"I guess so," said the blond ex-tin man in the duster...

[verilyverity]

What is up with the burly detectivism in Tin Man?  Never have I encountered a fandom so dead set on replacing characters' names and pronouns with ridiculous sounding proxies.  And passive voice!  With a verb that takes an object!  How can that even sound right to an author?

ETA: Ye gods and little fishes!  *stares at ballooning comments*

Comments

[blade_girl]

Heh. I am beginning to think that it really doesn't matter what English teachers say in class - almost nobody seems to retain anything they're taught in English. A month or so ago, someone caused a huge wank in torch_wood by suggesting that people who can't spell or don't know grammar especially well shouldn't post without taking some extra steps, such as beta readers. This was met with an absolute tsunami of rage (a whole lot of it from people who claimed to have dyslexia and who apparently believe that excused them from ever being expected to write comprehensibly).

In the course of the wankfest, several people claimed to have been educated in the U.S. and further claimed to have NEVER BEEN TAUGHT GRAMMAR. Some actually said that "grammar isn't taught in schools here anymore."

BULLSHIT! I have a seventh-grader who's been diagramming sentences for at least four years.

People like them are bored by grammar (and probably by history and social studies and science and math...) and so they pay just enough attention to get by in class and promptly flush the teachings from their memories at the earliest opportunity.

[verilyverity]

I want to see that wank. I am, apparently, a glutton for punishment.

Ahh, dyslexia. The refuge of the lazy. I would love to see a throw-down between a "dyslexic" and a real dyslexic. Most of the dyslexics I know have sweated blood to hone word-perfect diction and are thrown into a frothing rage when they encounter the "I'm learning disabled. I shouldn't be expected to tryyyyy" canard.

[amedia]

Re: dyslexia - yes, absolutely. I run into similar bogus claims of ADD.

But I have had many students who really did not get any grammar in school. I teach Latin and I frequently get students who have no idea how to find the subject or object in a sentence. I got very little English grammar myself growing up and learned most of it in French class and later in Latin. I wind up teaching them English grammar just so they can make sense of Latin.

I can also say that, at least at certain institutions *cough*, the trend in teaching college-level English composition is to focus on self-expression rather than on correct grammar.

[verilyverity]

Wow. I need to send a fruit basket to my English teachers.

[blade_girl]

I teach Latin and I frequently get students who have no idea how to find the subject or object in a sentence.

I suppose it's possible that some of them didn't get exposed to grammar in school, but again, I suspect that for most of them, it was simply a case of not finding it important enough to retain. I can remember covering the same grammar information from the previous year at the beginning of the new one, and people who were in my class the last year acted as though it was something they'd never heard of before.

I got very little English grammar myself growing up and learned most of it in French class and later in Latin.

Very odd. My school system was far from perfect, but English class included grammar instruction every single year.

[amedia]

*sigh* You went to far better schools than my students, I'm afraid. (They tend to come from underfunded school districts, the kind that the best teachers get hired away from.) I'm sure some of them just spaced out during grammar lessons, but some of them clearly have NEVER SEEN these concepts before; I've learned to distinguish different shades of glassy-eyed over the years. ;-)

My experience should be odd, but it wasn't when I was in school. It was the 1970's! We learned to feel good about ourselves! We all got rainbows and kittens and unicorns! Grammar - not so much. And I learned an awful lot of my pitiful quotient of American history by listening to radio contests during the Bicentennial.

(Also not much geography for some reason. When I started watching Rat Patrol, I had no idea that Libya is immediately west of Egypt. Fandom has been very good for my geography, right up there with Carmen Sandiego.)

[blade_girl]

Okay, I just had a thought that might explain why you and I seem to have had very different educational experiences during the 70s. I live in a small city in Indiana; educational trends here have always arrived about a decade after they first appeared in other places. For example, there was apparently a trend toward "open concept" classrooms in the 70s. Very late in that decade, we built an elementary school that utilized this concept... just about the time when it had already fallen out of favor in the places where it had originated.

Also, it may be that some states have been less than vigilant about including grammar in their curriculum requirements. It's hard for me to imagine anyone putting together such requirements without including at least rudimentary grammar study, but I guess it must be happening somewhere.

[amedia]

I live in a small city in Indiana; educational trends here have always arrived about a decade after they first appeared in other places.

*nod nod* My husband grew up in a small city in Wisconsin, which was similarly "behind" - he got a much better primary and secondary education than I did in many areas.

Also, it may be that some states have been less than vigilant about including grammar in their curriculum requirements.

