English Should not be Compulsory in High School

[Minoosh]

I'm familiar with puta. Would puto be a male prostitute?

I've taken to talking to my cats in high school Spanish, circa 1964.
Mi gatita es my bonita! Mi gatita tiene pies blancas! Mi gatita se llama Conejita!
Mi gatita es meowing at me right now and won't shut up.

I seem to remember more of high school Spanish than high school English.

Funny, my first "Spanish teacher" was a 3-year-old girl who would run up to me when I came home and ask, "¿Dónde está la gatita?" I'd say back, "La gatita está durmiendo." Her older sibs were perfectly bilingual, so I learned a lot. (I didn't mind sounding like I was 3 when talking to a 3-year-old, and the cat never corrected me).

I work with Latin American teenagers, need to know what the bad words are ...

The kids from Mexico were slightly ahead in math, I noticed.

 

[Minoosh]

If they want to go into manufacturing using raw materials, quadratic equations will be useful for calculating the limitations of stock say you have X number of one material and Y of another. The point on the graph, after you have calculated your X and Y axis where they cross will inform you of how many widgets you can make with your current stock.

I'm not sure if the complex roots part is needed for that. That sounds more like a system of linear equations.

ETA:

Water boil? I know it's boiled when the kettle switches off - the fact that it's 100C is no use to me whatsoever. I wouldn't put sulphuric acid down a drain for several reasons, chief of which is that it's a lot easier to buy a branded product.

How about the freezing point of water, though? Useful if you are driving in slush.

ETA 2:

Just as well it's an English thread, or I'd be laughing at the word "inculcated". It's a classic example of a word that shouldn't be used, because it's pretentious nonsense that is never used in normal discourse.

Funny, I never use "discourse" in normal discourse.

Inculcate origins:
mid 16th century: from Latin inculcat- ‘pressed in’, from the verb inculcare, from in- ‘into’ + calcare ‘to tread’ (from calx, calc- ‘heel’).

To grind it in with your heel?

 

[arthwollipot]

I don't buy the argument that it is useful to learn Latin to learn English grammar or other European languages.

If you want to learn French, just learn French! It's an inefficient Rube-Goldbergian method to learn Latin first.

But what if you also want to learn Italian and Spanish too? Wouldn't Latin be useful for that?

Not nearly as useful as...I dunno...learning Italian and Spanish instead of Latin!

Just a thought!

But what if you want to learn English grammar??!

Then learn English grammar!

I wasn't taught English grammar! That's the point of what I've been saying. My high school English classes never taught grammar. We were expected to just "pick it up" somehow through the process of appreciating and critiquing literature.

The only class in which I learned the difference between future perfect and future imperfect was Latin. The only class in which I learned what a passive sentence was was Latin. The only class in which I learned how to properly use a subjunctive was Latin. Those terms were not only mentioned in English class, they were deliberately avoided.

If I wanted to learn English grammar (and I did), I could not learn English grammar. I could only learn Latin grammar, and apply that to what English grammar I could pick up naturally.

And this was twenty years before the internet, and my school library's grammar section was woefully inadequate.

 

[Minoosh]

I wasn't taught English grammar! That's the point of what I've been saying. My high school English classes never taught grammar. We were expected to just "pick it up" somehow through the process of appreciating and critiquing literature.

How about in primary school? It's the only place I remember it being explicitly addressed.

 

[smartcooky]

Puto is a bad word in Spanish ... at least Mexican Spanish.

Hay mucho burro un dos tres

 

[arthwollipot]

How about in primary school? It's the only place I remember it being explicitly addressed.

Well that was a long time ago. I believe that I got only the most basic grammar prior to 6th grade. Past, present, future. How to make a plural.

 

[angrysoba]

The only class in which I learned the difference between future perfect and future imperfect was Latin.

Could you please explain the difference between the future perfect (which I know despite never learning Latin) and the future imperfect (which I admit I have no knowledge of at all. Is this a Latin thing?)

 

[arthwollipot]

Could you please explain the difference between the future perfect (which I know despite never learning Latin) and the future imperfect (which I admit I have no knowledge of at all. Is this a Latin thing?)

Future perfect: I will do this.

Future imperfect: I will have done this.

