The Grumpy Grammarian

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As I've reported here before, I begin my English Composition class each semeter with an impromptu "What Do You Know?" quiz.  The results consistently tell me that, after twelve years in school, they don't know much of anything.  After decades of teaching this course, I don't need this quiz to tell me that.  Its real purpose is to make these high school graduates aware that they know far less than they think they do.  It does.

Before taking this quiz, the majority are blissfully unaware that they know very little.  Before the scored tests are returned, students are asked to say whether the test was easy or hard.  About two-thirds (this semester the exact number was 15 out of 24) say it was easy.  However, the average score on the test is below 50% (this time it was 45%), and very few score 70% or higher (this semester only one did, with a score of 72.5%).  Only four scored above 60%; sixteen scored below 50%.

Questions cover rather elementary (sometimes very elementary) matters of grammar, usage, and mechanics.  More than half pertain to knowledge that one would expect students to have acquired by the eighth grade.  Yet the class I teach is not a "remedial" course.  Enrolled students have "qualified" either by passing a placement test in English or by having taken and passed a remedial class.  It is worth noting that more than a third of the students admitted to this college do not pass the placement test and are required to take remedial English courses.  (The educationists call them "foundations" courses because, I presume, having to take a "remedial" course is a blow to students' egos.)  One wonders what the average score on this basic test would be in those classes – 10%? 20%? – although all these students have high school diplomas.

As proof that virtually no English grammar is being taught in high school, consider the results for this question:  "A rule of grammar states that subjects and verbs must agree in (a) number, (b) gender, (c) tense, (d) all of the above."  Everyone got this wrong.  Of the 24 students, 17 answered "(c) tense." The remainder answered "all of the above."  One might argue that knowing a rule such as this is purely academic, but I disagree.  Some familiarity with the tools is essential to any task, and knowing what subjects and verbs are is vital for constructing coherent sentences.  So is knowing that the subject is a noun, pronoun, or noun-substitute.  So is understanding that the subject (thing or person) cannot have tense and that verbs (actions) cannot have gender.  It is little wonder that students cannot construct coherent sentences if they do not understand the foundation on which every sentence is built.

Students' ignorance extends beyond principles to specifics.  As usual, nearly half don't know the difference between its and it's.  When asked to circle the correct word in "An essay is effective only when its / its' / it's ideas are clear," eleven chose the wrong answer (usually it's).  Conclusion:  In twelve years of school, they have not learned much or anything about possessive pronouns or contractions, not enough anyway to distinguish between "belong to it" (its) and "it is" (it's).  Someone invariably answers its', and I often get an amusing answer when I ask, "What on Earth is 'its-es,' for that's the way it sounds?"  They say, "That's when you have more than one it."  "Wouldn't more than one it be they or them?" I ask.  They look puzzled, and I start to sense that grammar isn't the only hole in the curriculum; apparently, logical reasoning is missing as well.

Common words such as then and than also baffle them.  In two sentences ("It is better to ask questions [than / then] to make stupid mistakes" and "Many students know less [than / then] they realize"), more than a third were unable to choose the correct word (than in both cases).  This is not merely a spelling problem; it is ignorance of the meaning of two ordinary words that have no meanings in common.  Thirteen did not know that every day is written as two words when it means "each day"; they chose everyday.  (Perhaps they've been reading the signs at Wal-Mart, where it always seem to be wrong.)

When we get to more "sophisticated" distinctions, the error level is even higher.  Twenty out of 24 students said that "The principle idea of this essay is . . ." represented the correct use of principle.  Nobody has ever told them that principle is always a noun and never an adjective or that principle and principal have entirely different meanings.  Many seem to have decided that principal (the correct word in this construction) refers only to the "main person" because they have been taught the dumb mnemonic, "The principal is your pal" – leading them to think that any other use of principal is wrong.  (This shortcut is as simplistic as the "i before e, except after c" spelling rule, which has dozens of exceptions.)

As I have noted before (it's one of my pet peeves), while they cannot make these distinctions between common words, they have absorbed the idea that "it is not correct to begin a sentence with the word Because."  When 15 out of 24 students say that this is true (it decidedly is not true), I sense that this balderdash has been bludgeoned into their heads by their English teachers.  Indeed, when I ask where they got this idea, my students (who graduated from high schools all over the county) say that this was what their English teachers told them.  It's bad enough that I have to start by teaching college freshmen what they should have learned by eighth grade; I also have to "unteach" the "nonrules" that they have absorbed.

While this nonsense is taught, parts of speech are not.  I might reluctantly concede that it is not essential to be able to label parts of speech to become an effective writer, but I do think that all good writers could identify the verb in a sentence.  However, in the sentence, "One of the last writing assignments is the departmental essay," only eight students correctly identified is as the verb.  Of the choices I offered (writing, is, assignments, departmental. none of these), 15 students said the verb is writing.  One said "none of these," and I didn't have the courage to ask this student what he or she thought the verb was or whether this was a verbless sentence.

Pronoun case is a mystery to them.  One question asked:  "Which of the following is correct:  (a) Mary and me are good friends; (b) Sue will be visiting Mary and I this weekend; (c) Both a and b are correct; (d) Neither a nor b is correct."  Only six students recognized that the answer is (d).  The majority (15) selected (b), even though, if we take Mary out of the picture, we have "Sue will be visiting I this weekend," which even the slowest student would recognize as wrong.  Another breakdown of logic is evident in a pronoun question in which I asked them to select the correct sentence from:  "(a) Please send the check to Mr Jones or me; (b) Please send the check to Mr. Jones or I; (c) Please send the check to Mr. Jones or myself; (d) Please send the check to myself or Mr. Jones.  I thought this was almost a gift because, since c and d both use myself and they cannot both be grammatically correct, they had only to choose between a and b.  However, ten students chose c, and four chose d.  (Would any of these people say, "Send the check to myself"?)  Four selected "Send the check to Mr. Jones or I"; therefore, only six got the right answer.  I suspect that they have had drummed into them that "Mary and me are friends" is wrong (which it is) so often that they think any use of me is wrong.  It's far too daunting to teach them about nominative and objective case of personal pronouns because that would also involve (gasp!) teaching about subjects and objects.

I cannot adequately describe what they do with punctuation.  I'll just say that, when they are asked to differentiate among correctly and incorrectly punctuated compound or complex sentences, two-thirds or more show that they are clueless.  They have learned nothing about avoiding comma splices or about the correct use of the semicolon.  That is, of course, because they have been taught nothing about types of sentences or about independent and dependent clauses.

We may safely conclude that they have learned nothing about parts of speech, subjects and verbs, types of sentences, types of clauses, commonly confused words, pronoun case, or punctuation.  (Other deficiencies, such as pronoun-antecedent agreement, become apparent as the semester progresses.)  What, then, have they learned about the grammar and structure of their language?

When I report these findings to ordinary people, I'm often told that none of this really matters.  After all, most people are literate enough to make themselves understood without knowing "this stuff," they say – though this point becomes increasingly questionable as instruction in English grammar fades from the curriculum to make room for . . . er . . for . . . .  I was going to write there what is replacing it, but I couldn't think of anything because professors in other disciplines (science, math, history, and so on) are reporting the same abysmal ignorance in their subjects.