Mark Lester's Grammar And Usage In The Classroom

In math, the importance of foundations is emphasized in every lesson. As I am often told by my girlfriend, “Sure, I can do calculus, but don’t expect me to count to four.” I relate to nothing more when it comes to my relationship with written English. I can string together sentences and write an essay, but please do not ask me the difference between who and whom, and god forbid I need to use a semicolon. Somehow, I reached my senior year in the English department and I haven’t gotten a grasp on things that are culturally considered part of a basic education. English is a lot like math. There are variables that need to be placed into a formula but we no longer teach how these variables work. In the first chapter of Mark Lester’s “Grammar and Usage in the Classroom” the devolution of grammar education in the American classroom is examined,
These rules of language were stressed among students, with the hope that a solid grasp of abstract definitions would set them up with the tools needed to avoid errors in usage. But halfway through the 20th Century, research on the value of grammar education began to surface and there was no strong correlation between the teaching of grammar and a student’s ability to avoid usage errors, the once strict education structure was dropped. With traditional techniques abandoned, the vacuum was filled by new approaches. Structural linguistics, based around the importance of the way words form sentences, began to take the place of its predecessor but was then quickly challenged by transformational grammar, a more abstract concept than the prior two. With arguments from the structural and transformational side both pushing that the other was unscientific, the importance of grammar was abandoned. Though schools are beginning to reintroduce grammar in education, it has kept a firm separation between learning grammar and learning