My first high school was in California, my second, in Maryland. I'm not sure about the grammar curriculum, but on the whole, CA's standards were much more lax than MD's, and I spent my last two years of high school catching up. Fortunately not as much as I might have, since my parents weren't willing to let me take the minimum.

And actually, I had a friend who moved from a piss-poor school district in rural Pennsylvania to the one that was in town (the town had a university with a lot of youngish professors with kids in the school, so they got involved), and her kids had to go into remediation because they were so far behind. There's *tremendous* variation out there.

[luchia13]

I need an "I'M YOUNGER THAN YOU" icon just for this comm.

I wasn't taught grammar until my first AP English course, and even the teacher wasn't quite sure what she was doing. I know for a fact that no other class was taught a single thing about grammar. It wasn't even touched on in the second AP English course.

It may depend on the state, perhaps? I'm in Colorado and know for a fact that East Coast schools blow us out of the water in...well. Just about everything but hockey! We're good at hockey.

[amedia]

'S'okay - I need one that says "I'M OLDER THAN YOU"! (I do have a "fannish dinosaur" one, but I need to use the hockey one to express that I share the love!)

I used to teach Greek in an expensive private East Coast college, and while my students were the cream of the crop, they still didn't have much of a grasp of English grammar. They were the kind of kids who write correctly purely by osmosis, if you know what I mean; they had read enough good literature that they understood implicitly how to compose a sentence. I asked them once, point-blank, "Why don't you know this stuff? You're the smart ones!"

And they explained that their fellow high school students did study grammar, but they had gone into AP courses where they only read literature - no grammar. *foreheadsmack*

[verilyverity]

Y'know, I run up against that every time I beta. I try to explain why errors are errors whenever I can, but I find myself doing lots of vague searches for the correct terms. (There's a term for adjectival subordinate clauses whose subjects don't match that of the main clause? Even if they're not participles? Who knew?)

[luchia13]

All my friends (...well okay the ones I hung out with because they weren't all full of academia and extracurricular activities) were in standard English courses, and in senior year they were complaining about how difficult The Old Man And The Sea was to understand.

I'll admit I'm probably an 'osmosis' writer, although I, um. I kind of stole my teacher's grammar book? BUT I GAVE HER MY 'MY LITTLE PONIES' SO SHE DIDN'T NOTICE! And then it was just TRADE!

[andrealyn]

Dude, you're an osmosis writer too? WIN.

[blade_girl]

This just floors me. (The grammar stuff, not the hockey part. I accept that Colorado knows hockey.)

So what did you guys do in English class in grades three through twelve? I mean, kids aren't learning to write, they aren't learning to speak, they aren't learning to spell... what the heck are English teachers writing lesson plans around?

[amedia]

Well, in elementary school, we didn't have English, we had Language Arts, and I remember that we had this program called SLA, where we went to the learning station (open classroom) and read little stories pre-sorted by our reading levels, and answered questions. If you got enough right in one category, you got to move up to the next, so at least it wasn't boring; if you were able to read at a higher level, you got to read stories at that level. We also did a little grammar in 5th or 6th grade, stuff about subjects and objects, although I remember the teacher was wrong at least once and I had to correct her, which was startling because *she* would have gone to school back in the day when people learned stuff, whereas nowadays teachers my age were in school in the rainbow-kitten days and have something approaching an excuse. [Note: this was a public school in a well-to-do district on the East Coast. I went to a private elementary school for grades 1-4 but honestly, 1967 was a LONG time ago and I don't remember it very well.]

In junior high and high school English class, we read stuff. Poetry, plays, novels. We learned about metaphors, analogies, synecdoche, metonymy, and so on, and ideas, and characters, and the different types of plots, and dramatic irony, and that sort of thing. [Junior high was spent in two well-funded public schools, high school in two private prep schools.] I started taking French in junior high after a couple years of baby-French in 3rd and 4th grade, so that was really where I was learning grammar. My second high school also offered Latin, so I began taking that junior year, and found that I *still* didn't know enough grammar. Whew!

I loved my English teacher in my second high school. We still write to each other.

[luchia13]

Considering I didn't move to Colorado until...fifth? Sixth grade? I'm not sure. But I doubt I can really answer that. We learned to write, and spell, but everything was based on memorization. And "accordion papers" which was one thesis statement and paragraph, three paragraphs, and then one closing paragraph. We discussed literature, but...quite honestly, the worst thing was science. I moved from Maryland to Colorado and was almost two years ahead of everyone, but state policy says that you stay with your own age group.

In other words, they almost treated English like preschool. I distinctly remember that in sixth grade we made papier-mache models and had to write a story about how we painted it! Whee! I wanted to die and almost literally moved into the school library, considering the librarians were the only ones willing to actually teach me anything useful.