Life is a just a bowl of cherries

More fun with Common Core.

A few days later, though, the mood [in Ms. McNair-Lee's 8th grade English class] is more somber. In a lesson about figurative language, students are analyzing how authors compare nouns. They're mulling a quote from Lois Lowry's The Giver: [Reading Level: Grade 6] "It was as if a hatchet lay lodged in his leg, slicing through each nerve with a hot blade."

But they're tongue-tied when Ms. McNair-Lee asks if the quote compares two nouns. Finally, a boy from the front table, where Mikel sits quietly, ventures that it compares "hatchet" and "hot blade."

She takes them step by step through another quote, "The rain sounded like bullets." Does it use literal references? she asks. No, one student says, they're not actual bullets. Does it compare nouns? Yes. Does it use "like" or "as"? Yes. They're getting it. Could it be literal? No. Is this an example of a literary device? Yes, a half-dozen students say.

What kind of literary device is this? Ms. McNair-Lee presses. "Simile," says a small voice at the back of the room. The teacher remembers a question from the last interim assessment, asking students to identify the literary devices in the cited text passage. She anticipates something similar on the year-end test. "Simile," she says, smiling and nodding.

Moments later, a stumbling block: No one can identify the verb in a short sentence: "Life is a dream."

Ms. McNair-Lee resorts to a physical demonstration. She calls two students up front and has them stand on either side of her: the subject and the object. In the middle, she's the verb.

"The subject is the one doing the action," she reminds. "The verb is the action." Her frustration is tangible.

Into the Common Core: One Classroom's Journey by Catherine Gewertz | Education Week | Published Online: June 4, 2013

First of all, hoo boy.

Whatever happened to "state of being"?

Or  "subject complement"?

And forget linguistics-based grammar, which was developed in the 1950s, I think, and is a lot easier to understand than traditional grammar. For me, at least.

As far as I can tell, the action-versys0state of being explanation of verbs was always confusing to a lot of students, but it had to be better than "The verb is the action" alone. (Didn't it?)

What 'action' is the verb "is" "doing" in "Life is a dream"? (And yes, the words "It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is" are running through my mind at this moment, I admit!)

If you're an 8th grade ELA teacher teaching "close readings" and you don't know what a copula is, look out below.

Somebody better write some decent curriculum pronto. Most K-12 teachers have come out of the same public school system they are now supposed to improve via close readings of informational text. These teachers weren't taught grammar (nor was I); now they're supposed to teach students how to analyze an author's use of language---?

How is that going to happen?

I'll tell you how it happened for me, teaching at my college. After I was hired to teach freshman composition, I spent hours and hours (and hours) crash-coursing myself in grammar and linguistics, that's how. I'm still working on it. And I started with the advantage that I am a writer who has a Ph.D.; I've spent my entire adult life doing 'close readings' of the kind Common Core is talking about. Thirty-year old teachers teaching full days and raising families at night and on weekends aren't going to be able to do what I've been doing.

I was worried about Common Core giving students work that's way over their heads.

Now I'm worried about the teachers.

Whimbey on grammar

A favorite passage of mine, from Arthur Whimbey's Teaching and Learning Grammar: The Prototype-Construction Approach. I was thinking I'd posted it before, but haven't tracked it down.

When I was in the 9th grade at Brooklyn Technical High School, my English teacher stood at the board and said, ‘Your textbook defines a verb as a word that describes an action or state of being.’ On the board she wrote: A verb describes an action or state of being.

Next she wrote this sentence on the board:

Eating custard pie, Peter is a picture of happiness.

Then she called on me to identify the verb in the sentence.

It seemed clear to me that eating expresses an action, so I answered, ‘Eating.’

To my surprise the teacher said, ‘No, eating is not the verb.’

I protested, ‘But the book says a verb is an action word. Eating is an action.’

The teacher responded with what was to her an apparently clear explanation: ‘Yes, but eating is a participle, not the verb in this sentence.’

I had no idea what a participle was, but I began looking for another action word in the sentence—without success.

