I had been out of school for a while when grammar and sentence diagramming completed their slow death in American schools. It was the 70s, and I confess I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t remember even hearing that grammar in the schools was officially “over.”
But I remember well my own experience of being taught the essentials of grammar and diagramming in the 8th grade, by a classic old-fashioned schoolmarm named Miss Seawell.
Miss Seawell was what we called “strict,” meaning she ran a 19th Century classroom. If you screwed up, she sent you to back of the room. If you did well, you came forward.
Her presentation was something else. Miss Seawell was so good, that learning the trickiest material seemed effortless. Diagramming in particular, the way she presented it, was actually fun–like a puzzle or a game.
Of course, we only diagrammed simple sentences. But I’m a visual learner, and once I’d had a little diagramming, grammar began to make sense. It helped me “see” grammar–and once you can see it, it’s hard to live with heedless misconstructions like:
None of the crowd were hurt in the rush to the specials counter.
The chancellor presented honorary degrees to my colleague and I.
(If these examples look okay to you…please call the nearest grammar hotline for emergency treatment!
So this no-grammar thing…the collective policy decision of teachers to quit teaching it…can it be true? Did it really happen?
If you were in school in the late 70′s, 80′s or 90′s, do you remember studying grammar? If so, are you glad? If not, do you wish you had?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I was in school during the 80′s and while we studied grammar, I skipped a book going from public school to private and I found that no one but the English teacher (and most of the times he didn’t either), ever corrected for grammar. so where did that leave me and a number of other classmates? Fearful of taking a college writing class — where I might have actually learned something. It wasn’t until many many years later that I actually allowed myslef to push through that fear and tackle writing…bad grammar and all. I’ve learned a great deal from many people (particularly Bill) along the way and I have still more to grasp, but I’m no longer afraid.
I was in school in the ’70s and I never diagrammed a sentence in my life. There was a brief period, about two weeks, when the regular teacher was out with a broken ankle. The substitute just gave us a grammer book to work through until her stint was over, but I learned more in those two weeks than the rest of the twelve years.
The problem with grammer is it keeps changing. Language constantly evolves and what we were told was written in stone, um…, wasn’t. So depending on when your teacher was in school herself, your papers are graded differently.
I remember about three or four years that included grammar as part of Reading class (I think 4th-8th grades, 1990-1994, though I’m not sure which years). We diagrammed sentences, had to put our spelling words into sentences (even as late as 6th grade…at the time it seemed pointless, but now I wonder…). In high school I had one teacher who made a point of correcting common grammar mistakes so that the whole class could see how sentences should be written. So there are still a few schools out there that teach grammar and hold students to the standard, but I couldn’t guess how many (I went to public school programs – but I’m pretty sure most of the other schools – public and private both – were not teaching grammar).
During an extended family trip to India, I missed about half of the third grade. I think grammar was covered in this part. Handwriting certainly was (hence my terrible script). Nothing really in high school as I was in advanced language arts classes. I became an English double major by default: all my electives were in English and my other major, Psychology no longer interested me as a profession. There was an English Language class (I think it was called) where sentences were diagrammed. And it was the hardest part of my college career. It was the only B I got in my major all four years. I just had no concept of the terms (gerund was the easiest of the new bunch) and the branches of the various parts of the sentences were even more impossible. I had been using language my whole life; I didn’t understand what I was doing, I just did it. This is what I’m trying to be more self-aware of now as a writer. I even have a copy of ELEMENTS…. but I gave it away to an Irish friend that wanted help with grammar. I think the Europeans (to use a stereotype) are generally better at this than Americans?