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Diagramming sentences? Let's go back to English, period. Then we can worry about how good they speak. Younger people who have been born in the US can't speak English good enough to be understood, let alone all the influx of people who have come into the country and are not interested in learning how to speak the language of the country in which they are living. And some schools think they should be teaching "ghetto speak"! Are you kidding me? Is that some kind of a bad joke?

And we have a whole generation of people who don't have a clue about how to count change. They blame it on the new math. What is there about counting up that these young folks can't understand? Maybe they should take an hour off from playing computer games to learn how to tie their shoes and how to count change.

Jeez. Don't get me started.

Teaching English as well as reading and spelling went to hell in the public schools. I saw it with my children, spaced far enough apart to see wave after wave of academians dream up 'new' ways of teaching basic English reading, spelling and writing -- before we get to the harder stuff of diagramming sentences which I think they threw out the door.

My two youngest were dislexic and ADD. So I returned to the real basics -- Webster speller and McGuffie's reader. Amazing how short a time it took for them to learn how to spell and read well, too. No 'see Spot run,' but meaty sentences and paragraphs with multi syllable words.

When I took some evening classes, it was appalling to realize how poor the younger students' command of the English language.

Don't get me started on the new math, When the fundamentals are not taught in a straightforward, tried and true way, I can't blame the students. I blame the teachers and more so, the administrators. It seems as if to make themselves important, justify their being there, they dream up 'new' airy fairy ways of getting a subject across. And in so doing they are dumbing down the schools and students.

Well, you'd probably get used to it. The shorthand of texting will become the new English.

If you want to have a little fun, try saying "no I don't, please explain" every time someone says "ya know"..........

I agree things have changed for the worst in education. I was a lazy unwilling student throughout my school days back in th 40s and 50s. Despite that, learning must have been embedded in me. Tho I'm not the sharpest tack on the corkboard, I enjoy reading and writing, my speech is coherent, and I'm competent in math and basic economics.....So they taught, and like it or not I learned or at least was given the ability to learn............

texting.....p-shawwww......I have a text capable cell phone--but I don't know how to text and for now I'm refusing to learn....if people want to speak with me they darned well know my telephone numbers....

My phone has one of those slide-out keyboards. I'm a second phone on the bff's account and she texts her daughter a lot; I rarely use it, although I got pretty good at thumb-typing when one of my clients gave me a Blackberry. I don't use the new shorthand much....OK....I did use bff...but we have some old shorthand too...like...'OK' for example. How about y'all, yup, nope (two of my favorites). Do you remember when a preposition was a bad word to end a sentence with? Not any more.

Language evolves; it's supposed to. (There's that preposition problem again.)

God forbid, POM, that we ask students to be accountable for INFORMATION. No no no! Abstraction is the watchword now in education. Essential questions!

Facts -- well, their self esteem might suffer if they didn't remember shit.

Am I allowed to end a sentence with an expletive?

crestofwaves -- I'm not an administrator. Explicate all you want.

Anyone remember Why Can't Johnny Read? Austrian-born Rudolf Flesch wrote a book with that title in 1955 after discovering that his grandson could not read because he was being taught in the "see it, say it" method.

That surprised me. I was taught to read using phonics and I had no idea that see-it/say-it was so old.

I remember the firestorm the book raised and the months of headlines and the many magazine features on the matter Flesch raised. I was eight at the time, so I knew nothing of the substance of his complaints. I was simply aware that there was a book by that title. Within two years, another firestorm would erupt over the launch of Sputnik and critics of education would take arms, demanding that the teaching of science be improved.

My daughter describes herself as "basically, a French and Spanish teacher." She feels it is impossible to teach a foreign language to kids who learned to read English by the "si/si" method.

That, too, surprises me as I thought the method was long ago discredited.

I do know that in the wake of Flesch's book, many educators devised new ways to teach reading. While my own kids were not taught to diagram -- which should be revised at least because it addresses visual learning styles -- they went to a Montessori elementary school and used the Montessori symbol system, which, produces the same results.

I also know that the time my own kids spent in public school that the schools were back tracking on another educational fad: dropping memorization.

I taught SPED math. I argued with the kids to memorize the multiplication tables and demonstrated that my memory was faster than their calculators. No soap.

So, on another thread here, Michibilly argues against science as a requirement. Anyone have the idea that the citizenry is ultimately responsible for the quality of education in their community?

We moved to a MA town whose school system is consistently among the top 10 in the state. We removed the two older kids from the public schools for other reasons. The third was never accepted at the private schools the other two attended but he feels, after having lived in Maine, that he can credit the public schools and me for the fact that at 25 he is asked whether he is a professor. He did one year at a community college (after not attending Marlboro in Vermont where he was accepted) and then went to a trade school for auto mechanics.

Oh....POM...there's that reading comprehension problem again.....

"So, on another thread here, Michibilly argues against science as a requirement. Anyone have the idea that the citizenry is ultimately responsible for the quality of education in their community?"

Never said that. I said that advanced math and science should not be a requirement for ALL students. A general science class is a great way to introduce science and I would definitely accept that as a requirement. Those who do well and show that they are intelligent enough to move up to more difficult classes should do just that. Those who can't keep up in a rudimentary class...maybe not.

Your son the mechanic is mistaken for a professor? Wow...what does that say about higher education in your area? LOL The guy who did the roof on one of my old houses was a former teacher with a masters in education; he misspelled two words on his invoice, and added it incorrectly; he needed a calculator to figure out the 10% premium he added for delivering materials. Hmmm....guess you don't have to be all that intelligent to be a teacher.