Suppose that you teach a college course in English Composition. You have explained in painful detail the distinction between its and it's. You have given a lesson on the formation of the possessive of personal pronouns, showing that we don't use I's, you's, he's, she's, we's or they's when we mean my, his, her, our or their. You have supplemented this with a lesson on how contractions are formed. You have ranted. You have declared emphatically that mixing up it's and its is one of your pet peeves.

The message falls on deaf ears. More than half the students are still confusing it's and its with alarming frequency.

Would you threaten to fail any essay in which this error appears, knowing that you must follow up on this threat for it to have any impact? Would you need to use a similar threat to cure students of confusing other commonly confused simple words such as there/their and then/than?
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 16-Sep-2007 9:16 AM

I am not mechanical. When my husband became disabled, I had to start hanging all the pictures in our house. Now, I know this is a simple task, but every time we hung a picture had to show me which drill and/or bit to use, which way to put the little black switch to make the screw bit thing go the right way, and which type of molly works for wallboard. This all seemed simple to him because he likes screws and bolts and hammers and he's always used them. I don't like them, and I don't want to know how to use them.
Nevertheless, he was patient and willing to explain the whole process every time we hung a picture.

And the moral of the story is:
As unwilling and untalented as I was, even I learned after five or six times. These people are hopeless.

Schools nowadays have all these neato things like SMART Boards and clickers and interactive games on the internet to make learning fun for kids. Maybe you should try something like that. Maybe a new verson of Duck, Duck, Goose. Or maybe some jingles that they could use to jump rope. Get that blood pumping. Maybe it has never made it all the way to their brains.

Somewhat more seriously: How many times should a student be permitted to repeat (and have corrected) the same basic error before a mandatory "F" is imposed? Or could I put a time limit on it ("After midsemester . . .")?

Maybe, they are hopeless, but what's even sadder is that I am becoming hopeless as well, in the sense of being without hope that anything short of the death penalty will get them to learn the difference between its and it's.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

I tutored a fourth grade girl who hadn't learned her times tables. She desperately wanted to be a cheerleader, so we turned the tables into cheers. We leapt all around her living room doing cheers. That was in 1991. She must be married with kids now, but I betcha every time she has to multiply, she whispers something like, "Gimme a 9. Gimme a 7. Whaddya got? 63!! Yaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy!!!"

Last Edited on 18-Sep-2007 11:07 PM

It's hardly a new idea, but I've had teachers who used variations on the following strategy with good results. If you haven't done this already, perhaps you could put together a one-page (will they all fit?) handout of the errors for which you'll flunk an essay after the date you've set. You could remind your students to use this handy and essential writing guide each time you assign an essay, and offer to give them a replacement copy if they've lost it, or the dog ate it, or it got locked in a friend's car and the friend is out of town. You could finish up by telling them, finally, that no excuses or 'explanations' for their failure to adhere to the rules on that sheet between the assignment of the essay and turning it in will be entertained by the management. That should pretty much cover it. This little ritual should only take a minute or two each time you give an assignment.

I know that, ideally, you’d like them to actually learn the rules of grammar and apply them properly without having to threaten them, but an important lesson about actions and consequences might help the light to dawn for some of them.

Pogo

Others suggest that I should teach it to these college students by making a game of it. Really? And then after we play this fun game, shall we all put our heads down on our desks for a little quiet-time nap?

Pshaw! This is college. I still think that, once it has been clearly explained, anyone who doesn't get it should flunk. However, if I were to give them a list of the ten most blatant simple errors that they make and required them to shape up on these, or else (as Rhubarb suggests), I would flunk nearly everyone.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 20-Sep-2007 6:38 PM

If the first, I don't know what to do. If the second, ask them if they plan to be that sloppy at the drawing board or in the laboratory. They will say something about that being important and this isn't. Remind them that habits carry over! Cite the Pendarvis Theory of Technology.

When I was in high school, every paper written got two grades, viz. C/B or A+/A. The upper grade was for the paper itself; the lower grade was for the grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation. I have heard that recently, teachers are forbidden to mark down for-- well, if the paper is assigned in composition class, bad spelling and grammar must be ignored. Is that nuts?

Pogo

Pogo

Conclusion: Students build up antibodies.

