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The Grumpy Grammarian

Whenever students turn in their first essays in English Composition, I expect to see certain errors – the confusion of their and there, its and it's, then and than, and the like.  Although I expect these errors, it's still distressing to see that college freshmen, people who have twelve years of schooling behind them, can commit such basic blunders.  Even more disturbing is that these mistakes are made by many students, not just a few, and that they sometimes appear in papers written by students who otherwise show signs of reasonable intelligence.  They are not merely typos, nor are they simply errors made by students who are "linguistically challenged."

Consider these excerpts from a recent set of papers:
> "Picture a soccer team.  There dream would be to win there games.  There visions would be there plays."
> "Teachers must . . . contact parents to inform them of the trouble there child may be having."
> "Kids can get better if there given a chance."
> "Its not what you know, its who you know."
> "Actions speak louder then words."
> "There are ways to deal with troublemakers other then [to] kick them out of school."
> ". . . we have to work to strive for better then we have."
and we have this beauty:
> "These kids should be giving [sic] some chances or help in bettering them self's."

Are you worried yet?  These quotes do not come from the same student but from eight different students.  They are not from essays written under pressure in class but from rewrites of papers that were originally written in class, marked, and then revised out of class.  And there are more – some illustrating the same confusion of everyday words, others giving bizarre twists to the English language:

> "Networking with people who have more incite [sic] on your own area of expertice [sic] can only help you up the external latter of success."  [I wonder how the external "latter" differs from the internal "latter."]
> "One of the reasons they act up in school is because they get no attention at home, so that's why they act up in school."  [Welcome to the world of "I've got to make this paper longer somehow" and "the reason is because."]
> "Wealth is past from generation to generation."  [Well, it does come from the past.]
> "When Garland responded that, 'it doesn't matter – they don't become educated anyway', when asked what happens to these students?  Truly may be the worst outlook for anyone to possess."  [Punctuation and sentence breaks are transcribed exactly as written.]
> "If my father owns a major company like Sony its much easier to get the companies' ownership through inheritance than it is making your way up to a CEO position in the company."  [Huh?  But give the young man credit – he got than right.]

Not infrequently, student essays are outageously funny, especially when they blindly accept wrong words from spell-check.  The most recent example is the student who wrote about ghosts and paranoia activities, which would have been funnier if the student's essay hadn't revealed that he thought "spirituality" referred to a belief in ghosts.  (Uh-oh.  I mentioned in class that I believed that humans have a spiritual side, so this guy may be going around saying, "My English prof believes in ghosts.")  That's not what distresses me, however.  It's the confusion of everyday words, of common knowledge that should be in every high school graduate's verbal toolbox, that makes me wonder what in the world is going on in high school English classes. 

Although I bleed gallons of red ink on my students' papers, we are still on speaking terms.  Sometimes we talk about their high school English classes.

Did you do any writing?
"Yeah, we wrote journals."
Did the teacher read and correct these journals?
"No.  He just walked around the class to see if we'd done them.  He made a check mark in his book if we had."

What did you do in English?
"We read stories."
Did you ever write about these stories?
"Well, no, not really."
What about book reports? Did you do any book reports?
"Did we do what?"

Did you cover any grammar – you know, rules and stuff like that?
"Yeah, sometimes, but I guess they weren't really rules."
Such as?
"Such as, 'Don't begin a sentence with because.'  You said that wasn't a rule, didn't you?"
Yes, I did, and it isn't.
"Then why did they tell us that it was?"
[Sigh] I don't think I want to get into it.

You say you got good grades in high school English.  Did you do any writing?
"Yeah, we did some."
And you got much better grades on your papers than you get from me?
"I sure did – mostly A's and B's.  I never got a D or an F before."
Why do you think you did so much better in high school?
"Well, for one thing, they didn't take off so much for grammar, spelling, and stuff like that.  It was all about whether we had any creative ideas and whether we wrote enough.  Like, y'know, if they said 300 words, we had at least 300 words."
But did they mark the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes so you would know that they were mistakes?
"No, not usually.  They'd just write a comment."
Such as?
"Oh, stuff like, 'Good ideas," or, if it wasn't so good, 'Try harder.'"

Did you read Shakespeare in high school?
[Proudly, as if acknowledging a great feat] "Yeah, sure.  We read Romeo and Juliet."
What did you get out of it?
"Huh?"
I mean, what did you learn from reading Shakespeare?
"You really want to know?  I mean – honestly?"
Yes.  I'm not going to run to your high school and tell them to take back your diploma.
"I guess it's that I don't like Shakespeare.  I mean, maybe I would've, but I couldn't understand it very well.  It's like Old English or something."
I understand.  [Speaking very softly]  Just between you and me, I don't think they should be teaching you Shakespeare until you're pretty good at modern English.

I'm sure readers get my drift.  Something absurd is going on here.  When high school students don't know the difference between then and than or there and their, it's more than a little crazy to have them reading Shakespearean English.  When they can't distinguish between common words, it's criminal to be teaching them "nonrules" such as, "Don't begin a sentence with because."  When they lack skill in constructing sentences, it's wasteful, to say the least, to have them writing "journals" that are never read or marked.  When they need to develop some analytical reasoning, it's silly to have them reading "stories" without requiring any written analysis of what they have read.

Let's be fair.  Not all teachers are wasting students' time, playing silly games, assigning busywork, and spouting "nonrules."  Burdened with large classes, most teachers cannot assign and go over a steady stream of expository essays.  And, yes, some students have reached a level of competence with modern English so that they can deal with, and possibly be enriched by, reading a Shakespearean play.  High school English classes need not and should not be a constant regimen of grammar lessons and essay writing.

Yet – good grief! – it is our responsibilty to produce students who are at least marginally literate and don't write their native language as if it were some kind of alien tongue.  Teachers:  Could you get back to basics, please?  It's not fair to the students to require them to go to college so they can learn the difference between there and there or then and than.  Remember that some of them aren't going to attend college, and those who do are going to want, and be expected, to learn something just a tad more advanced than that.  Most of all, be aware that, if these students don't have a foundation in the basics, you are setting them up for failure.  Colleges don't give out degrees just because students hang around for four years.