Why is Good Grammar Absent from Schooling?
by Brilliant in Grammar Tips 0
A few weeks in the past, I used to be chatting with a friend when she casually talked about she had plans to spend an evening serving to out one other buddy of hers with some work that wanted to be done. I requested, “What kind of work?”
“She’s an English teacher. I’m going to help her grade papers.”
I skilled a moment of envy. “That seems like fun,” I said. I love trolling written paperwork in the hunt for typos, misspellings, and different crimes towards grammar.
(What can I say? I all the time endorse good grammar.)
“These papers are written by teenagers,” she responded, “not so fun.”
Good Grammar is Fun and Training Should Be Too
I thought of this, then remarked, “Yes, judging by the amount of writing errors I see coming from adults, those papers will in all probability be extra purple than white by the time you’re done.”
“Oh no,” she exclaimed. “No mark-ups. She just grades them. She says there are too many errors and he or she doesn’t have time to mark each single mistake.”
Effectively, if that’s the mentality of right this moment’s English lecturers, it’s no wonder the written word is treated with such complete and whole disregard. I stated as a lot to my buddy and then we moved along to other, much less disturbing topics.
What’s Occurred to Our Schooling System?
Since that dialog, I’ve spent ample time wondering what, exactly, the English and Language Arts teachers are teaching college students, if not good grammar. Trying back, I noticed that I hadn’t had an honest grammar lesson previous fourth grade. My spelling and punctuation abilities were largely inherited from the massive quantities of studying I did, so I didn’t want grammar lessons essentially, but it surely certain would have been good to have graduated high school realizing the difference between farther and further.
During highschool, I had an English trainer who found time to teach the class courting etiquette, which was supposed to arrange us for prom. We realized issues like how to step out of a automotive, which arm to fold your coat over, and the best way to eat in a wonderful restaurant. While I found the teachings interesting, and the trainer was one which I preferred very much, I look back with a lot chagrin, as a result of we actually ought to have spent that time mastering break up infinitives.
A 12 months later, I had a instructor who proceeded to read the complete novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest out loud, at school, for a number of weeks, when the class ought to have been writing about, and discussing the novel - you understand, a little literary analysis.
Teachers Have a Hard Job To Do
I've a friend who teaches high school science, so I’m not fully without perception as to most of the obstacles that lecturers should overcome: delinquent students, overbearing dad and mom, oversized classes, and ridiculous requirements handed down by a politically-pushed faculty board. Don’t even get me began on the paperwork within the public school system.
Is there an answer? Why are we letting these kids down? What’s wrong with a system in which a teacher can not mark up her students’ papers in an effort to teach them good grammar? And if it is a problem for an English teacher, what are math, science, and historical past academics skimping on? Are the children getting shortchanged?
How will those youngsters ever learn to communicate successfully in the event that they don’t discover ways to read, write, and grasp grammar, spelling, and punctuation? In a world the place written communication is changing into increasingly crucial, the place will these children receive the abilities they should succeed? Or is good grammar only to be relegated to the privileged, the gifted, and the self-starters?
