It wasn’t just “a movement” – metric became the official standard of measurement in the US during the Carter administration. The law is just ignored. It would’ve been easy enough for a school administration years after the fact to believe that metric would really become the de facto standard “any time now”, especially if the administrators had scientific backgrounds where they dealt with metric all the time.
Exactly. My point is that “letters as consonants/vowels” is a much less useful concept than most people realize. It’s completely irrational to try to hammer that into 7-year-olds’ heads, but it seems like we should have to unlearn it sometime. As it stands, you have to go to college and major in linguistics, speech pathology/therapy, or maybe English to get there.
Actually, perhaps the most defining characteristic of nouns is that they can be pluralized. Just because the “plural” morpheme (represented by the “s” in “cans” etc) isn’t represented by a change in spelling doesn’t mean it’s not there. “Garbage” is arguably already a plural (when was the last time you took out “a garbage” or “a few garbages”?), and “cattle” is a plural form of “cow”, isn’t it? You’ve never seen “a cattle”, have you?
Well, I suppose by “can pluralize” I meant “has a form representing a singular sense, as well as a form representing a distinct plural sense”, in which case neither “garbage” nor “cattle” pluralize; you’re right, though, that “cattle” was a bad example, arguably plural (it takes verb agreement like a plural noun, for instance) with no singular form. However, I can’t see any defense of “garbage” as syntactically plural, anymore than I could of “water” or “cleanliness”. It takes verb agreement like a singular noun, it can be the referent of singular pronouns but not of plural pronouns; like any mass noun, it cannot be counted, but I don’t see why that should cause us to consider it plural.
I agree with you that one defining characteristic of nouns is pluralization, but only in the sense that all pluralizable words are nouns; the converse very much fails.
That distinction is pretty much meaningless, though. It’s far less important than the fact that the concept of singular and plural in English can only be represented by nouns; the few times when other parts of speech (“is”/“are”) recognize plurality, it’s only because they’re taking cues from the noun. This makes English nouns especially easy to teach: if it can be plural, it’s a noun.
How about “cow” or “calf”?
My point is that uncountable nouns represent the concept of plurality even though they’re not specifically plurals of other, related words. “Water” can refer to one molecule or 7,000 gallons, but “cold” has no such luxury; the word itself has a fixed meaning with no room for plurality.
I agree that the concepts of singular and plural can only be represented by nouns, in English. And, thus, if a word can be plural, it’s a noun. But, as I said, that’s a sufficient but not necessary condition for being a noun. Witness “cleanliness”, “news”, “information”.
Those are entirely different words from “cattle”, as far as I see it, rather than merely different forms of the same underlying word. (Indeed, they have their own plural forms, of “cows” and “calves”). Saying that “cow” is the singular form of “cattle” is like saying that “dog” is the singular form of “canines”.
Fine, you can pull that style of thinking with mass nouns if you want, though I wouldn’t, but how about nouns like “cleanliness”, “news”, “information”, or the noun “fun”? To the same extent that the adjective “fun” leaves no room for plurality, neither does the noun “fun”.
The other side of this is, since I had learned to read and to write in cursive before going to school, my first grade teacher told me it was not allowed in first grade.
I wasn’t enough of a smartass (yet) to ask her if she meant anywhere or just in her dumbass class.
It would have been on though, if she’d pulled that “You’re not allowed be proficient at reading before first grade” crap.
Oh, yeah, I can’t remember if this happened to me or not, but my sister had something even more ridiculous: as I recall, her teacher decreed that she was forbidden to even learn any cursive during first grade or the subsequent summer (from me or my parents or anyone else); apparently, it was very important that students only be taught at the time and in the manner of second grade, without so much as exposure to a single cursive letter beforehand.
But, yeah, the whole cursive thing is a crock; apart from signing my name, I can’t recall any time in my life, beyond a brief period in elementary school, when anyone has ever preferred cursive to print, and there doesn’t seem to me to be much of a speed advantage either.
True–but explaining why “rest” is a noun in that sentence, but not in the sentence, “Can we rest before continuing?” is not something you want to explain to a 7 year old.
Or maybe you do. At this point, I think I’d be kinda entertained by watching you do it :).
You have a pretty clear grasp on linguistics; I’m not so sure you have a grasp on how kids think about problems.