Sensing my frustration, the teacher offered a hint. ‘Remember that a verb can describe a state of being.’

State of being, I thought. What is a state of being?

Scanning the sentence to find a word expressing a state of being, I considered happiness. Happiness seemed to express a state of being. I figured that if I knew what a verb was, I would be in a state of happiness. Unsure but hopeful, I asked, “Is happiness the verb?”

‘No,’ came the judgment.

After another minute or so, the teacher answered her own question:

‘The verb in this sentence is is.’

But it didn’t matter. Grammar made no sense to me, and I dismissed it as something I would never understand.

Whimbey, Arthur and Linden, Myra J. Teaching and Learning Grammar: The Prototype-Construction Approach. Chicago: BGF Performance Systems, LLC, 2001. Print. (4-5).

What matters most in "The Writing Revolution"

Peg Tyre’s recent article in the Atlantic, "The Writing Revolution,” provoked controversy among educators, many of whom find direct instruction in writing, particularly at the level of sentences, to be unnatural, ineffective, joy stifling, and creativity-crushing (despite compelling evidence to the contrary).

The article should instead have provoked controversy among linguists.

It implies, among other things, that:

-Many under-privileged children, even in high school, don’t know how to use basic conjunctions like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, and basic connectors like although and despite, and that the remedy includes teaching them the parts of speech.

-Such students also don’t understand that “the key information in a sentence doesn’t always come at the beginning of that sentence.”

The problem is that, except for severely language impaired children (and non-native speakers), these basic facts about the English language are among the things that children do pick up incidentally, without formal instruction, and master well before high school. (Mastering the written aspects of language, including the conventions that are specific to writing, is a different story).

Does anyone seriously think that typically developing native high school students, however socio-economically underprivileged, don’t know how to use and and or?

As for although and despite, while it’s possible that these specific words don’t figure much in the everyday speech of socio-economically underprivileged children, how likely is it, if you said something like “Although the hurricane won’t hit for a couple of days, you should start getting ready for it now” or “Despite the fact that we haven’t lost electricity yet, we might still lose it later,” they wouldn’t understand what you meant? Has anyone even bothered to test this?

The notion that the students in question don’t know these crucial function words comes partly from observations about their written language: “the students’ sentences were short and disjointed” and deficient in function words; partly from their performance on a “quick quiz” that required them to use these function words; and partly from their performance on a task that combined reading comprehension and writing: reading a passage from Of Mice and Men and then writing a sentence based on the passage that began “Although George...”

In this last task:

Many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”

As a linguist who specializes in grammar, reading comprehension, and the mechanics of writing, I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation for what Tyre and others are observing here: these students are showing a combination of difficulties with reading comprehension, difficulties with writing conventions, and difficulties sustaining attention.

These high school students know perfectly well what for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so, although and despite mean, and how to use them. And, as the article observes, “the students who couldn’t write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences.”

However, the article provides no evidence about their reading comprehension—and how many of them, for example, comprehend at the level of Of Mice and Men. While they surely understand the basic function words of their native language, perhaps they don’t understand all of nouns and adjectives used by Steinbeck. Perhaps (especially if they encounter words they don’t know) they aren’t able to sustain attention across some of his longer, more complex sentences. And while they surely could use the word “although” correctly in oral speech, perhaps they haven’t been instructed in the basics of punctuation and sentence fragments vs. complete sentences. All this could result in a fragment like Although George and Lenny were friends. when what the teacher was looking for instead was Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

And all this is consistent with the efficacy of the remediation program adopted by the school that the article profiles:

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children … are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own.

Prompting children to use certain function words, and also appositives, prompts them to practice writing longer, more complex sentences. Helping students comprehend paragraphs improves their ability to write responses to reading passages.

By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella’s lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.

Although ... “hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion,” Monica wrote, “a compound of them puts out fires.”

Unless ... “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.”  

If …  

This was a hard one. Finally, she figured out a way to finish the sentence. If … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.”

