MY COLLEAGUE Susan Reimer complained recently that her daughter thought North America was a "consonant," while her 15-year-old son couldn't tell the difference between "there," "they're" and "their."
A lot of parents and a surprising number of educators sympathize. Grammar is the wallflower of American education, standing at the fringe of subjects taught in most schools while its cousins, reading and writing, bask in attention.
Not that it doesn't get lip service. Heavy emphasis is placed on grammar in the Maryland "core learning goals," which require that students know "how words are classified grammatically by meaning, position, form and function."
The Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) tests grammar, calling it "language usage." While Maryland children score somewhat better in language usage than they do in reading, their MSPAP grammar scores declined in all three grades tested in 1999.
The problem is that many teachers don't know how to teach grammar. For many years, as standards were relaxed in the 1960s and 1970s, teachers were admonished not to teach grammar "in isolation."
The idea, says Allan Starkey, language arts coordinator in Howard County, "wasn't to abandon grammar, but to demonstrate how good grammar is used in practice to enhance writing, speaking and reading. Unfortunately, many teachers took this to mean don't teach grammar."
Starkey points out that the new teachers of 2000 are of a generation that failed to learn the rules of grammar in elementary school.
The word "rules" is another part of the problem. A friend recently gave me a yellowed volume titled "The Maryland Primary Grammar, Designed for Beginners in the Study of the Science." Published in Baltimore in 1857, before formation of a state school system, the book contains 102 grammar lessons, each propounding at least a dozen rules.
If you love the English language in all of its complexity, this is a great read. You learn something, too. I learned that "brutes" can only sound vowels, which presumably don't require conscious effort, and only "people can sound consonants." So much for a cow's moo.
As lessons in the primer get more complex, children are instructed to take out their slates and begin conjugating and parsing verbs.
When I described the exercises to a state education official, I was reminded that "parsing isn't an end in itself. It's not an isolated exercise. There's no use in piling grammar on grammar with no connection back to oral or written presentation."
