To Teach Grammar or Not to Teach Grammar...

A Kentucky eighth-grade teacher is enjoying some notoriety for teaching grammar, which is largely outmoded. I've been told since I started teaching 22 years ago that this was a huge no-no.

I've got decidedly mixed feelings. As an ESL teacher, I insist on teaching grammar. There is simply no way kids will learn to write acceptably without knowing and practicing the rules. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool, a robotic administrator, or both.

Although my first license was in English, I taught it for a very short time. The kids I taught were clueless about grammar, and I was inclined to teach them. However, if they'd known the rules I wouldn't have bothered.

I was taught rules about punctuation in first and second grade, and I never thought much about grammar till I started teaching. But I read a lot as a kid, and I think that helped me know the rules, even though I couldn't have explained them. Ideally, all kids would do that.

In New York City, though, conditions have been less than ideal as long as I can recall. I would teach grammar to American teenagers if they needed it.

Should we teach grammar as a matter of course? Or can we produce readers early and render it unnecessary?

Related: See what Graycie has to say.

Do You Talk Good?

There are two models of grammar and language use: prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive grammar suggests that everyone must speak precisely as the grammar book dictates. Descriptive grammar suggests than everyone speaks their own languages perfectly, with whatever regional variations that may entail.

I subscribe to the second school of thought, which caused a major disagreement with one of my colleagues the other day. I suggested a student did not belong in ESL, saying, “She speaks English better than me.” The teacher, for whom English was a second language, corrected me, saying “She speaks English better than I,” and gave a long speech suggesting I should not be teaching English, as I was profoundly incompetent.

Nonetheless, “She speaks English better than I,” doesn’t sound right to me. I’m well aware of what grammar books say, having taught them for years. I can accept “She speaks English better than I do,” but without the do, it sounds artificial and pretentious.

I’d say that, whatever regional variations may form their language use, virtually all kids in this country are aware of more of less “standard” American English through mass media. Now Latin, being a dead language, may have stricter rules, but English is a living, evolving thing. No matter how much it breaks our hearts, whom, for example, is probably bound for extinction.

I’d also strongly argue that people who speak by ear are far more proficient than those who need to consult rules of grammar, whatever their languages may be.

Written language is a lot tougher, and there’s far less variation. We all say gonna, but it’s not acceptable in academic writing, which every kid needs to learn.

So what do you think? Let me phrase this as objectively as possible--Was the grammar book carried down the mountain by Moses along with the Ten Commandments, or does language ebb and flow with the tide?

Just Do It

As I pointed out recently on Jenny D’s blog, I’ve been very lucky thus far, in that I’ve been able to keep up with my fourth grade daughter’s math homework. However, I fear those days are rapidly coming to an end.

A few weeks ago, she brought home a multiple choice test that asked her to identify equations displaying “commutative properties” of mathematics. I suggested she select a pair of multiplication problems, something like 5 X 7, and 7 X 5, which happily turned out to be correct.

I have to question the need for her to know that term. I’m admittedly not good at math, not interested in math, and very grateful I no longer have to study it. But I don’t feel my quality of life has been markedly damaged by my unfamiliarity with that term. The concept, to anyone schooled in basic arithmetic, is obvious.

As an English teacher, I have to suppose that many Americans don’t know what present progressive or future perfect means, yet manage to speak perfectly. Many can even write with clarity and precision, despite our best efforts to churn out automatons who do nothing but five-paragraph compositions.

On the other hand, I’ve had hundreds of foreign students who could name the grammar terms backward and forward, but could not speak.

I figure if you’re not a teacher, you don’t need the terminology. You just need to know how to do whatever it is you need to do. We’ve got it backwards—which is why so many of us have studied Spanish but couldn’t speak it to save our lives.