Notice that what’s hard about this task isn’t the meaning of the function words and how to use them, but understanding the chemistry of hydrogen and oxygen well enough to know their relevant causal and contrastive properties. The issue is both reading comprehension and subject-specific mastery. But the task is still a good one, because what the although, unless, and if prompts do is to prompt Monica to review the lesson with the specific goal of finding the causal and contrastive relationships it discusses.

As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica’s reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words,” she says. “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”

When you’re prompted to look in a text for the kinds of relationships expressed by although and if, you know that you should specifically be looking for words like although and if. This kind of focus may help students overcome difficulties sustaining attention, such that complex texts become something more meaningful than a “sea of words.”

The Hochman method is a great antidote to the current fads in writing instruction, but not for most of the reasons suggested in Tyre’s article.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

all teachers should pay attention to anaphora

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Morningside teaches students how to read anaphora, and that my own freshmen students seem to have difficulty understanding anaphora.

I saw another example this week (post here).

Some combinations of words are possible in English, while others are not possible. Every native speaker of English can easily judge that ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ is a possible English sentence, whereas “Home computers now much are cheaper” is not, because they know that “much” is wrongly positioned in the second example. The ability to recognise such distinctions is evidence that in some sense native speakers already know the rules of grammar, even if they have never formally studied grammar….”
An Introduction to English Grammar by Sidney Greenbaum and Gerald Nelson

Most of my students did not know what the words "such distinctions" referred to. They did not know that the authors were alluding to the distinction they had just made, in the previous sentence, between ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ and 'Home computers now much are cheaper.'

My students understood the first two sentences of the paragraph perfectly. That wasn't the problem.

They were having a specific problem with the words "such distinctions." They believed that the author had brought up a new issue referring to something 'out in the world,' and they were stumped because they couldn't tell what that new issue might be. What distinctions, out in the world, were the authors talking about?

So now we're focusing directly and explicitly on anaphora in the texts we read.

At the moment I'm thinking you could produce a huge jump in reading comprehension in an awful lot of students just by teaching anaphora comprehension explicitly and making sure students become fluent in reading and understanding anaphora.

I'm also thinking this may be a skill students can pick up quickly.

We'll see.

writing by ear

On the question of 'picking up' grammar through reading, Jean writes:

I think many people--like you--can learn general grammar rules by reading. I am also one of those people, BUT I have always felt insecure in my writing. There are many fine points that I did not absorb and that I make mistakes in. I have also noticed that my daughter, who reads no more than I did at her age but who is made to do a rigorous grammar course, can read at a higher level than I could at her age.

Reading Jean's comment, I'm thinking ... I probably would have been insecure about the fine points of grammar IF I had ever thought about the fine points, or cared. But I didn't! I didn't think about grammar at all, I thought about writing (comma splice intentional).^*

I write by ear. I don't recall ever consulting a grammar book, not once in an entire career of professional writing. In fact, I didn't even own a grammar book until a little over 10 years ago, when an editor told me that all the editors in New York liked The Grammar Bible. I bought it, but I didn't read it. (Hope to do so one of these days.)

I always wanted to be a writer, from the time I knew what writing was, and I was an obsessive reader (and still am). And I simply never gave grammar a second thought. I learned grammar through reading, and I practiced grammar through writing.

I wish now I had been taught grammar -- sentence diagramming in particular -- as I would have loved every minute of it, and I think formal instruction in sentence syntax would have made me a better writer sooner.

But I wasn't taught grammar, and I learned to write without thinking consciously about grammar and punctuation.

Back to the question of missing the fine points: I distinctly recall, from time to time (especially back when I discovered my affection for the semicolon) not knowing what 'the rules' said to do. But uncertainty about the rules never caused me to think I ought to actually go out and look up the rules.

Basically, I had just one ironclad rule: does it sound right? If it didn't, I rewrote; and I rewrote over and over and over again. One of these days I should count how many versions some of my sentences (and passages) go through. It has to be in the hundreds. Many hundreds, in some cases.