 

[Minoosh]

Well that was a long time ago. I believe that I got only the most basic grammar prior to 6th grade. Past, present, future. How to make a plural.

I remember transitive and intransitive verbs. Was never taught how to diagram a sentence, as far as I can recall.

I was editing something that had a lot of dangling modifiers in it, and looked up the term. Someone on a blog said, "It's not that your grammar has to be perfect; it's that you don't want to write something that's unintentionally funny." That seemed like good advice.

 

[angrysoba]

Future perfect: I will do this.

Future imperfect: I will have done this.

Nope. The perfect uses the participle form.

Do did done
I will have done this. is the future perfect.

 

[arthwollipot]

I remember transitive and intransitive verbs. Was never taught how to diagram a sentence, as far as I can recall.

I still have trouble remembering which is which.

I was editing something that had a lot of dangling modifiers in it, and looked up the term. Someone on a blog said, "It's not that your grammar has to be perfect; it's that you don't want to write something that's unintentionally funny." That seemed like good advice.

Yes, as I said upthread, as long as communication was did I don't really see much of a problem. But when reading something, I appreciate good spelling and grammar as it is less disruptive of the experience and comprehension.

 

[smartcooky]

I can say without any doubt that apart from languages, the only thing I learnt at high school that I've used in my life is typing. Maths/English/Chemistry/Biology/Physics, not one of them has served me any useful purpose in 45 years out of school.

My experience was almost exactly the opposite of that.

Maths: Competency in algebra and trigonometry was critical to gaining qualifications in aeronautical engineering. I needed to be conversant with integral and differential calculus, solving quadratic equations and simultaneous equations.

English: The ability to write grammatically correct English was critical for submitting assignments and writing papers. If the assessor could not understand what you were trying to say, it would result in lost marks.

Chemistry: Mainly those parts relating to metallurgy are a very important part of any aerospace/aeronautical qualification

Biology: same as you, never used it

Physics: Used extensively. Understanding force, mass, velocity and acceleration as well as those components of physics that relate to electrical theory, and the physics of atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity was also a necessary part of my avionics certification.

 

[The Atheist]

ETA 2:
Funny, I never use "discourse" in normal discourse.

I was going to go with "intercourse" first.

My experience was almost exactly the opposite of that.

If you're doing a technical degree, no question - it's essential to do those subjects.

If you have a career in sales, accounting, history & geigraphy would have been quite useful, but the "elite" kids were expected to go down the classical route and I never got near them.

 

[gypsyjackson]

Inculcate is a surprisingly commonly used word in Malaysian English. I had to suggest to colleagues that they leave it out of reports to London, because we don’t really use it in the UK. While some Brits would probably understand it in context, I would guess they almost certainly wouldn’t have come across it before that point. Whereas here, when I drive to the in-laws’ place I drive past two roadside billboards which use it!

As has been pointed out (I thought in this thread, but maybe it was another), people tend to think of correct English usage as what they were taught at school - I would go beyond that and say what they think they were taught at school. For instance, on English grammar, I do not remember ever having been taught it formally at school; rather it was taught through correction by teachers and parents. When then learning French, German, Latin and mercifully briefly ancient Greek, I began to see how some of the grammatical rules were paralleled or not in English.

It wasn’t until I trained as a TEFL teacher 16 years after school that I began to understand the formalities of English grammar beyond ‘it just is’, or an odd feeling when someone said something non-standard.

I think personally it is too much of a generalisation to say I have never used anything I learned at what some people call middle and high school. But it might be the underlying principles which have served me better: Maths and Physics taught me to apply rules and logical thinking, Chemistry how to cover up a solvent hangover, English and English Literature to have varied styles of writing for different reasons, History to apply critical analysis to sources, and Geography for not colouring beyond the lines.

 

[Segnosaur]

It's probably beneficial to expose the student and challenge them to fields they do not naturally excel in, if for no other reason, just to be conversant in matters beyond their job. School is not strictly job training; it seeks to make you roundly educated and stuff. We all picked up far more than we realized. Remember the kids saying 'oh why do we have to learn math, we have calculators now'?

I agree that schooling should expose students to more than just a narrow set of topics that the student finds interesting or useful.

