The Spin Dilemma

Premier Mike Rann said on radio the other day in answer to a caller accusing him of too much "spin"..,.well I suppose you will think this answer is spin any way.
Indeed! Even if a question is answered directly...the spin critics will suggest that you are trying to spin the impression that you are a direct speaker
Damned if you do....
This, incidentally, is why English should do more than just teach grammar. It is more important to know how to decode spin than where to stick your apostrophe!

Historically accurate!

It is interesting tha the national 'debate' (or has the conclusion already been arrived at) about the common curriculum is of different quality depending where you focus.
The Language and Maths areas for example are very narrowly focussed on fairly mundane skills...grammar, adding up, multiplying, spelling...and so on.
The History area is really about evaluative interpretation. Long ago (when I was at school) I remember being told by someone who had not long been out of university that history was not about regurgitating dates. This was news to me. As it seemed that that was all it had been about up until then.
So 1066 is immediately recognisable as a date of significance, and indeed 1914-1918.
But get into it at any deeper level and it is apparent, even obvious , that the dates are not that significant.
They are of course easy to teach!
But what is important is the meaning and interpretation of events, words and actions.
This requires a level of critical skill which is far more important than being able to regurgitate the sucession of British monarchs from 1066 to the present day.

This is also true of English.While I do think that it's important to be able to spell, and to write relatively intelligble English. It's also vital that anyone is taught how to evaluate what is written as well as to spell it correctly.
And not just what is written. But also what is thrust at us in the form of advertising, the values that are promoted through TV and film, and the inevitable need to work out what on earth is the value of anything that appears on the internet.

Lest we think that all problems are solved with rote learning of grammar and spelling, we should I think try to address this some what more deeply and realise that that is only a start.

Maths is a bit more tricky. I am always amazed when I arrive at a checkout and am told that the cost is $7.15; when I hand over a $10 note and a 5 cent and 10 cent piece (thinking I am making their life easier) I am sometimes faced with a puzzled look.
This is because the cash register has told them that the change is $2.85 and they can't always easily work out what they should do when I give the extra 15 cents.
This is very low level stuff.
I think Maths is also evaluative. Statistics are used widely, but which of us can adequately assess what we are told unless we can sort the wheat from the chaff. (don't even start me about the use of metaphor!!)

What is literary truth?

The Australian continues its war against teachers of English. Justine Ferrari can scarcely hide her indignation in a front page piece today (28/2/09) this is followed up by editorial comment which suggests that professional teachers of English have (once again) got it wrong. We are of course entitled to our opinions, though Ferrari's article purports (and I use that word advisedly!) to an objectivity which is tainted with snide comment and emphatic utterance which hardly renders it impartial.
The thrust?
In discussing the national curriculum English teachers want us to recognise that the teaching of literature is inherently a political act. This Marxist view has undoubtedlyt an element of truth.
When you think back to what you were required to read at school, at the very least we should all recognise that we were being given a world-view which was the political correctness of the time.
Not all of this is bad?
But what I think the English teachers are suggesting is that kids read cultural values outside the bounds of literature. Indeed kids don't read anything approaching 'literature'. They do web-surf, they do watch music videos, anime, youtube and so on.
If they were to leave school not being able to evaluate this populist material they are far more vulnerable than if they have never read Great Expectations or even watched youtube about it!!
TheAustralian also takes opportunity to whine about the teaching of grammar ( I have blogged before)
I have mixed feeling about this, but I am most concerned about the fact that the constant demand to "teach grammar" is not about addressing understanding but about doing something manageable. It is not an exercise in education, it is an exercise in control (pretty Marxist sort of stuff ehhh?).
I am not convinced that understanding what an adverbial clause is necessarily contributes to understanding.
I do think that spelling is important, though meaning is more important.
It is important to be able to read critically and to be able to address issues...this is not about parsing sentences and so much of what passes for grammar.
We need to recognise that grammar is the servant of language and not the end.

What education might be for?

