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every American school teacher's dream
genkaku
Northampton, Mass. U.S.A. Veteran
God bless the Aussies! .... 
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Too many parents defend their child's rotten behavior and place the blame on everyone else. It's sad because the children and society lose in the long run.
I understand that your experience may be different.
The ones we canned were all relatively dedicated people. But being dedicated doesn't necessarily mean one can actually do the job. Not once did we have to fire one of the less dedicated people. They did their jobs. Maybe not the ideal, but they did what they needed to do.
thats insane
I had much better grammar and spelling back then. I am more relaxed now and don't worry too much on the internet. Also I miss spell sound alike words like to too there their our are and so forth since I have been on medication.
My university did not make accomodations for those who did not know what grammar was.
Thanks for your post.
remedial is a word. at princeton it means something different than 'remedial' in highschool
"Remedial" refers to helping those who lack basic skills. It is founded on a lack rather than premised on a past foundation that allows things to move forward. High schools can (perhaps should?) provide the foundation on which a decent house can be built. If the basement is inferior, the house will be too. With college expenses being what they are, should college teachers be expected to teach high school classes? If college is going to be the agency that spends time correcting high school failures ... at what point and at what cost do college classes begin? The same, I imagine, might be asked about the mission of high schools ... at what point does parenting leave off and education begin?
I've got no answers for this stuff, but it seems to me that at some point, in any occupation, there has to be a line in the sand ... if you can't do 'x' 'y' or 'z' then ... well, there are other occupations in life. Is it unduly nasty for a trucking company to expect applicants to know how to drive? Should that trucking company be expected to teach driving to those who can't? If so, why?
Michael Jordan was one of the top players at North Carolina basketball in college. He needed remedial classes when he came to the NBA. Make sense?
But entrance essays for college are now almost universal, they weren't back then. So maybe now they use that to weed people with poor grammar/composition out. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Well, except at the Ivy League schools and equivalent, which Jeffrey pointed out have higher standards.
Vinlyn: how are students going to understand lessons on subject/verb agreement if the terms "noun, verb, subject, object" have never been taught? First they need to learn the terminology, which at some point in history used to be a grade school subject. How are students expected to learn to write, even to a point where a teacher determines they're weak in this or that aspect? Are they expected to just absorb by osmosis writing skills from their gradeschool primers and other textbooks and their own extracurricular reading? Do schools have stated policies about this? Are their state teaching standards about this?
(This is an interesting breath-of-fresh-air change from the usual topics.
Yes, and then there are the special admissions: the sports scholarships, the "diversity" admissions (many minority students have top grades, but some from inner city schools or remote rural areas don't, so the bar is lowered a little in schools that have a diverse student body as their goal). Should entire courses be devised just for the few? Colleges usually have peer tutoring centers for that. Community colleges, I would think, would be good for those needing remedial skills before transferring to a university. And I think the practice of admitting students on sports scholarships who don't have sufficient academic background or performance has become controversial, I'm not sure.
Many colleges do require a course such as Composition 101, but also students to test out of it within the first few weeks if they show proficiency in writing. Again, if you don't need it, why take it?
These days, my question to any college I might consider for my children is the same: How many students did you throw out last year for academic reasons? The answer, whether from the best institutions or the worst, is few to none, I'd guess. This has led me to think that there is a greater need than ever for quality vocational training -- not as a means of holding anyone back or putting anyone down or creating a race of serfs, but as a means of meeting the needs and capacities of those who (like one of my sons) really doesn't want to or is not capable of college. It's hard to look down on a trade when I pay the plumber or electrician about what I pay the cardiologist.
The only statistic that comes compellingly to mind was one I read a number of years ago -- that only 25% of the voting public have school-age children. If this is the case, then 75% of the voting electorate is less likely to be concerned about education and the financing it might take to upgrade high schools and speak to the honest needs and capacities that individual kids have. I guess we all can talk a good game, but paying for it is another matter.
In private schools (and maybe some public schools, idk) it's the same for grammar. In early grade school you start out learning the concepts: "Noun is a name for a person, place or thing". Does anyone remember that? In the next grade you move up to writing simple sentences and analyzing how they're put together, word order, and such. Next grade, you move up to compound and complex sentences, how those work, how they're put together, the difference between the two, and appropriate punctuation. In highschool, you move on to advanced grammar, learning about parallel construction and other aspects of complex sentences. In the next year, you learn how to organize a paragraph, and by extension, a long essay. By Jr. high you've begun to do basic research papers, learning how to organize them into chapters. In high school you're doing more advanced research papers, and ideally you apply what you've learned about how to organize an essay and by extension--a research paper (Introduction, main body where you outline and give your arguments in a logical progression, conclusion). By the time you graduate, you've had enough practice at these skills, that you can do well in college writing.
As principal of several schools over your career, Vinlyn, did you come across any policy or school or state standards regarding this? Or is everyone just winging it, and allowing English teachers to pass off their responsibility to the foreign language teachers? Why do we have skill progression by grade level in math, but not in grammar and composition? A lot of parents would like to know. So would I.
If the OP feels this is off-topic, we can take it to PM's. But there seems to be a bit of interest here.