I guess the question is, is english really a good subject to force students to take to give them that rounded education. Given the direction the world is going, some higher-level science or history courses seem like they would be much more useful on average.

 

[angrysoba]

As has been pointed out (I thought in this thread, but maybe it was another), people tend to think of correct English usage as what they were taught at school - I would go beyond that and say what they think they were taught at school. For instance, on English grammar, I do not remember ever having been taught it formally at school; rather it was taught through correction by teachers and parents.

Ha! Maybe it was me (Oh wait! Maybe I should have written "Maybe it was I", or should it be "Perhaps you were referring to I" hmmm...).

"Grammar traditionalists" have been bemoaning the decline in grammar for hundreds of years, from those who thought Shakespeare couldn't write proper grammar, to Swift, to Strunk and White, to George Orwell and to modern day pedants like Lynne Truss and Simon Heffer, despite the fact that literacy has risen over those centuries, and the fact that they mistake "What I learnt when I was at school" for "correct grammar", and their books tend to littered with all kinds of errors which are pointed out by actual linguists.

In this post, I was more specifically referring to people who have somehow made a career writing books about how English should be wrote. People such as Simon Heffer whose book cites his sources of "correct" English as books written in the 19th century, the 1920s all the way up to the 1940s! I believe he admonishes his readers that an adverb should always be followed by a verb, which is a ridiculous assertion, particularly when his book is called "Strictly English"! Ermmm...hello Simon, ya ***** in the bucket!

Here's a good take-down on the grammar prescriptivists such as Heffer and others:

I have been suffering the same painful experience — reviewing the same ghastly, insufferable, obnoxious, appallingly incompetent book. It is by Simon Heffer, the associate editor of the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who imagined that he could improve the world by offering 350 pages of his thoughts on grammatical usage, uninformed by any work since he was in college thirty years ago — in fact pretty much innocent of acquaintance with any work on English grammar published in more than half a century.

The book is called Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write… and Why It Matters. It was published in September by Random House (whoa! that's random!). If you can feel your teeth start to itch as you read his title, don't buy the book. Look at it in the front of the bookstore and then put it back on the table. It really is that pompous, and for true bone-headed blundering stupidity about grammar it actually gives The Elements of Style a run for its money.

I know that a few tender souls will feel that there must be something good in everything, and that I really shouldn't be so negative. So I will say one favorable thing about the book. Holding it in my hands did not make my skin erupt in a horrible disfiguring disease. There. I'm done. Don't tell me I don't know how to be fair and balanced.

But yeah, you are right about people often thinking they know a rule about English because their teacher told them, but then not being able to apply it (assuming they were even taught it correctly). For example, people will think they are correcting someone when they say, "You mean, 'Roger and I' not 'Roger and Me'"

No, it depends on whether we are talking about the subject (I) or object (Me).

It is a story about Roger and me.

*It is a story about Roger and I.

The latter sounds weird to everyone who hasn't been inculcated with the hypercorrection.

 

[Segnosaur]

I wasn't taught English grammar! That's the point of what I've been saying. My high school English classes never taught grammar. We were expected to just "pick it up" somehow through the process of appreciating and critiquing literature.

I had the same sort of experience....

Back in high school (this was in the early 80s in Ontario, Canada), my english courses were heavily focused on things like "Read this book and explain the symbolism in it". Very little attention was paid towards grammar, sentence structure, etc. (past what was learned pre-high school.)

 

[sphenisc]

According to whatever I just read, Puto, meaning "I judge" or "I think" in Latin, and Puta, meaning "prostitute" in Spanish, are false cognates. There is some speculation that they may both originate in the same proto-Hindo-European root, but nobody can ever say for sure (because whatever that language was, it was before writing stuff down was invented).

The problem there is that you've put Descartes before the whores.

 

[Lupus]

The whole English pushing and math reducing is just a thing to try to make female students excel more than their male counterparts.
It seems to me that English should be changed to be more about communication and journalism skills than interpreting novels and plays.
The problem also is that they choose the uninteresting and dull classics which gives students a bad impression of old books.

 

[Trebuchet]

Was never taught how to diagram a sentence, as far as I can recall.

Presumably you're younger than me! I really, really, REALLY hated diagramming sentences.
Can't remember what grade, maybe sixth or seventh.