No doctor cures every patient, Mudge.

Pogo

To the contrary—

Mudge, as I understand it, many learning tests have been conducted using as subjects students beyond the primary grades, those who had so far been taught with traditional teaching techniques. The experimental classes, statistically the same as the control groups, were taught using new techniques they had not encountered before.

Improvements in experimental classes, apparently resulting from using novel techniques that pique the students' interest, are well known in the world of education scientists. Skeptics among them quite rightly wonder whether those new techniques are intrinsically better, or if the "novelty effect" is at play, producing only temporarily better results. That "novelty effect" has a more formal name used by educationists.

Some online checking shows that the "Hawthorne effect" may be the term I'm looking for. Googling that term yields a long list.

Last Edited on 4-Oct-2007 12:11 PM

Remember New Math? And Tom Lehrer's comment on it? Remember when the educrats tried to placate the champions of phonics (who were upset because look-and-say had been failing for decades) with Whole Language? Finally, we're getting back to phonics, but with legions of teachers who don't know it themselves.

Have you read The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1996), by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.?

Have you ever read the first chapter of Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel (1958), by Robert A. Heinlein? (Available as a sample at Barnes & Noble. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780345461070&itm=1#CHP might work.)

Tom Lehrer is available here: http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/the_year.html#math My favorite bit of the song:
"And so you have thirteen tens,
And you take away seven,
And that leaves five...

"Well, six actually.
But the idea is the important thing."

My sister the English teacher howled hysterically every time she heard that song. Especially on "Now let's not always see the same hands."

Pogo

To my students, learning to identify subjects and verbs so that they can write sentences that make sense is novel. Learning to relate ideas to one another by using dependent and independent clauses is an astonishingly new idea. Developing an essay by grouping ideas into paragraph units is something they've never encountered before. Even figuring out their percentage scores on a 20-question quiz by counting the number of right answers and multiplying by five is a novel stroke of insightful genius.

Somehow, these remarkable and novel ideas never made their way into the schools my students attended for the past twelve years, so I don't have to worry much about rehashing old stuff.

As for methodology, my method, which involves failing work that doesn't meet certain minimum standards, is a novel concept to many of my students, some of whom have passed without doing any work at all. My technique of giving students a critique on every paper they write is so novel that they are in shock when they get their first essays back. Many have never before had more feedback from teachers than two-word comments such as "Nice try" or "Try harder." I'm loaded with novel ideas such as these.

I also have the "novel" ideas that someone who hasn't been inside a classroom in years except to teach "educational theory" has no business teaching teachers how to teach and that people who have not been directly involved in teaching subjects should not be advancing theories about how these subjects should be taught.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 4-Oct-2007 9:50 PM

Mudge, I guess you still don't get my point. I'm on your side. New teaching techniques are sometimes touted in the professional press before they've had a long enough period for a fair trial.

The Hawthorne effect I mentioned in my previous post sometimes presents a problem to conscientious experimental researchers, including those in the field of education. Is the improved performance of students due to the intrinsic superiority of the new technique under study, or is the improvement simply a manifestation of the Hawthorne effect? Are the students performing better just because it's interesting being part of an exciting new experiment?

I'm not against the study of new learning techniques but, like you, I'm not a fan of novelty.

I get especially uppity about educationists' experimental claptrap because I lived through the era when "see-and-say" (later given the pretentious label of "whole language") replaced phonics. Kids were no longer taught to sound out words by syllabes but essentially to get the first sound and guess at the rest. The damage done to reading and spelling skills was enormous.

I don't know who came up with the wacky idea, but it took hold with remarkable tenacity. Those who criticized "see-and-say" were labeled as old-fashioned reactionaries who couldn't grasp the enlightened methodology of progressive education. Even as evidence mounted that "see-and-say" was not working very well, the educatoramuses defended it. Some still do.

Lately, however, some educationists have been suggesting a "new" approach to teaching reading. They call it phonics, and it consists of sounding out words syllable by syllable. Great idea, guys.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

"See-and-say" was just that--look at the word (i.e., memorize it) and say it. When push came to shove, "whole language" incorporated writing activities. (Can you pronounce "Noam Chomsky"?) If a child wrote (i.e., created a story using words), so much more easily would come the reading.

