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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