Yeah; I may or may not be able to explain this concept to seven year-olds (actually, I’m visiting my seven year-old twin cousins later this week; perhaps I can get some hands-on empirical data, though, alas, I won’t be taping the experience for entertainment’s sake ), but, like I said, I’m not sure I see the point in trying to explain this concept before kids are ready for it.
If it’s about “complete sentences”, I think you could get that across without dealing with what, specifically, nouns are, and that, indeed, knowing what a noun is doesn’t really contribute to knowing what a “complete sentence” is. (I wouldn’t envy having to explain to a kid whether the first word in “Reading is fundamental” is a verb or a noun, but I think it would be easy enough to make a kid understand that that is a complete sentence in a way which “Is fundamental” is not, without even mentioning parts of speech, especially with appeal to their (by now) well-formed intuitions about spoken language)
Seriously, it’s nowhere near as easy as you seem to think it is to get kids to grasp these concepts. By the time they’re nine, they risk failing fourth grade if they’re not writing organized stories in well-formed paragraphs from well-formed sentences–and plenty of kids fail. A second-grade teacher who sends students on to third grade without being able to recognize basic nouns does nobody any favor.
Your objection to this type of simple initial teaching seems to be based on Jon Stewart’s joke about terrorism. I just think that’s a weak objection. This is how people have taught kids probably since language was invented (Thog taught Thog Junior that buffalo were dangerous, saving the lessons about how to catch and kill a buffalo until later). Kids think in a very concrete fashion at a young age, and as they grow older, they become increasingly capable of thinking in an abstract fashion. Trying to teach them in an abstract fashion at a young age is unproductive; refusing to teach concepts in a simplified, concrete fashion at a young age out of an overdeveloped sense of precision is misguided. Instead, you teach kids where they’re at, and as they grow, you help them modify and elaborate on their conceptual understanding.
(I hope this curtness isn’t a sign of mounting tension between us; I certainly don’t feel strongly enough to want to carry on the conversation if it’s having that effect). Perhaps I should clarify what I said before. What I meant was that I don’t think introducing this watered down fake concept of noun makes teaching the concept of complete sentences any easier than it would be to teach complete sentences otherwise. By all means, feel free to introduce some watered down fake concept of a complete sentence (“A complete sentence expresses a complete thought, which can either be a thing performing an action or…”), but why drag nouns into it?
You could well be right about the difficulty in teaching kids these concepts, but I really don’t see the point in teaching kids the particular watered-down fake version of noun being promoted here (other watered-down fake versions of noun might be more acceptable). Like I said, what’s the rush to teach parts of speech? The average man really has no use for knowing them.
Well, I think that’s a weak reading of my objection. My objection is that, unlike in many other cases where simple initial teaching easily gives way to a more accurate understanding later on, in this particular case, it seems to me the simple initial teaching, being so very detached from the true fact of the matter, only becomes a stumbling block later on.
Absolutely. I agree with this (for example, I agree with what you’ve said before, that you teach kids about the number 3 by lining up 3 apples on a table, rather than discussing bijections between sets.) But every simplification has to be evaluated on its own merits. If a concept is sufficiently inherently abstract, then I don’t think there’s any point trying to teach kids a misleading concrete simplification just for the sake of teaching them something.
Perhaps much of my view boils down to my not thinking there’s much practical reason for the average adult man to know parts of speech (except as a general knowledge sort of thing, like knowing the inventor of the cotton gin or the quadratic equation), much less the average seven year-old child. It’s not clear to me that one needs to know what the various parts of speech are in order to write well, and it’s absolutely clear to me that one doesn’t need to know the parts of speech in order to speak well. The only place I can think of where an adult might regularly employ this knowledge is in reading a dictionary entry, and even here the relevant practical information can be gleamed from the definition or usage examples just as well. So I don’t understand the rush in this case to push out inaccurate information for speed’s sake; I’m perfectly comfortable waiting till people are old enough to get the real (or, at least, a much closer to real) deal on this one.
Not at all; I was giving you an example of a complete thought that doesn’t, for many purposes, qualify as a sentence. (These many purposes including grading on the fourth grade writing test in the beginning, and how their cover letters will be evaluated later in life). The fact taht it was snarky was just a cheap thrill.
For several reasons. First, it’s not a fake concept of a complete sentence; rather, it’s a subcategory of complete sentences.
The cat is blue: clearly a sentence.
The blue cat: clearly not a sentence.
Blue conveys sadness: enjoy your blank looks from children.