My contribution to the wit of the 20th century was "Anglicans like to be told what to do so that they can go ahead and not do it"
I try to not tell people what to do (some would laugh) and this worries some people. We work the education system in such a way that we get good at discerning what bring the teacher's or authority figure's approval, so when we are deliberately not told it can be alarming.
Janet Albrechtsen, the rightist commentator, writing in The Australian this week reminds us that education should be about teaching kids to sift what they are taught so that they can detect the teacher's bias. This is not dissimilar to my own goal, (rather unusual for me to agree with Ms Albrechtsen). I don't want people to believe what I believe, I want them to respoect what I believe but to make up their own minds.
The ongoing grammar debate might have something of this. The trouble is that people want to be told what to do....how easy it is to just assume that there is a set of rules. This is the great flaw, grammar is much more fluid than that.
The rules by and large are not absolute, the only given is that you need to be understood. So accurate spelling is probably more important than meticulous sentence structure.
But if I write that chocolate pudding is deeeelishus, you probably know what I mean.
We make absolute rules...no prepositions at the end of sentences....which don't make the slightest biut of difference (and it is now widely regarded that this rule is more breached than kept).
What about split infinitives? Most people don't have a clue about this ...and although each year ay Synod we used to count up their number, I would like to also contend that this rule is more subtle than it is often given credit for....(did you even notice that I split the infinitive in that last sentence?) viz: to also contend has a slightly different meaning from 'I would like also to contend' or 'to contend also'...'to anxiously deny' (don't you think dear reader) is different from 'to deny anxiously' or 'anxiously to deny'.
The point? People shoudl be being taught to think not to regurgitate!!

Grammar (iii)

During my fairly limited language education, I am rather glad that I had a good grasp of grammar as a result of being at school in the 50s and 60s.

For my sins I have been formally exposed to the teaching of French, German, New Testament Greek, Biblical Hebrew and I have had cause to try and teach myself a little bit of Italian, Latin and Bahasa Indonesia.

It would seem to be fairly apparent that just to get into language you have to understand how you name things (nouns); how they act (verbs); and how they might be qualified (adjectives and adverbs); you probably need to know who owns what (possessives and genitives); and have some idea about what time it is (tense).

This is a fairly significant syllabus, even if it is fairly minimal.

I am not so convinced that you need to understand about gerunds, adverbial participles, the future perfect, and other ephemera...you do need to know about how to find out about this stuff...but hours of classroom time, that should also be involved in encouraging the appreciation of literature, developing the ability to evaluate written and spoken language...should not be being wasted (now that phrase/clause is a grammatical nightmare!) on rote learning only.

Grammar (ii)

I asked the question in the last post about how you could teach a language without the grammatical super-structure. The answer of course is ... the same way we teach swimming.... by immersion.
There are plenty of humble folk who have little or no education whose livelihoods depend on speaking a language other than their native tongue. The modestly educated street merchants of an island such as our near neighbour (no, not Tasmania) Bali seem to do quite well. Most ordinary folk in that place have limited education, and many have good command of not just English but also Bahasa Malaysia, and even Japanese.
Not all,but many.
Occupying soldiers pick up working language, though often with awful mispronunciations like danke schön...we have Elvis to thank for Danke Shane! I suspect... which makes every person who has ever learned German shudder (see here) but by and large they don't read novels or poetry!
What you are doomed to experience if your knowledge of grammar is non-existent is the continuing risk of being misunderstood, and the likelihood that you will get stuck at a very elementary level.

The Prose and Konns of Grammar (i)

I will try not to make any grammatical mistakes in this post, but these days my fingers rather do what they want!
I have mixed feelings about the current focus on the reintroduction of intensive grammar into the curriculum.
First, as a former teacher of English, I am conscious of the fact that much of what is said is true about kids not having a clue about grammar. This may not matter much, as long as the common or plain meaning is clear.
I became quite obsessive about the apostrophe, but I think now (if signwriting is anything to go by) that is a lost cause. The rule now seems to be .... if in doubt put an apostrophe in just in case!
What about things like this quickly gleaned from the web:
Ladie's Restroom; Christian's Love Sarah Palin;Your invited; You're car; Your fat!...well its/it's a never ending list. Sometimes meaning is ambiguous but not usually life threateningly so.
Second,I know ( and was talking about this to someone of the same age the other day) at least half of our English time in First and Second Year Grammar School (year 7,8,9) was spent 'parsing' sentences. We used to rule up columns like the modern day spreadsheets and parse "The cat sat on the mat"
Subject: The Cat, verb: sat (past tense) Predicate: on the mat
This could be more complex the predicate could be understood to be in the accusative case, there was a preposition 'on' which governed the accusative...
The point of my conversation of days ago was that never....and I mean NEVER...since I was 14 have I had cause to parse a sentence.
Even those people who never really got parsing, apparently manage to communicate quite well.
Third, though, my principle reservation is about the teaching of LOTE (Languages other than English).
How on earth do you begin to teach a language if you can't have a super-structure?
I shall blog on this later.....