't want to comment myself on diagramming because it's not my desire to
argue against Reed-Kellogg diagrams or people who teach them.  I simply want
to use this issue as a movement into another discussion I consider more
important.  Why do we teach what we teach?
What do we want students to learn about the structure of language?  How will
this knowledge be useful to them?  Could I begin the discussion (like an
auctioneer) and ask that the opening bid not be about correctness?  My sense
is that would get us stuck in a swamp as impenetrable as the one which the
ValuJet is now stuck in.
 
By the way, I was one of the participants in the Nashville roundtable.  The
roundtable was about my grammar class and included, besides a graduate student
who had observed it (Jim Dubinsky) and a faculty member who had taught other
sections of the same class (Janet Ziegler), three undergraduates who discussed
their experiences learning grammar.
 
Max Morenberg
English Department
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056
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