I would respectfully disagree with you - people lost interest in
teaching diagramming because they didn't think grammar was important
- and they could get away with thinking that because the English
language lets people be totally unconcerned about case and gender for
all nouns and adjectives. They were sadly mistaken (in my opinion) -
and I also loved diagramming sentences.
At 10:31 PM -0500 2/12/06, Ruth wrote:
I don't think it's so much a lack of declensions. In my college
Latin classes when the professor started talking about parts of
speech like direct and indirect objects, you could see eyes glazing
over. Lots of the kids in the class had never even heard of them,
let alone know what they were or how/when to use them. The problem
is that grammar isn't taught in the public schools any longer. Back
when dinosaurs still roamed the planet and I was in grade school
<grin> I remember diagramming sentences over and over. I asked my
kids once if they understood how to do this in their English classes
and they looked at me like I had sprouted another head. Kids today
think that grammar is married to grandpa.
It would be nice if things like grammar, spelling and punctuation
were actually encouraged in school. I remember asking one of my
daughter's teachers at a conference why, with Traci's terrible
spelling, her paper was scored as high as it was. I was told that
these days the emphasis is put on making the student feel good about
him/herself rather than correcting and possibly embarrassing them. I
nearly fainted!! Isn't that what education is for?? Teaching them
the correct way to do things?? I'm convinced that the only reason my
children knew any of this stuff when they graduated from high school
was that I forced them to do it at home. But at least they can read
and write an intelligible sentence and do enough math to ensure
they're not getting shortchanged on their paychecks.
Okay, I'm off my soap box now :D I don't mean to offend any teachers
on the list. Just remember that opinions are free and worth what you
pay for them <grin>
Martha Krieg wrote:
Ah, but when you put your text into Word, the spell-checker
squiggles under the "colour" words, and unless you have the
grammar-checker turned on, it ignores the hypercorrection "he was
nice to my mother and I" --- an overreaction to "My mother and me
went to the store together." The teachers drilled so much on "My
mother and *I* went to the store" that people started using it
everywhere. The downside to a language with almost nothing left of
its declensions is that a majority of people have no clue what the
different between a subject and an object (direct, indirect, or of
a preposition) is!
--
Ruth
You don't have to wear a red hat to have an attitude.
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