response 76 of 112:

Aug 22 17:04 UTC 2003

I just finished Composition I at WCC.  I had the instructor for an Lit class
a couple of semester ago and we developed a beginning friendship at that time.
We did peer reviews of our papers.  She divided us into groups and we did
feedback on our group members.  From the papers of the other 3 members of my
group, and the members of Damon's group (including Damon), they are no longer
teaching grammar or sentence structure in public school.  Because of our
friendship, she asked me to do feedback outside my group when she was having
problems getting a group to work together.  From her comments on my papers,
some email and phone calls what I saw was endemic to the class.  She kept
commenting on how easy it was to grade my papers and the fact that I had to
do very little revising.

Even Damon noticed that one member of my group used three different verb
tenses in one sentence.  It was painful for me to have to do just three
feedbacks per paper, I can only imagine how hard it was for her to have to
do 14, and to have to do them in more detail than I had to.

response 78 of 112:

Aug 23 00:19 UTC 2003

Heh.  We just had a talk with a client who paid a P.R. firm to do a
press release...but the P.R. firm clearly didn't know "its" from "it's"
and about half a dozen similar sad mistakes in two simple paragraphs.
The release had already gone out to the media before we got a copy to
put on their web site (& called 'em right away).

response 80 of 112:

Aug 23 19:54 UTC 2003

One need not be a teacher in order to have good grammar.  In fact, now 
being a teacher might, in fact, be a handicap.

response 82 of 112:

Aug 26 18:39 UTC 2003

I only went to public schools for high school, and I only ran into the concept
of sentence structure in two places:  foreign language classes and in my
freshman english class.  In the latter, it wasn't a regular part of the class,
it was a week or two that the teacher added, perhaps in desperation.  Most
of the other kids in the class were stunned, and had no idea what the heck
he was talking about.  I don't think it's any kind of exaggeration at all to
say that grammar and sentence structure are no longer taught in public
schools.  

response 84 of 112:

Aug 26 21:13 UTC 2003

I went to the same high school flem did, and we sure as hell didn't have
any kind of sentence structure in english class.  Come to think of it, 
while my papers were often marked up for having run-on sentences, I'm
fairly sure no one ever bothered to define the term "run-on sentence".
German had a fair amount of sentence structure in it--but then German
sentence structure bears little to no resemblance to the English 
equivalent.

response 86 of 112:

Aug 26 23:08 UTC 2003

I learned lots about English grammar in studying German in high school for
three years. I think I was more ready to learn grammar then than I was
in elementary school where we parsed sentences.

response 88 of 112:

Aug 27 03:05 UTC 2003

You'd expect people to write run-on sentences if they do not do
much writing.  Modern written English style is very terse
compared to typical spoken style, and someone who writes the
way they speak would probably use much longer sentences.  (It
was not always thus, as anyone who's read "Tom Jones" knows.)

This confirms that today's students do not do enough writing.

response 90 of 112:

Aug 27 12:56 UTC 2003

Re #88: I actually tend to have the opposite problem.  My writing often
tends to be choppy, with a lot of short sentences.  Often when I go back
and edit, I combine some of them.

Re #89: I think I agree with what you're getting at -- that English has
been deemphasized in the last decade or so in favor of subjects like
math and science where there is a perceived national security/economic
interest.  Trends in education are almost always reactionary.  People
complain we're falling behind the Japanese, and we get more math;
companies complain that they're getting engineers that can't write, and
we get more English.

response 92 of 112:

Aug 28 00:44 UTC 2003

I've heard it suggested that the reason we have problems with science
education is because we teach it in reverse order - we start with biology,
then go to chemistry, then physics, even though chemistry relies on principles
of physics and biology relies on principles of chemistry.

response 94 of 112:

Aug 28 13:16 UTC 2003

Re #93:
> I am inclined to agree with the people who say that science
> is taught poorly because the teachers know it poorly, and that the
> curricula focus on disconnected atoms of fact rather than the
> fascinating (and romantic) process which uncovered them.

Actually, I have the same complaint about the way history is taught.  In
most of my grade-school history classes it was taught as a series of
boring dates and facts, to be memorized and then regurgitated for a
test.  It wasn't until I got to college and took a class from someone
who knew how to present history as what it is -- a series of
fascinating, often rather sordid stories with real people involved in
real conflicts and dilemmas -- that I really got interested in it.

response 96 of 112:

Aug 28 18:28 UTC 2003

Speaking of chemistry teaching, I think that it is misdirected in the
schools my daughter attended. They made it mostly physical chemistry, I
suppose in order to have things to calculate, but they didn't convey very
well the nature of "chemistry" and the chemical behavior of chemicals.  (I
recall undergraduates at UM in our chemical engineering laboratories that
didn't know copper sulfate (hydrate) was blue, or whether many simple
chemicals were gases or solids, or what common substances were soluble or
insoluble in water, or much else about what reacts with what.) 

response 98 of 112:

Aug 29 01:24 UTC 2003

Heh.  Chemistry is far from the only "science" where the goal of modern
academic training appears to be making sure that students gain absolutely
NO basic practical knowledge or experience whatever.

We've interviewed a few U-M Comp. Sci. majors at work for real-world web/
database programming positions.  The *only* thing that those poor kids
seemed prepared for was spending more time in the ivory tower.