Interesting. I review lots of engineering papers, and I can tell the national origin of the authors from the grammatical mistakes in the papers - English teachers in various countries teach it incorrectly, or, more likely, grammar from the native language spills over into English. In one case I knew the supposed author of a paper didn’t write it from the grammar (not plagiarism, more ghost writing) and in another, I could tell that the author of a thesis my wife was not editing was not Indian as she had thought. (I was right.) It’s not that all native English speakers write better - just differently.
In non-professionally edited papers, I wonder if the slack we give to papers written by non-native English speakers decreases our expectations for native English speakers.
Agree, but I would state it more strongly. It’s not an either/or situation: students need to be tought both creative writing **and ** grammar/punctuation.
I think a better analogy is in driving. You need to be able to operate a car (creative writing) and to know the rules of the road (grammar) to be a good driver. Without both, you’re either stuck riding the bus, or a danger to others.
Well, I did ask for opinions, and I guess your opinion is a valid as anyone else’s. I guess. I do want to clarify, however, that the explanation I gave of “kitchen floor” is derived not from my personal ideas about grammar, but from the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, which says this about modifiers:
“Modification in English is done by adjectives and adverbs or by other structures, called adjectivals and adverbials, which function in the same way.” Looking up “Adjectives,” one finds this entry, in part: “An adjective is a part of speech that modifies nouns or other nominals … Adjectival and adjectivally (not adjectively) are grammatical terms that have to do with the functions of adjectives: an adjectival modifier is a word, phrase, or clause that works like an adjective”…
I don’t know what reference you used, but I looked in Strunk. Mencken and The American Heritage Book of English Usage and found similar entries. All allow the classification of nouns, when used to describe (modify) another noun or nominal, as an adjective or adjectival.
What bothers me about teaching “theories” is the apparent lack of a rigorous scientific approach. Things like “whole language” just seemed to be made up from whole cloth without any experimental support, control groups, etc.
The truth is that American students are ignorant in comparison to most other industrialized countries, and they seem to be getting worse. I was never a start in grammar or spelling but I catch the most egregious errors every day.
My son had a Montessori education and they taught grammar using a “grammar box”. Grammar was one of my son’s favorite subjects (?!) and he ended up with a 770 on his English SATs.
No references handy (sorry) - though there are plenty out there, this is something gathered from a number of linguistics classes and books on English grammar. I’ll check to see if Pullum and Huddleston’s Student’s Introduction to English Grammar has anything on it (based, obviously, on their recent and extremely well-regarded Cambridge Grammar of the English Language). But the syntactic tests I used are the sorts of things used to make those determinations nowadays - I think the evidence I posted speaks for itself. One of the big differences between adjectives and nouns used as modifiers is that adjectives can be used predicatively, as I demonstrated.
The definition you quoted is quite apparently far too vague to be useful - after all, lots of things can modify a noun. Prepositional phrases do so frequently, but no one would claim from Ipanema is an adjective in The Girl from Ipanema. That’s why more exact syntactical and morphological tests are used in linguistics.
But that’s the basic difference - “grammar” as taught by English teachers and grammar as studied by linguists are two very different things, and only one is really based on reality. It’s a problem, in my opinion, that we teach the former rather than the latter - most people decrying grammar instruction don’t know about scientific approaches to grammar at all. Thence do we get such silliness as children being taught not to “split infinitives”.
Incidentally, you mentioned “Strunk”. Are you referring to The Elements of Style or some other work of his? I love The Elements of Style - do recent editions still warn against using “people” as the plural of “person”? Man, that book is great - it’s the most deadpan joke I’ve ever seen. Too bad so many people don’t get it, and actually try to follow Strunk’s (and to a lesser extent, White’s) advice, culminating in predictably awful results.
According to FinnAgain, this idea is based on a rigorous scientific approach. (And contrariwise, while I’ve only heard good things about the Montessori approach, I’ve never heard any evidence that it’s based on scientific findings.) I would agree that there’s a tendency for education techniques to be more trend than substance, but I hardly see how this is an example.