I'm sure that, like Jean, I was making subtle errors all those years. In fact, I know I was. After I finally started to learn the formal rules, just 2 years ago, I discovered one in particular that I hadn't picked up through reading, which is the prohibition against placing a comma between an independent clause & a dependent adverbial clause.

e.g.:

I went home because I felt sick.

not

I went home, because I felt sick.

I had never heard of this rule, and never conceived of it, either. (I had also never heard the rule about using a comma after a FANBOYS, or the rule about not putting a comma after "rule" 2 sentences ago.) Where commas were concerned, I had always followed my own rule, which was to use a comma if it sounded right. So sometimes I used a comma, and sometimes I didn't use a comma, depending.

After I learned the No Commas Before Subordinate Adverbial Clauses rule, I started to follow it .... but then, not too long afterward, I stopped. The rule doesn't work! Sometimes a sentence needs a comma, rule or no rule, and there's an end to it.

All of this said, I feel pretty strongly today that I would have been better off if I had learned formal grammar, including sentence diagramming, in K-12. But that is a subject for another post.

^* The fact that writing is grammar, pretty much, escaped my notice.

Magister Green on how the Greeks and Romans taught

Magister Green on the question of whether you can "pick up" the grammar of writing through reading:

Going back to ancient times, the Greeks and Romans taught their children not rules of traditional grammar but rather the works of the great poets and thinkers who had come before. In particular, emphasis was placed on memorizing and modeling one's own schoolwork on the works of past masters. If we accept that students can learn grammatical rules through exposure as opposed to explicit instruction (which I do accept), the fact that schools in general (public and private) refuse to teach, much less acknowledge, the works of "masters" would go a long way towards explaining why students today know so little of the rules of traditional grammar.

I've been only vaguely aware of the 'copy work' practices of the ancients (and of the Well-Trained Mind people), but I've come to be a fan.

I think Magister Green is right.

One reason students don't write (or punctuate) grammatically today is that they aren't spending enough time reading, studying, and 'mastering' important works under the direct guidance of their teachers.

I think there's probably something missing in terms of fluency training in the early grades, too: possibly just basic fluency practice in writing and punctuating simple Subject+Verb+Object and Subject+Verb+Complement sentences. But I don't know.

I speculate that 'basic fluency training' is missing because C. was reading important works under the direct guidance of teachers in high school (though not before then), yet his writing still had lots of comma splices. I asked him how he finally got rid of them, and he said he thinks his dad just corrected so many of them that he finally started to see them himself.

Which reminds me: I need to get a post up on Morningside and "discrimination training."

Morningside does not seem to teach "grammar" at all, really. They teach writing via sentence combining, and they don't teach sentence parsing or sentence diagramming. Kent Johnson told me he teaches grammar terminology after students have learned to write, and he teaches the terminology at that point because students have to know it for state tests.

I don't know how I feel about that. I gainsay nothing Morningside does; I've seen the results with my own eyes (and in a writing class, too). But the idea of 'withholding' or avoiding the vocabulary of grammar bothers me nevertheless. I wish somebody had taught me how to diagram a sentence back in the day!

On the other hand, I may be looking at it the wrong way. The Morningside program doesn't avoid teaching the vocabulary of grammar so much as it delays formal instruction in grammar.

Maybe that's the right sequence. Reading and writing first, grammar second.

I'm going to come back to this later.

can you 'pick up' the grammar of writing through reading?

I'm thinking the answer is 'yes.'

I was given almost no formal instruction in grammar at all as a child, and my years in Spanish class didn't make up for it. Yet when I finally began to learn formal grammar just two years ago, I discovered that nearly all of my writing follows the traditional prescriptive rules of written grammar, up to and including the prohibition against dangling participles.^*

I learned all of the rules by reading. (And writing, but mostly, I think, by reading.)

The question is: if it was easy for me to learn applied grammar by reading, and I think it was, why isn't easy for most students today?

Have to catch a train, so more later.

^* I didn't quite have the who-whom distinction, but close.

palisadesk remembers being taught how to read pronouns

On the subject of pronoun instruction in reading class, palisadesk writes:

I remember being explicitly taught about pronouns and antecedents -- 8th grade, I think. We had to memorize the rule, "a pronoun refers back to the nearest noun that agrees with it in gender, number and case" (or something like that). Then we had lots of assignments where we had to circle or underline the pronoun, go back and find the noun it referred to and circle that, and then draw an arrow arc connecting the two.

