It always bugs me to see writing instructors talking about how they can't, won't, or ought not to "teach grammar, yo." This attitude tends to carry over even into graduate school, where the same folks teaching FYC can't use punctuation or even get their pronouns to agree. Sure, we can say, "Doesn't matter--language changes," and so on, but it really just boils down to laziness. "The ideas are great, but the writing is terrible." Hmm...I've never seen this occur in actual life. If you aren't teaching your students how to write Correctly (note the caps), then you're an aneroxic Nazi with bad breath hell-bent on destroying society and blowing up the Statue of Liberty. Burn your driver's license and move to Disney World.

And, yes, I know it's more fun to talk about socialism and queer theory with a class of impressionable young minds than boring old commas and when to use "shall," yet that's what we're supposed to do in FYC, so help me God. What do I care about some first-year student's thoughts on the sexual identity construction of a furvert when he can't even write about it in dactylic hexameter? Whom does he think he is?

It's tough working out grammatical relationships and memorizong all the "vestigial organs" that no longer serve any real purpose, but, nevertheless, you will seem like a complete and total nincompoop until you do. Call me an old-fashioned sadistic old duckbill platypus if you will, but at least I know what present perfect progressive tense is, and it has been improving my life for quite some time now. Really.

Yaar! (Can you tell I've been reading Rushdie?) Grammar be a pain in the arse to teach, and I don't, at least not directly. I agree, if a writer can't punctuate to save their life, no matter how great the ideas, they'll be labled a moron. I don't devote much in the way of class time to this sort of thing, though I do require an "error log" where students submit the wrong sentence with a corrected version when they submit their final revisions. I think this a reasonable appraoch to getting them to recognize their errors, their violations of the rules of the game, and they have a handbook to check the proper way to do things. They can always ask me too.

I think it's a waste of class time to teach comma usage if only one or two people have problems with it. I go over my pet peeves (utilize--yuck! that/who and like/as distinctions, but little more. I also spend some time on effective thesis statements, choosing good words, nouns and verbs in particular, and the Toulmin Model of Logic. Most everything else can be covered in the error logs and comments on essays. I agree that there is little I can do about students who don't read and haven't instilled much of a grammar for their writing, especially in the little time I have those students. In many respects, it's naive to think we can fix all the stuff that comes into our classroom in just one class.

That being said, while I don't do the queer theory thing, or anything particularly radical, I do build my course around some sort of non-fiction reading. This year it's been Tocqueville's Democracy in America because it gives the students something to write about and gives them a little cultural literacy as well. I am a humanist afterall, and since it's my choice what the course content will be, what the students will write about within certain boundaries, I like this cultural studies approach. I haven't chosen next year's text yet, but it will be something easier than Tocqueville. It was too tough for most students and the fourth time I had to read it, I didn't.

bradley
bleckblog.org

Actually , I find teaching grammar is fun. It does involves some intricacies. But, it is really enjoyful and satisfying to solve them. Best part is, you are making some one master.

 

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.