by Julia Sneden
Subordination trees, Wikimedia Commons
Pronouns, pronouns, pronouns: does no one these days teach youngsters how to use them?
The other day a bemused friend quoted from a sweet letter she had received:
“Just seeing your face at Mike and I’s wedding…”
Unbelievable, you say? Even more unbelievable is the fact that the writer is a graduate student at a major university. The child obviously doesn’t lack brains; what she lacks is proper training in the use of her native tongue. And, perhaps, an introduction to the word “our,” which would have been a quick rescue as well as referencing what the ceremony had been all about.
Had the young woman been writing on her computer, not by hand as etiquette demands, the letter would have been less charming but more grammatically correct, since spell-check would doubtless have caught her error.1. Of course that wouldn’t prevent her from hitting the “Ignore” button and leaving it as is, but let’s give her and spell-check the benefit of that doubt.
In fact, spell-check may prove a better instructor than many of the elementary school teachers turned out by our universities. Back in the ‘50’s, my mother made quite a bit of pocket money by correcting the dissertations of graduate students seeking doctorates in Education. Her efforts often went beyond merely correcting grammar, because many of those students lacked the ability to present their ideas logically, in clear prose. The writers tended to use big words, but unfortunately they often didn’t use them correctly in either syntax or meaning. Mother tacked a sign saying “Eschew Obfuscation” over her desk. She was rarely asked what it meant.
Somehow we have forgotten how to teach grammar using simple, clear rules. When I was young, we were introduced to the difference between subjective and objective and possessive pronouns at an early age. I remember my fourth grade teacher parsing the subjective pronouns with us: “I, you, he-she-it; we, you, they,” and then demonstrating how and where to use them in a sentence.
After a few days of that, there was literally no chance that any of us would begin a sentence using “Her and me went to the store,” because we were well aware that her and me weren’t subject material. Trickier to handle were cases where one needed two objective pronouns, but Miss Bartram had a quick remedy for our confusions there. If we didn’t know which case to use in a sentence like “The teacher gave Maddy and (I? me?) a lecture,” she said to drop “Maddy” from the sentence and listen to it in our minds: “She gave I a lecture” was obviously not something we’d say.
In this day and age, I’m not sure that strategy would work (see “Mike and I’s wedding” above), but it has worked for me for all the years since I was nine.
The structure of our language receives little attention nowadays, perhaps because the teachers themselves have had little exposure to its rules. Our grandparents were drilled, as was I, on things like case and tense and the voice of verbs. That rarely happens today.
Learning about English grammar first was a big help when I began to study a foreign language. These days, learning a foreign language is about the only way kids discover English grammar, a true back-formation of grammatical concepts that probably doubles the difficulty for the teachers of foreign languages.
There is little direct teaching of the structure of the English language now. Instead, teachers emphasize things that can be easily checked, i.e. tests using right-wrong answers which a teacher can grade quickly. This approach favors things like spelling tests, or tests that offer true/false answers as opposed to open-ended essays. The kind of testing that asks students to memorize facts does little to encourage logical thinking, or critical skills, or the organization and clarity of written response.
Prepping kids for the weekly Friday spelling test can, of course, be excused on the basis that English is the devil’s own language when it comes to spelling. Our native tongue is a polyglot, with words borrowed wholesale from just about every other language in the world. This causes hundreds of exceptions to what should be the simple rules of phonics. These days, teachers refer to such words as “rule-breakers” or “outlaw words,” in an effort to identify them and make memorizing them a bit of challenging fun for the children.
Perhaps it is time to throw in the towel and move to true phonetic spelling, as the Russians did by fiat in 1920. That threw the old folks for a loop, but by golly, anyone who learns the phonics of the Russian alphabet today can pronounce the words aloud, even if they don’t know the meaning. And you’d better believe that Russian children are good spellers.
Again, it may be Spell-check that leads us to phonetic spelling, although it often doesn’t catch misspelled homonyms, accepting bear for bare, for example. We will have to hone our skills in interpreting context, unless some genius will come up with an easy way to differentiate being bare from seeing a bare. Until then, as long as we’re without phonetic spelling, we surely need to proof-read what we’ve written very carefully before we hit “PRINT.”
It is long past time for those who certify elementary school teachers to insist that school teachers themselves speak and write correct English. I know of a third grade teacher who taught her class that “it’s” was a possessive pronoun. I shudder to think how many of her students to this day use “it’s” incorrectly. My memory from 1945 hears to this day dear Miss Bartram’s chanted mantra of: “The meaning of ‘I-T-apostrophe-S’ is always, exclusively, and only-ever: ‘it is.’”
Tell that to spell-check.
Teaching grammar is not an impossible task. If Miss Bartram could handle a class of 35 squirmy nine-year-olds back in 1945, teachers today should be able to manage it too, even without their electronic whiz-bangs. But that won’t happen until we take a few steps back and teach the teachers of our teachers the English language.
1. I take it back. In typing this, spell-check did indeed intervene. Its suggestion to replace “I’s” was “I am.” A fat lot of help that was!
©2010 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
