I agree wholeheartedly with Craig on this.  I really WANT kids who have 
studied language in some sort of systematic way.

I was wondering--most people know more about the situation in other 
countries than I do.  Is there any non-anglophone country in the world 
that does not teach elementary and secondary students about their 
language in a thorough, incremental, and non-error-focused way?

KMW
On Apr 1, 2005, at 10:34 AM, Craig Hancock wrote:

>        I'm going to be a little bit of a gadfly on this one, not quite 
> ready to fall into the lets blame everyone but ourselves mentality. 
> (Not that the blame isn't telling.)
>      First of all, I am surprised at how comprehensive the Washington 
> list is.  The students who arrive at my college don't routinely use 
> commas for nonrestrictive modifiers or use the passive in effective 
> ways.  The unanswered question is how much students need to KNOW in 
> order to do that, or in order to talk about it meaningfully when they 
> don't, and that's left off the list entirely.  Presumably, some people 
> will grill and drill and others will hope that it rubs off in a whole 
> language environment; we have no consensus on how to get from point a 
> to point b in our current climate, so how can we expect the schools to 
> be clear about that?
>      Most people, including, I think, the majority on ATEG, think of 
> grammar as learning the parts of speech and avoiding  error.  We 
> simply differ on how to go about that.  Progressive educators think it 
> will happen naturally if students are allowed to read and write, and 
> thus seem to be avoiding accountability in this test happy time. 
>  Conservative educators worry that students will be allowed to get 
> away with things if we aren't careful to penalize their mistakes. At 
> the moment, they seem to hold court, though teachers happily ignore 
> this in the kingdom of their own classes, especially in the blue 
> states.  How can we expect to make a difference if the only 
> disagreement is in how to get there or in what order?
>       We don't have a consensus, even on our own list, in favor of 
> wide scale exploration of language in the public schools.  We think 
> behavior is important, not knowledge. We still seem to hold to the 
> untested assumption that  kids learn their native language naturally, 
> so there's no benefit in paying attention to it except to correct 
> mistakes. We seem divided primarily between grill and drill exercises 
> and minimalist grammar at the point of need, with no clear, consistent 
> voice calling for a rich exploration of language.  If we did, we could 
> devise tests on what students actually know, not on how they behave, 
> and the whole enterprise could be raised to a much more sophisticated 
> level. Give me a kid who knows what a clause is or what is meant by 
> "nonrestrictive modification", and I can talk to her about choices in 
> her writing.  At the moment, I'm not getting that.
>       What does a student need to know to negotiate nonrestrictive 
> modification?  Does that mean a noun is no longer a thing, but a 
> category being reduced?  Shouldn't any kid coming out of a public 
> school know about that?
>      If we took a vote on the statement that "students don't need to 
> know about grammar; they just need to use it correctly," wouldn't most 
> of us say "true"?
>     We have met the enemy, and the enemy includes us.
>
>  Craig
>     
>
>  Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
>
>
> To add to Ed’s concern, let me note that even when reasonable 
> linguistic content has been written into language arts standards, as 
> it has in Indiana, it can be socially constructed out of existence, 
> which has also pretty much happened.  Standards mean nothing without 
> the will and understanding on the part of educators to implement them 
> even in the fact of public, school board, and PTA incomprehension.
>
>  
>
> Herb
>
>  
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar 
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
> Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 8:31 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Washington
>
>  
>
> Johanna's message about how standards get adopted is on the money, but 
> I wanted to add that sometimes the will of the English teachers on the 
> committes is subverted by political forces over which the teachers 
> have no control.  That is how the Pennsylvania standards came to 
> include the crowning absurdity that "students [by eleventh grade] 
> spell all words correctly"; that is how diagramming became mandatory 
> in Virginia; and, I'm told, that is how some of the specific 
> "masteries" came into the California standards.
>  When I was on the PA committee, forty-plus English teachers on the 
> Writing Assessment Advisory Committee sent a petition to the five top 
> education officials in the state, including the Sec of Ed himself.  It 
> was TOTALLY ignored.
>
>  Ed Schuster
>
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