Sometimes homework is the most stupidest thing ever.

[conuly]

Ana had a worksheet on verbs for today, the first one I've seen her do.

This is what it says at the top: "A verb tells what people or things do. More generally, a verb tells the action a noun or pronoun does."

1. Ana does not admit to any firm knowledge of what nouns or pronouns are, mind, but it's a subject we can work on.

2. This is far from the best definition of "verb" I've ever seen... but for first graders just beginning to learn this sort of thing, it probably doesn't matter. Except...

3. They were supposed to underline the verbs in various different sentences. And in each sentence, afterwards, we were helpfully told how many verbs were in the sentence. And almost all the verbs that Ana was supposed to identify weren't "action" verbs!

Has to (where dollars to doughnuts she's only supposed to identify "has", although the has in "she has a bed" is very different from the has in "she has to go to bed", which is the sentence she had), is (several times), will be (this is two verbs, of course), be, was.... Do and did I guess imply some action, but really, is a beginner gonna pick up on them?

Worse, some of the sentences had words that are verbs in ONE context, but not in others - "the play" and "be quiet".

The sample sentence lists "can" as a verb. Tell me, what sort of action is implied by "can"? If you're going to have them jump in with helping verbs and various conjugations of "to be", give them a better definition than "it tells what people or things do". Because when you do that, kids expect, well, to see things being done!

Instead of bothering about that, which didn't make sense to her, I told her that a verb can come after "I" or "she", and that if it comes right after "the", "a", or "an" it's probably safe to say it's not a verb. (Let's not talk about gerunds and all, okay?)

Comments

[conuly]

For that matter, unless you're explicitly teaching children to speak in a dialect other than their own (which you should approach just as though you were teaching them Spanish - one isn't right or wrong, but just as there are places where it's better to speak Spanish than English and vice versa, there are places where it's better to speak SAE than whatever non-standard dialect you speak) there's no need to make them learn the words for "those words that can have -ed or -ing stuck on them" or "those words which usually show up after THE or A" or "those little bitty words that we can sorta do without but wouldn't like to". They already KNOW grammar, even if they don't know the words to describe what they know.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I think it's reasonable for the schools to presume that they're teaching SAE whether or not the local kids speak it at home, because in the academic and professional realms, the inability to speak and write it fluently is a serious liability. Children can certainly learn more than one dialect.

True enough, though, they ought not to be told that their original dialect is wrong, and definitely not encouraged to go around correcting their elders. School-talk is for school, and that's the place to speak it; people at home are not obliged to do so.

[conuly]

I have no objection to schools teaching SAE. I have no objection to schools teaching Latin, or French, or Esperanto, or Klingon as the preferred standard of communication with others!

I just don't think they should a. say that a child is WRONG for not speaking SAE b. say that SAE is THE only option everywhere you go or c. for looking at differences between the dialect/language in question and SAE only as deficits and mistakes.

A child who speaks AAVE, or Spanish, or what have you isn't speaking badly, they're just not yet bi whateveral.

Do you know, there's another silly review of "I Ain't Gonna Paint No More" up saying that children should never EVER learn the words "ain't" and "gonna" because that makes them ignorant. I don't even want to know how adding two words to a child's vocabulary makes them less knowledgeable. The ignorant child is the one who, upon hearing the word "gonna", looks around and has no idea what is meant. The ignorant child is the one who, with a little more experience, thinks that everybody who says "ain't" is ignorant, that they can't be making a deliberate stylistic choice or simply speaking differently, and that therefore there is nothing of worth in what that person says. The child who can speak colloquially with his friends, and formally with his teachers, who can speak one dialect at home and another at school, who knows when to use a nonstandard form and when to use the standard (and when to deliberately break the standard for some sort of humorous or home-like effect) is not ignorant.

/tangent

I also don't think that there's any benefit in teaching children to recite "a noun is a person place or thing a verb is an action word". If you have a job that requires you to know this stuff, you probably have a job where you learned this is all nonsense anyway. Otherwise... it's not important. Children don't need to know the words "noun" and "verb", they already know how to USE nouns and verbs. If they didn't, they wouldn't be able to speak at all, and wouldn't that be a pity.