The linguist’s definition of a complete sentence is fine, but seven year olds will not grasp it. At the same time, refusing to teach kids how to write complete sentences does them no service.
Teaching them how to write sentences about the concrete things they are cognitively equipped to understand? That’s productive, and helps them develop from where they are.
Again: this isn’t a fake version of sentences, any more than “person, place, or thing” is a fake version of a noun. It is a concrete subcategory of the concept that kids of that age can reasonably grasp, and upon which they can build as they grow older.
Left Hand of Dorkness, Indistinguishable, would I be instigating if I asked what the two of you think of the past practice of teaching sentence diagramming? The usefulness of that was a lie, if ever there was one.
BTW, I’ve been following your exchange and I’ve learned a lot – just the sort of stuff I didn’t have the advanced concepts to express.
I guess I’m kinda that proverbial, green 7-year-old y’all’ve been talking about.
I consider an invocation of “complete thought” as kinda fake, precisely because of examples like your “Is not” from before, which do express complete thoughts but fail to be complete sentences in the appropriate sense. But, ignoring that and concentrating on the “a thing performing an action or…” part, sure, we’re just talking about a subcategory here (something like the declarative sentences); that’s fine by me. [I recall coming out of third grade or so thinking all sentences fell into one of four discrete categories of declaration, question, exclamation, or command, and that this misunderstanding was never cleared up by future English teachers, but I’m actually ok with teaching this particular inaccurate simplification at some early stage; it seems to have enough pedagogical value to justify itself]
I’m afraid you’ve lost me with that last line. I’m not sure what you are saying in this section.
What was wrong with the “a thing performing an action or…” definition from before? It doesn’t cover “The cat is blue”, but, then, you didn’t let me finish. I would have finished with “…saying that a thing has a certain property.”
Absolutely. But why drag a discussion of nouns into it at this stage, any more than one would drag a discussion of grammatical aspect or syntax trees in?
Well, alright. It’s a restriction to a subcategory (at least, if we interpret “thing” as “tangible object”). In the case of “complete sentences”, this restriction has some pedagogical merit, but in the case of nouns, I don’t see why one can’t wait until it’s possible to give a much more accurate and less restricted description, one which actually conveys a less misguided understanding of the concept of part of speech.
Can we change your definition to be, “A person, place, or thing performing an action”? If so, can we just merge those three and come up with a handy term for them, a term that they’ll later elaborate on in future studies?
I hope you see where I’m going with this. I think you’re trying to fix an unbroken wheel here, to mix my metaphors.
Oh. All this talk about English, and I finally remembered a blatant lie from high school! One of my high school English teachers made a big speech one day about how the word “till” could not be used to mean “until”, that if she ever saw the word “till” (yes, spelled just like that, with two ells and no apostrophe), she would assume it meant a farming implement. This was apparently her major pet peeve. I accepted this blindly for quite a while till I happened to chance upon a dictionary one day, and wondered why she never had.
She was actually my favorite teacher in high school, but this particular case was a bit disappointing.
This comes off a bit more snarkily than I intended. I wondered why she never had consulted a dictionary on this particular pet peeve of hers; obviously, as an English teacher, and quite a good one, she’d consulted many dictionaries many times on other matters.
Yeah, I see where you’re going with it, and I guess there’s something to it. I don’t know, though; I might just leave “thing” completely unanalyzed all the same. I don’t think any kid will be clamoring to write “Jump Johnned the fence”, at any rate, and it’s easy to see that “Jumped the fence” doesn’t have anything in it to be the performer, even if no one ever made it fully clear what "thing"s are. Or maybe I would rephrase the definition, “A complete sentence starts about by saying who or what it’s about, and then continues by saying what they or it did”.
Ah, well. At this point, I think we’ve gone on long enough that we may just have to agree to disagree.
I never did sentence diagramming in school, so I don’t know what sort of thing they teach for it. Could you perhaps link me to an example? However it’s done, I imagine it really shouldn’t be bothered with till, like, middle school, at which point students should be well-enough equipped to do it pretty properly. I don’t know if it’s really useful, as such, to most people, but, then, most of school isn’t strictly about learning things that are useful. I might enjoy the world in which knowing how to properly analyze a sentence into a syntax tree was a common bit of general knowledge, understanding the hierarchical structure and the various syntactic roles. But if it’s just some silly obfuscatory pictorial scheme, then there’s not much point.
), but, like I said, I’m not sure I see the point in trying to explain this concept before kids are ready for it.