It seemed tedious at the time but it cleared up a lot of misconceptions, such as why wasn't a noun nearer the pronoun the antecedent, as in examples like, "Phil passed the ball to Anton. Later, he scored the only goal for the team." "He" has to be Phil, not Anton, b/c both are nominative. Of course if you wanted the goal scorer to be Anton you could connect the two sentences with "who" and delete " he."

Fascinating! I don't remember ever being taught how to understand pronouns in writing.

I think today a writing instructor would probably have to tell students that the "he" in the sentence "Later he scored the only goal..." is unclear. No one teaches the nominative rule today, no one learns it, and no one knows it, including me. I'm pretty sure composition textbooks caution against this kind of reference, and I myself wouldn't use it!

Now that I read palisadesk's comment, I wish I could.

Is this a case of writing conventions changing in reaction to changes in reading instruction?

desperately seeking anaphora

At Morningside Academy I learned that many students have difficulty understanding anaphora, which I am (presently) defining as any expression in a text that:

• refers back to something earlier in the text (the antecedent)
• often possesses a meaning that can't be found out by looking the word or words up in a dictionary

e.g.:

But shortly afterwards both Androcles and the Lion were captured, and the slave was sentenced to be thrown to the Lion, after the latter had been kept without food for several days.
source: Tales of Wonder From Many Lands: A Reader for Composition by Howard Canaan and Joel N. Feimer

"Latter" refers to the Lion, and a dictionary can't tell you that.

Yesterday, in class, I found that most of my students were thrown by this passage. I assume the same has been true of students in all of my previous classes, but I never picked up on it. (aaarggh)

This sentence was a problem, too:

Some holidays are greatly overrated, Valentine's Day is one of them.
source: Hunter College Reading/Writing Center Grammar and Mechnics

Nearly all of the class thought this sentence was correctly punctuated, and not because they had no idea what a complete sentence (or clause) is. (I was pleasantly surprised on the 'what is a complete sentence?' front.)

My students easily pegged "Some holidays are greatly overrated" as a complete sentence, but they vehemently denied that "Valentine's Day is one of them" could be complete because it doesn't make sense on its own. I do mean vehement. I had the same reaction from the rising 8th grader I worked with last week.

From the get-go, two falls ago, when I returned to the classroom, I've been trying to teach my students how to write cohesive prose. Writing cohesive prose means connecting sentences to one another, and connecting sentences to one another means using anaphora.

But now I'm going to be paying close attention to anaphora in reading comprehension, too.

Meanwhile, turns out Erica M. has been dealing with this issue forever:

Catherine, that is EXACTLY the kind of sentence my students have trouble with. That's why I do so many "is it a sentence or not?" drills with my students. They can't tell. Even kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools (especially kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools!) just can't figure it out. They can't separate grammar from context. That's why they write endless comma splices. I have one student right now, a very bright rising senior at a notoriously progressive Manhattan private school, whom I recently spent an entire session just doing "is it a sentence or not?/punctuate the comma splices" with, and the next practice SAT she took, she still got loads of them wrong! I'm going to keep having to write her drills. I bet that in her entire education, no one has ever made her do this. What disturbs me, though, is that her teachers have apparently looked past the problem for years.

and see:
All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

2 + 2

3 factoids:

• Public schools stopped teaching grammar decades ago because the NCTE believes teaching grammar in isolation does not improve writing. In lieu of explicit instruction, students are expected to acquire their knowledge of grammar via reading and writing. Grammar is "caught, not taught." (Phyllis Davenport)
• Reading comprehension falls apart in the 4th grade. The 4th grade slump was identified and named by Jeanne Chall in the early 1980s. 

• The syntactic complexity of the texts children read increases each year, eventually becoming more complex than anything children hear in conversation. This point is reached in the 4th grade. We have Jeanne Chall to thank for this insight, too.