(Thank goodness both of my sons who lived during those disastrous times had decoded the English language on their own long before starting school and were able to slide through "see-and-say" and "whole-language" assignments.)

"Whole language" sequed into "writing phonetically," but when no one could read any of the stories, teachers began moving into the correct teaching and proper use of phonetics.

Last Edited on 5-Oct-2007 11:22 PM

Mudge, for the history of look-and-say, read Why Johnny Still Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch, 1981.

Here are some interesting commentaries:
http://www.edspresso.com/2006/07/why_johnny_still_cant_read_mic.htm
http://highschoolrenewal.org/whyjohnnystillcantread.pdf
http://www.improve-education.org/id29.html

Pogo

I was in the top quarter of my graduating class but they do not give scholarships to M.I.T. for that--not from Centerville High. I am stating a fact; our high school isn't very good. It's great to go to--we're league champions in basketball and our square-dance team is state runner-up and we have a swell sock hop every Wednesday. Lots of school spirit.

But not much studying.

(continued)

The emphasis is on what our principal, Mr. Hanley, calls "preparation for life" rather than on trigonometry. Maybe it does prepare you for life; it certainly doesn't prepare you for CalTech.

Pogo

If neither one works, http://www.bn.com and search for the book.

Pogo

Last Edited on 17-Oct-2007 1:11 PM

Occasionally, I wish we had a satirist who would reduce all these wacky experiments to absurdity by proposing some transparently outlandish new methodology (such as color-coding the letters of the alphabet and rewarding kids for the "prettiest" words). However, that might do more harm than good. Some educationist, not recognizing the satire, might try to introduce it.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

It's already been done:

Cued articulation

Last Edited on 20-Oct-2007 11:17 AM

One day before school, in 1963, a friend was working on a paper due that day and wanted to use a word she did not know how to spell. So, knowing that I had been in the National Spelling Bee in 1962, she asked me. I don't remember what the word was, but it is one of the many English words that is perfectly phonetic. I said, "Sound it out." She looked at me as if she had never heard that before -- I didn't know that she, havung gone to public school while I went to parochial school, hadn't! I asked, "What's the first letter?" and pressed my lips together, humming. She looked even more perplexed, and finally offered, tentatively, "J?" At which point I spelled it for her! A B student in a high school that sent 80% of its graduates to college -- and she had no idea that letters stood for sounds!

Pogo

Pogo

There's a positive correlation between essays that contain these very basic mistakes and those that are deficient in more "subtle" areas. I hypothesize that, for many, the reason is that they don't study anything. Not even the threat of failure can get these students to crack a book. In those cases, they are simply not teachable. One or two may not "get it" no matter how hard they try, but many don't try. Once I know who's who, I just wait for lazy students to drop the course. We've just passed the midway point in the semester; a third have managed to fail themselves and have dropped out.

Unfortunately, many of the dropouts will appear next semester in someone else's class and will again attempt to get a free ride. Equally unfortunately, we have some instructors at the community college who pass anything. The minimum requirement for a C is the ability to inhale and exhale (preferably not at the same time). I've been told by my department chairman that some instructors "are so eager to have their students succeed that they don't want to fail anyone." Never mind that this practice postpones the inevitable failure when they go out in the world and discover that they're expected to have learned something.

We've been doing this for decades in high school by giving diplomas to people who can barely read or write. The practice is trickling up to the college (or at least the community college) level. I can't help thinking that we've reached a point at which it is impossible to stanch the flow of ignoramuses into the general, adult population. Maybe it's only a matter of time before its and it's, theretheir, then and than, etc., become interchangeable because almost nobody knows the difference, and those who do know don't care. After all, the simplest way to meet standards is to lower them. Ultimately, an even simpler way to ensure that everyone meets standards is to have none at all. Our educational system is very close to adopting this system, NCLB notwithstanding – for NCLB is more a technique for evaluating students' ability to memorize facts that can be forgotten after the test than to test whether they can use this knowledge.

Whether or not NCLB stays in effect, I fully expect students' writing skills to continue to decline. Once these skills are utterly nonexistent, I won't give a damn because I will have descended to the circle of hell (or purgatory) to which grammarians are sent and forced to spend eternity making sense out of incomprehnsible gibberish.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 25-Oct-2007 9:27 PM