Incidentally, cite for how American students are comparatively ignorant? Because I hear this all the time but my impression from what I’ve read (outside of newspaper editorials, which always seem to be arguing that something or other is going to hell in a hand-basket: morals, educational standards, primetime TV scheduling, it’s always something) is that this is far from a well-proven fact, even if it seems to be “common knowledge”.
Teaching techniques are a result of science (specifically, developmental psychology) and decades of experience. What else could they draw from? Teaching techniques are not made out of ‘whole cloth’ any more than law practice or social work or really any other profession. I can’t figure out why people who would never dream of walking in to someone else’s workplace and claiming their training is a fraud and they havn’t learned a thing in the years they’ve been on the job feel free to do that to teachers.
It’s not an either/or proposition. At least not the way language arts are supposed to be taught.
With my kids, it was “first, learn to put your thoughts down on paper, then learn to put them in a proper order and sequence, then learn to put them in a style and format that other people can understand.”
Grammar wasn’t broken out as a separate category, but was part of the “style and format” part of instruction. This also included editing, spelling, proofreading and revising.
Granted, it’s a more holistic approach (therefore harder to quanitfy) than the way my wife and I were taught, but considering my daughter just graduated magna cum laude with a degree in creative writing, and she’s at least functionally literate in both German and Japanese, it doesn’t seem to have hurt her.
Because many people view us as glorified babysitters, and most people have no problem telling off “the help”. But, you’re right, it is strange. We can go to grad school, get advanced degrees in curriculum and instruction, study and read up on all the latest information, and still have parents who can’t even be bothered to make P/T meetings or help their kids with homework, but still want to tell us how to do our jobs.
My qualification here is as a parent of children aged 20 to 4. I’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth. Whole language ascendent, phonics ascendent, back and forth … at least officially. You see, the reality has always been that the good teachers have always taught using both methods. There is a place for just getting ideas on the page and not expending intellectual energy on worrying about whether or not it is spelled right or punctuated perfectly. And there is a place for learning proper grammar and correct spelling. Of course that can be done in the context of editing real papers but some driling is needed as well.
I do get a laugh out of the defense of teaching techniques as having some sort of scientific validity, though. “Whole Language” was a piece of dogma that was accepted so much as a whole cloth that its good parts were eventually largely thrown out with the bad. (I still remember the hand-out explaining Whole Language to us nervous parents over 15 years ago. It was full of spelling and grammar errors.) We are just now coming to grips with the sequelae of “modern math instruction” - see this article in Science from May 19 this year about the “Math Wars” and what has been needed to bring the parties together http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/312/5776/988?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=math+education&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
Those of us who have been parents for a while know that teaching is a damn hard job and few of us would have what it takes to do it well, but we also know that there is precious little science behind it. There are some stupid ideas put out there and stated with certainty, until the opposite is stated with just as much confidence a few years later. And we also feel passionately that our children be educated well. I can switch doctors. I can switch lawyers. And yes, I can switch babysitters. But I am stuck with the teacher. A good one is a blessing. A great one is something we all should have the good fortune to experience at least once in our lives. A bad one is a malignant experience that can take some kids years to recover from.
Sorry, Excalibre, but in the aforementioned Linguistics class, I was also taught that if a word fails one of the tests for a particular function but passes yet another test for that same function, then that word passes for that function. In short, kitchen in kitchen floor is the adjective portion of the compound noun.
And there are stupid ideas in every field. Even precious science isn’t immune- how many different things have we been told about nutrition in the past decades?
It seems to me that decades of experience has been thrown out and trendy new theories subsituted in their place. Phonics vs whole language is a case in point.
Law is clearly not a science. I don’t know much about social work but it seems more art than science. Are there double blind studies of various approaches to social work?
I don’t find fault with teachers as much as with the educational-industrial complex that has to come up with new trends to justify sales of new books, materials, and curicula.
I’m sorry, but ignoring spelling and grammar, deprecating phonics, and teaching set theory to first graders is just BS.