I'm not so sure it's that different between math and science. For example -- and it varies with the ability level of the students involved -- simple addition is not taught in just first grade. It's reviewed the next year, but becomes more complex. At some point in elementary school (just not sure which grade level) it's not taught anymore, except in a remedial sense (and again, that's sort of the situational thing). Once you've learned multiplication, it doesn't end there in just one year. It's brought up again multiplying decimals and fractions. In all of these cases there's a degree of review from one year to the next to be sure students have the basics, before adding on new concepts.
And, to a large extent that's true in English curriculum. You may be introduced to nouns early on, but then comes pronouns, proper nouns, etc. You may learn to diagram sentences in middle school (that was abandoned for a long while, but has seen a resurgence). And, think how much more complex diagramming sentences is than just recognizing parts of speech. At some point learning parts of speech gives way to more composition, and that's where the "situational" teaching of grammar comes in. And, when I talk about the situational grammar, that can be handled in a number of ways. If most of the kids in the class don't get the concept, the whole class may be retaught the old concepts. If it's a smaller group, the teacher might divide the class up into learning groups. Remedial groups where students are put into special groups outside the classroom are becoming far less common. Another thing that we experimented with in both English and math -- for students who were having problems -- was letting them sit through the same class twice in one day, or having them take math from two teachers and perhaps see the concepts explained differently by two different people.
The foreign language aspect you mentioned. I've never seen that, and in our middle school we had French, Latin (some years), and Spanish.
so.
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I am not one of those people who puts on blinkers when it comes to discussion. All topics always go off-topic. Pretending they don't is the problem. I say, as long as it generates some (even silly) interest ... let 'er rip!
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GRAMMAR. The only (there were probably more) practical application I recall when it comes to parsing sentences etc. came when I took a language test in the army. The test consisted of a made-up language. On page one (and I'm remembering this only roughly), there were a series of nouns and rules related to them. Page two consisted of questions that related to those nouns. Page three consisted of verbs and rules that affected them. Page four consisted of questions related not just to the verbs on the preceding page, but also the nouns originally offered. Page 5 was adjectives and their rules. Page six was questions relating to those adjectives, the preceding verbs and the preceding nouns. And on it went, each question page incorporating preceding information. You were allowed to look back at earlier pages, but that took time and you only had so much time in which to complete the test. Luckily, success on the test was not measured by how many questions you completed but by how many you got right. If you got more than 32 right, you passed the test.
Having taken other foreign languages in high school and college and having learned a little about parsing sentences (Gawd I hated it), probably was the reason I made it into army language school -- the single best school I ever attended. Why was it the best? Because they told you what they were going to do and they did it splendidly.
As far as Anthony Weiner and his YKW- I prefer not to look. :hair:
At various levels in elementary school all those concepts that you mention are still taught. When I was a kid, grammar, punctuation, capitalization (and so forth) were also reviewed and taught again in various grades in middle school and even in ninth grade high school. But think about the kid (like me) who was always a great speller. Why does he have to continue to learn spelling when he's already mastered it. I was always great at grammar (although couldn't necessarily state the specific rules). Why should I have to continue to sit through boring lessons in grammar if I've already "got it". Why not let me move on to writing more sophisticated composition?
And by the way, I write fast online, so I don't necessarily use my best grammar here.
I guess I was confused by the posts about remedial classes needed in college. My kids told me that there were many students at college who didn't belong there. They were not trying to be unkind, they just said that these kids were totally unprepared for the course work. My kids were tutors in college and were frustrated by the students who expected them to do their homework for them instead of trying to help them.
My language skills have declined over the years. Some days, I'm lucky if I can string coherent thoughts together. :dunce:
Yeah, I remember diagramming sentences, I didn't find it all that helpful. But maybe for some students, it helped. Is that what you call "parsing" sentences, genkaku? Where did you go to army language school? The one I've heard about in the US, that's said to be quite good, is in Monterrey, CA. That sounds like a very interesting test you took.
I agree with everything kayte said. Unfortunately, it does seem that computers and text-messaging are setting up bad habits in students, and perhaps creating the impression that grammar, spelling, etc. aren't needed. (There's spell-check, right? WRONG!)
The class size issue. During my years of teaching I found the ideal class size was somewhere between 20-24. You would think smaller class size would be even better, but one year when I had class sizes under 20, I found it was difficult to get class discussions going, which really had a negative effect on post-lab discussions. What's more interesting is that -- ALTHOUGH I DO NOT AGREE -- a number of studies have shown that until class size reaches about 40, there doesn't appear to be a negative affect on student learning. Although those studies didn't measure the long-term effect on teacher burnout.
Your last point about text messaging. Just a few days ago I saw a CNN report on a young Latino teacher in (I think it was) Chicago who was having students respond to things in class via text messaging. I was appalled. All I could think of was what it was doing to written English language skills. HUMBUG!
:eek:
The superintendent told me about one particularly tight year at the beginning of which some 40-50 students were jammed into a single class. During the very first meeting of the class, the teacher came in, told the students why there were so many in the classroom (not enough money) and laid down the law ... the teacher realized things were tough, but he would not tolerate disruptions. The superintendent said that halfway through the year, he scrounged up the money to allow the class to be split in two...but by that time, things were running smoothly and not a single student wanted to be separated from any of his classmates.
I'm not suggesting that humongous classes aren't all that bad, but I was interested that someone could turn lemons into lemonade.
On the other hand, the last year I taught, I was in a school in Fairfax County in Virginia...decent school. But I had two low-ability classes of students, one of which was doing fine, the other I couldn't do anything successfully with them. I ran out of strategies.