Question posted by: Betsy on September 27, 2003

Forgive me everyone but I'm going to make a bold statement here: I think English or Language arts is a stupid subject!! There I said it. Let me clarify what I mean though. We have to indeed teach them to spell correctly, punctuate correctly, research and compose good writing. Why do we need to have them circle and underline nouns, verbs, helping verbs, prepositions. I've never been asked in my adult life to circle a noun or complete subject. Kids aren't stupid they know when their sentences sound bad. They never, I dare say, point out that they used the wrong helping verb or the like.

Is there any English teacher out there among you that can clarify for me what it is we are trying to accomplish with year after year of "circle the nouns" and "underline the prepositional phrase". If there is something beyond what I stated above that should be accomplished, I'd love to hear it. I know why we teach math and reading, history and science, but beyond intelligent writing... what is the purpose of all the other stuff in english textbooks?

Sorry I sound so frustrated. I've been wanting to ask this all summer. At the end of every school year, we've finished the curriculum but what was it all about...the english part that is. I always feel like we've been made to jump through hoops and I'm not sure of why we are doing it. I like LLATL as it uses real literature to show the concepts at work but there still is things required like circle the verbs and underline the complete predicate. Does that really help in composition or later in life? I know if they don't know this stuff the standardized testing will go bad but what else is it for? Can anyone shed some light for me? :-)

 

Answer:  Not being an English teacher, I hope you don't mind me answering anyway. After all, not many public school teachers hang out here and they all don't agree anyway.

I "believe" that the underlying goals of Language Arts are:

l. To be able to make sense of what one is reading.

2. To be able to make one's own writings clear to others.

I'm not sure why a 6 year old needs to be learning about nouns. I know plenty of curricula start out this way, but I think it's unnecessary at this age. It can be taught later.

Does it need to be taught? Most assuredly. For more reasons that I can think up off the top of my head. One is to help punctuate sentences. A person cannot punctuate correctly unless they know what constitutes a sentence. Punctuation makes the written word clear.

Without knowing parts of a sentence, longer passages of text can be difficult to decipher. I found that my few years of sentence diagramming came in handy when in college (and even still). A really long (compound complex) sentence will melt away into simplicity when all the prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses are deleted--you know, once it's down to Noun/Verb/DO format or whatever its simplest terms are.

The amount of drilling is up to you and what your student needs to understand the concepts. I can't imagine that it should take 30 minutes a day from grade 1 - grade 12 for a student to be able to identify which words/phrases are acting as adjectives. How long does it take? That's the question.

Reading and writing clarity is the goal, imo.

Spelling and vocabulary also fall into the mix. And I've had my children doing the MCP Word Study workbooks to get more experience with words, etc.

Ruth Beechick has an interesting view of learning/teaching. Her book You Can Teach Your Child Successfully: Grades 4-8 is full of common sense. She taught school for years. I can't remember exactly what she said, but it would be worth checking to see if your library has a copy or can interlibrary loan it in for you to look over. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that LLATL is an outgrowth of Beechick's views on language arts--at least that was the word on the street back around 94/95. I didn't think LLATL followed her views closely enough, but I had the older versions.

But you raise an excellent question. A lot of homeschooling books tell you how to homeschool, but not why certain things need or don't need to be learned. The same for curricula products--or their reasons are just more of the same: because it's always been done this way or because the curriculum standards state blah blah blah. That's not a lot of help.

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