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Date:         Tue, 29 Sep 1992 18:00:00 EST
From:         "JEFFREY R. GALIN" <GALIN@PITTVMS.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Grammar? Don't do it!

Karen,
        I'd like to echo Alvin's comments, but from the other
perspective.  As a student in high school, I hated grammar so much that
I purposely never learned how to parse a sentence.  It seemed useless
and deadly boring to me.  A good friend of mine and a hell of an
elementary teacher in the Pittsburgh area offers what I think is a good
common sense explanation of why teaching of grammar out of context (i.e.
exercises, drills, lectures from books) is unnecessary.
        He starts one of his professional presentations on the topic of
writing assessment saying:
        Imagine yourself sitting at your desk at the front of the class
waiting for the school bell to ring (or in a college classroom for that
matter).  The bell rings (starting time passes) and two students stroll
in late and slide into their seats.  You know the kind of stroll I'm
talking about.  My friend stops and looks at the audience.  He asks, "Do
you ask your students to name all of the muscles and tendons that they
just used to stroll into your class?  Do you know these muscles and
tendons yourself and how they work?  He goes on . . . .
        While the biological metaphor can only go so far, it does offer
an important point.  And this is something that I state clearly in my
own course description for the Basic Writing classes I teach:  Basic
writers are not basic thinkers and should not be treated as such.
Furthermore, basic writers know a hell of a lot about writing, more than
most of us give them credit for knowing.  It's not a matter of boring
the entire class to death trying to force feed something that they "have
not learned" after how many years of drill and practice.  As
Shaughnessy, Bartholomae and others have argued, each student has her
own idiosyncratic systems of rules and principles.  When students can be
helped to find their own patterns of error (this does not mean the
teacher circling every mistake in a paper--i.e doing the work for the
student), they can begin to understand how their patterns differ from
those that are expected.  Perhaps more importantly, the problems with
error occurs when readers lose track of what is being said by the writer,
rather than breaches in grammar rules.  When rules are taught as a focus
of a course, the message is clear to students:  Don't break the rules.
But when students read any newspaper or major magazine article, they see
most of the "rules" being broken.  Why the double standard?  It's OK if
you do it on purpose?  No.  It's OK when meaning is clear to readers,
when it does not interfere with what is being said, and when it
adds stylistic nuances to texts that could not be obtained by following
the rules.
        So, my point is that having students develop strategies for
discovering their own patterns of error coincides with the reasons for
dealing with error in the first place, readers.  There are oodles of
techniques for doing this kind of work in the classroom, from peer
editing, to check mark systems in the margins of papers, to error sheets
where students collect their own errors, correct them by working with
peers, teachers, tutors, or Aunt Janices, and write their own versions
of rules that they come to understand through recognizing the problems
in the first place.
        Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying ignore error or don't worry
about it because it will go away.  I am saying that formal instruction
in error in my own experience as a student and a teacher bores students
into a stupor of disinterest.  Or, yes, such work can also give
them a false sense of accomplishment.  That is students who can write
error free get the idea that it doesn't matter what you say as long as
it's error-free.  Any version of a "critical" pedagogy of composition always
already points to the fallacy in such beliefs.  Again, I come back to
the place I began.  Basic Writers are not Basic thinkers.  If you treat
them as such, they will perform accordingly.
jeff galin
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