NEW YORK - The third-graders at P.S. 277 in Brooklyn twist upward in their seats, hands fluttering on outstretched arms like flags atop a pole.
As teacher Janet Kennedy recognizes them, they march in turn to the blackboard, drawing a collection of lines and connecting dots that would be foreign to almost anyone who graduated from college in the past 20 years or so.
This is no arts-in-the-schools project, or even some beginning geometry lesson. The enthusiastic 8-year-olds are learning to diagram sentences.
In teaching her pupils this long-lost skill, Kennedy is reviving the educational equivalent of a woolly mammoth.
The educational establishment - the National Council of Teachers of English, along with many researchers and curriculum developers - declared long ago that any systematic teaching of grammar belonged to the Ice Age.
In the past few decades, sentence diagrams - word maps that once helped teach parts of speech and other rules of syntax - have been shunned as if they were a cut of steak at a vegetarian banquet.
Studies from as far back as 1963 have told teachers that it is useless and even "harmful" to teach diagramming, or for that matter any formal lessons on grammar.
Children, according to the studies, retained little from old-fashioned grammar lessons, which stole time better spent on reading and writing. What's more, they suggested that focusing on grammatical errors would inhibit creativity. College education programs gave short shrift to grammar - and so, some veteran teachers say, many teachers don't know it well themselves.
But grammar, once the meat and potatoes of any child's education, is back on the table.
University administrators, fed up with the poor writing of incoming students, have pressed the College Board, a Manhattan-based, national nonprofit group, to include a section on writing and grammar on the SAT college admission test.
"About 15 to 20 years ago, it became verboten to teach grammar at the high school level," says Judith Richman, who has taught English for 33 years in Smithtown high schools on Long Island. "At some schools they were absolutely forbidden to do so. Now people are talking about it again."
Ed Vavra, a Pennsylvania College of Technology professor, has tried to sound an alarm.
"The public has to be more informed about this," says Vavra, who started a newsletter on syntax and set up a conference that spawned a national organization for teachers of grammar. "They are hurting the children. ... The children cannot recognize subjects and verbs. They can't recognize clauses."