So, starting in 4th grade children are supposed to learn grammar by reading texts written in a grammatical register they have never heard in conversation and never will hear in conversation. Writing is not talking, no matter how smart your parents are.

And, also starting in 4th grade, children's rate of progress in reading comprehension collapses.

Nobody seems to have noticed the coincidence. The National Reading Panel doesn't talk about syntax, E.D. Hirsch doesn't talk about syntax, and the NCTE is interested only in the question of whether formal instruction in grammar improves writing. Not reading.

No one seems to have asked himself whether it was all those precision diagrams of yore that brought children to the level of syntactical fluency that allowed 4th graders to read McGuffy Readers and 10th graders to read Dickens.

Instead, it's been left to speech-language pathologists to discover the fact that if you want children to read, you had better teach them how to read sentences, not just words.

reform writing (Robert Connors on the Erasure of the Sentence)

David Mulroy on 'critical thinking' in the late Middle Ages & 'looking for bias'

The "critical thinking" discussion brought David Mulroy's The War Against Grammar to mind.

I remember Mulroy making an argument that what we call critical thinking today corresponds in some sense to "disputation" and "logic" in the Middle Ages. Mulroy is on grammar's side of grammar, obviously.

Unfortunately, looking at my copy of Mulroy's book, I see that I'm going to have to do more than skim my underlinings and notes to reconstruct exactly what he's saying.

So, for the time being, here is one of my favorite passages from the book: Mulroy on "interpretation by free association" ("making connections," presumably) versus "precise interpretation of the meaning of complex statements." [boldface added in the passages below]

The tendency of modern teachers to disparage the importance of literal meanings reinforces and is reinforced by the low status of grammar, since the rules of grammar play an indispensable role in establishing the literal meanings of statements. Grammar and literal meanings have both become pariahs, and this fact lies at the root of several troubling tendencies.

To a teacher in the humanities, the most obvious of these tendencies pertains to reading comprehension. We increasingly encounter students who can speculate about the "hidden meanings" of literary texts but miss their literal sense. To gauge the extent of this problem, I recently asked members of one of my large mythology classes to produce brief paraphrases of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

I was looking for a restatement of the proposition expressed in the main clause, that respect for public opinion makes it necessary for parties who are abandoning an established union to explain why they are doing so. It was disconcerting that of sixty-one students who tried to paraphrase the sentence, none seemed to recognize its source. Some thought that it had to do with ending a romance. I estimated that twenty-five comprehended the gist of the sentence. 

[snip]

Most disturbing, however, were a large number of students who responded to the assignment with misguided enthusiasm.

[snip]

It doesn't matter where you came from. In the end we are all human beings. Humans are at the top of the food chain, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't respect nature. Because we have one earth, learn to preserve it.

I was taken aback by how poorly the students had done on this test and repeated it twice with essentially the same results. Most recently, in November 22002, I offered the paraphrase exercise as an opportunity for "extra credit" on a mythology test. Sixty-four students of 228 attempted it. Thirty-three seemed to have grasped the essential thought. Among the others war e some more vivid examples of interpretation by free association.

For example:

Mankind is in a state of separation. There will come a time when all will be forgotten, and man will be one with mother earth.

[snip]

These responses seem to me to exemplify a kind of higher illiteracy. The students who suffer from this are proficient in spoken English and can express their own thoughts in writing adequately. They lack the tools, however, for the precise interpretation of the meaning of complex statements. This kind of illiteracy boils down to an ignorance of grammar. If a student interprets the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence a an exhortation to "preserve the earth," then how can you demonstrate the error? There is no way to do so that does not involve grammatical analysis: the subject of the main clause is respect to the opinions of mankind, the main verb is requires, and so forth.