True. But the public hardly restrains itself from telling scientists that they believe they have it wrong. My point is that we consumers of education are not treating you with disproportionate disrespect when we question you.
But that is less the point. There are indeed arrogant scientists, but the nature of that beast is to recognize the possibility that you have not quite got it right yet. While many teachers know that about teaching techniques as well, and are constantly refining their craft, the top-down theories of education are often presented as if they are, for that moment, infalliable, despite a lack of supporting evidence.
That arrogance and those mistakes are not only up close and personal, dealing with whether or not our kids are prepared for the future, they are outside our control. We are going to be critical.
Of course I want you to be critical of the education your child is getting, and I love-I mean LOVE, people have stopped inviting me to parties–to talk about what goes on in my classroom and why I take the approach I take and do what I do, and as that is always changing, I am pretty open to changing how I do things as a result of parent or other layperson input.
However, what drives me crazy are the truly amazing number of people that haven’t been in a school since the day they graduated high school who think they know how to fix education, and don’t want to talk about education, but want to tell me where all the problems are and how schools today all suck and what they’d do to get the whole thing straightened out. In my experience, these people invariably generalize based on whatever their school experience was, not recognizing that schools vary enourmously, and that what worked, or might of worked, for them in a small school in the Pacific NW in the 50s may not be the panacea for every single child in an enormous urban high school in Dallas today.
Again, It’s absolutly bizarre to have someone tell you what you do is all bullshit and will never work based on an imperfectly remembered experience from 15 years ago–like having someone who had cancer in the eighties lecture how, based on that experience, they have a unique understanding of why HIIPA is a terrible thing, or someone who got sued once, twenty years ago, and now thinks they have insider knowledge about how corrupt the legal profession is. HIIPA may be a problem, and there may be corrupt laweyers, but while laypeople should certainly have an opinion, they should be as willing to listen as they are to pontificate.
And being bothered by boorish boneheads bombastically broadcasting bullshit is very understandable. My comments were more directed at even sven’s concept that teachers are particularily disrespected, that “people who would never dream of walking in to someone else’s workplace and claiming their training is a fraud and they havn’t learned a thing in the years they’ve been on the job feel free to do that to teachers.” And that is just not true. Idiots who believe they are experts without any basis and without any openness to discussion about why they may be mistaken are equal opportunity idiots. They do it to everyone. People do go on about things like HIIPA and corrupt lawyers based on little or no knowledge all the time! Teachers have it no worse than the rest of us in that regard.
Actually I think teachers are more disrespected today. Every one of us has been in a classroom, spent a lot of time there, in fact, and while we see the subject matter as being tough, we don’t see the training for how to teach.
What’s more, we see lots of teachers, both ours and those who teach our kids - far more than the number of lawyers we see (unless we’re mafioso or Enron execs, that is. ) Not all the teachers are equally good.
When I was a kid, teachers seemed to get a lot more respect. It might be that the teachers, and our parents, grew up in the Depression where teaching was a very sought after job - it was the one job where you didn’t wind up unemployed. Today, the anti-tax faction needs to denigrate teachers to justify opposition to decent pay and decent working conditions. That would cost them money, and they don’t like it.
My complaint about the “scientific” theories is that they don’t seem to consider the diversity if students. Good teachers differentiate, and teach according to their students needs, not what some Ed. Professor published.
I took this class my junior year of high school. Sadly, most of my syntactical analysis these days seems to be confined to analyzing song lyrics. Anyway, I had just moved to a new high school in a university town from a much smaller town. I was a bit apprehensive that I might not be fully prepared for all of my coursework. On the first day of that class, our teacher had us break into groups and list the parts of speech. I was the only one who knew all 8, having this drilled into me in middle school. I spent most of the group time arguing with another classmate that “gerund” wasn’t a part of speech in itself, but a subclassification. I’m not trying to brag, but I did find that all of the grammatical drilling I had done in my previous school system prepared me very well for that class.
That’s not sad. If you are enjoying music more because of your education, it’s done its job. School isn’t just to train you for work, it’s to train you for life, as well.
) Not all the teachers are equally good.