MY EIGHTH-grade daughter became the object of ridicule among her private school friends because she thought a "consonant" was one of the seven major land masses of the globe.
The poor child may have her mouth washed out with soap soon if she continues to begin sentences with "Whitney and me" despite frequent correcting from her previously adoring but currently very frustrated father.
My son came home from high school and -- just as he did when he was in grade school -- asked for the meaning of a word he just heard for the first time: "predicate." At 15, he cannot tell the difference among "there," "their" and "they're," and I fear for his future gainful employment.
Thanks to the nuns, my husband can diagram even the serpentine sentences George Will cobbles together. Thanks to my mother, poor grammar assaults my ears like fingernails on a chalkboard. We both make our living putting punctuation marks inside quotation marks. But our children cause us to shake our heads and wonder: "Doesn't anyone teach grammar anymore?"
Apparently not.
Grammar, says the aptly named "Grammar Lady," was tossed over the side in the 1970s, a victim of the social turmoil of the times.
"Sometime, somewhere, someone decided learning rules for the sake of learning them wasn't `relevant,' and everything you taught had to be relevant," says Mary Newton Bruder, who answers grammar questions over the phone (800-279-9708), online (www.grammarlady.com) and in the newspaper from her home in Pittsburgh.
"And you couldn't hand a child his essay with all sorts of red marks on it because it would damage his self-esteem," she says.
In fact, the educational research of that time concluded that teaching grammar as a separate subject did nothing to improve students' writing. They were not applying the lessons they learned, and the nit-picking corrections merely frustrated them as they composed. It appears that punctuation and parts of speech were lost in the flood of unfettered creativity that followed.
Ask teachers, however, and they will swear they have been teaching grammar all along and are teaching it now as never before.
Paula Simon, coordinator of English and reading at the secondary level for Baltimore County, says every gathering of English teachers is loaded with workshops on every hot new way to teach grammar so it will stick.