Mulroy goes on to connect "a-grammatical interpretation by free association" with what he sees as a focus on ad hominem argument in many state standards:

By far the worst effect of interpretation by free association, however, is the legitimation of ad hominem arguments. Of all the associations that are attached to statements by reflective judgments, those having to do with the speaker's or the author's motives are the most common. In a culture in which interpretation is typically based on free association, people have inevitably lost sight of the fact that speculation about motives is an invalid method of argumentation, a well-known logical fallacy....Most discouraging, however, is the fact that new state academic standards in the language arts actually encourage students to engage in ad hominem arguments. In Wisconsin, for example, a standard for grade 12 under the heading of "Effective Participation in Discussion" reads: "Detect and evaluate a speaker's bias." And later: "Appraise the purpose of discussion by examining their context and the motivation of participants." California's Listening and Speaking Standards for grade 8 include this: "Evaluate the credibility of a speaks (e.g., hidden agendas, slanted or biased material)." In Kansas, fifth-graders are supposed to perceive an author's "purpose"; eighth-graders, his "point of view"; eleventh-gradesr, his "point of view or bias."

This is not the way to train students to participate in serious discussions. Charges of hidden agendas or biases and raising the question of motives are sure ways to turn conversations int o shouting matches. Students should be exhorted, when engaged in serious discussion, to analyze the meaning of statements according to the rules of lexicography and grammar and then to test their truthfulness according to the rules of logic and evidence, while disregarding extraneous associations. One arrives at truth and maintains civility by obeying well-grounded rules, not through exhortations to be sensitive and certainly not by trying to psychoanalyze one's opponent. We cannot have good conversations in our society unless we attend to the literal meanings of what we say to one another, and we cannot do that without greater emphasis on understanding grammar.

Or so it seems to me.

Until the moment I read Mulroy, I had simply taken for granted that 'looking for bias' was an OK thing for students to do.

Mulroy opened my eyes. Then, when I visited the Cambridge Pre-U course, I saw the fallacy of "looking for bias" in action. "Looking for bias" when you lack background knowledge easily turns into an exercise in being - or becoming - biased yourself.

One group of students in the class, whose Google search had turned up an article in Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, reported that: "Since this is an article in a newspaper in Israel, it might be biased against Arabs."

No one present challenged this reasonable-sounding observation, including the two teachers, and I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Is it OK to assume that any news article written by any Israeli reporter should be suspected of bias against Arabs?

Really?

The answer seemed to be 'yes,' and to me that 'yes' comes pretty close to being an expression of (unintended) bias against Israelis.

So I'm off the boat when it comes to looking for bias, etc. Looking for logical fallacies and the like is another matter -- although I suspect it's more valuable for students to look for logical fallacies in their own work than in the work of others.

Setting aside the basic question of civil discourse, however, Mulroy is right: students need a great deal of help throughout their educations in reaching a precise interpretation of the meaning of complex statements.

I suspect most college-level instructors, not to mention SAT critical reading tutors, would agree.

Mooping the lady (& children with ADHD)

Two-year olds can tell the difference between "the lady mooped my brother" and "the lady and my brother mooped!" (pdf file)

I love that.

Meanwhile, people with Parkinson's can have trouble understanding sentences like:

"The king that is pulled by the cook is short." (pdf file)

The words "That is pulled by the cook" are a "center-embedded" relative clause.

I'm intrigued by the Parkinson's research because Parkinson's and ADHD both involve dopamine deficits and problems in "set-shifting"— and impaired set-shifting appears to be the stumbling block for Parkinson's patients reading about the king and the cook. All of a sudden, mid-sentence, they have to shift off their expectation that what they are reading is a standard Subject-Verb-Object affair. That's where they stumble.

Do kids with ADHD also have trouble reading such sentences?

I wonder.

I gave Arthur Whimbey's zoonoses test to my class two weeks ago. Around 40% of my students got the answer wrong, which is what I've seen in my other classes.

Assuming I'm reading (make that skimming) the Parkinson's article right, the answer for ADHD kids having trouble with center-embedded relative clauses would presumably be to give them lots of practice reading sentences with center-embedded relative clauses.

On the other hand, I can also imagine practice with center-embedded relative clauses making it more difficult for kids with ADHD to read any sentence....?

Is there research on this?

Lingua Links: What is a relative clause?