omg, Grammar is Making a Comeback

October 4 -- It's official.  Grammar is making its way back into the Language Arts/English curriculum.  Woo hoo, I say and I am being totally serious.  I think it was rather naive of the curriculum dictators to take it out of the classrooms in the first place.  Every language -- with the exception of the English language taught in the United States -- is taught by identifying the nouns, the verbs, the direct objects and so on.  I guess the theory was that students in American classrooms would learn about grammar by writing and reading.

Unfortunately, the average American kid does not read outside of the classroom.  The number of children who read for fun is extremely low.  It used to be that kids had their weekends free, so they could conceivably get lost in a book.  But with travel sports and premiere sports and rec sports acting like travel sports, there is no free time left in a weekend.  The other filler is the internet and the video game market.  Why read a book if you can get completely absorbed in your Playstation?  While sports is good for the body, it comes at the cost of less time to develop the mind.  This is clearly a payment that many parents gladly make apparently, because they are totally convinced their son or daughter is going to get the 1% sports scholarships available to graduating seniors countrywide.  But in the long run -- especially in the grammar department -- kids in public schools are grossly under-educated when it comes to grammar.  It's actually frightening.

I am waging a war on this ignorance.  If my students are going to be good readers and writers, they need to understand what a verb is and what a noun is and how they dance together to make a sentence.  They need to identify verb tense so they can have the verbs all in the same moment -- the past, the present or the future -- they should know that the adverb actually needs to be placed near the modifier and not at the end of the sentence.   That's my goal anyway.  With high schoolers who have had next to nothing for instruction, it's starting from scratch.  Oh well.  Gotta start from somewhere!