Reflections on a life-long process

A discussion this afternoon as we walked down the Bishop's Glen under a miraculously cleared sky had me thinking. Not, on this occasion, of how cold my head had become - it was, we discovered, only 1ºC - nor of how lucky we were to have hiked for over an hour without getting wet, but about education. Again.

Thing is, when you spend 17 years of your first quarter-century in formal education, and the best part of your adult life involved in imparting the fruits of your learning to others, it's hard to retire the bit of your brain that thinks about such matters. And I keep reading blog posts that make me remember and reflect, and then I find I have to discharge these reflections to make room for more development. This particular outpouring, actually, also has its genesis in the English grammar test that was doing the rounds on Facebook last week; I was amused to see that among my circles I and one other judged the test by our 100% scores rather than the other way round.

So I can write correct English by the standards of the past century. I know my subjects and my objects, I recognise errant apostrophes and misrelated participles (all wildly common these days), I tend not to split my infinitives despite the mootness of the imperative that dictates such niceness. And yes, I know how to use "nice" correctly. But why? And how did this come to be?

Of course, it's a process. A lifelong process that began when I learned to read before I started Primary School, continued through the reading before I was 10 of books like "Treasure Island", Whymper's "Scrambles amongst the Alps" and the historical novels of Conan Doyle, was underlined by regular lessons and exercises in analysis and parsing all through primary school and into S1 and S2 and culminated - I suppose - in the mastery of Latin grammar at secondary school and university. I was taught from first Infants by teachers who were graduates - as far as I can remember, they all turned up in Glasgow MA hoods at special occasions - and who seemed possessed of infinite knowledge. (Here I have to single out the unfortunate BSc who took over my class in P7 - he struggled dreadfully with the English homework he set us, and had to seek help from my father, an old acquaintance from University.)

When I think about it, I can't remember ever not knowing how to write correctly - given, of course, that I was of an age to be literate. I couldn't always spell, and still have words that I like to check - but they're few and far between. I used to use "like" as a conjunction in careless speech, and may sometimes still do so, but I can hear my father's voice telling me not to. At dinner, God help me. Did such knowledge make me a good English teacher? Of course it didn't. But it made me a confident one. I didn't worry about the things I didn't know, because I could underpin everything I considered with a solid foundation. I never minded having to check something, or ask the class what they took from a text, because I enjoyed the stimulus of doing new stuff - there was no fear of being outgunned. I never needed to use half of the things I knew, but they were there, in the background, like a full tank of petrol, ready to emerge as a matter of interest, or to help in the delving. And when an earnest child assured me that it was wrong to start a sentence with "and" I was able to assure them that it was perfectly fine as long as you knew what you were doing. That kind of thing.

Now for an admission. Every time I read something, I'm judging it by the standards that have their roots in this past. When someone who is supposed to be educated doesn't know their comma-splice from their dangling participle, I notice. When someone writes about English teaching and does so in a less than literate fashion, it pains me. But I wonder about the future - about whether all this stuff that lies behind my thinking about the language and what we do with it will come to be seen as irrelevant, and if it does, whether that will be because no-one will have been educated in the way that we were.

Was it boring? Did we switch off? Sometimes. But in the end, I acquired what I needed because I attended a selective school, and most of us accepted that we had to learn. Even my distractions tended to be academic, like reading a book under the desk. I didn't meet non-academic children until I started teaching. But here's a thing. A boring teacher will make anything boring. Everything they touch will be tarnished by tedium. Pupils seem to me to be less likely to accept boredom than in the past. They are used to professionally packaged entertainment, all the time, on tap. They know when someone hasn't got what it takes, and they react predictably. Gone the days - happily gone - when a class of forty would sit in silence while the teacher droned through a bowdlerised "Hamlet" without ever giving one of them a shot at the lead role. As for parsing ten sentences in their jotters before the bell rang ...

Happily,  the selection and training of teachers is quite another story.

Talking posh

Just before I left the house this morning, I caught a snatch of Call Kaye on the radio. Should we be insisting that our children talk 'properly'? Sadly, in Scotland that tends to mean adopting a Pan Loaf accent - and, worse, using the first person of the personal pronoun regardless of grammatical context. And so it was, as I hovered over the off switch, that I heard with a crushing sense of inevitability a brief skit of a family scene. Pan loaf Mum, Glesgae Dad, silent wean. Mum: "You don't want to disgrace your father and I."

Grrrrr.


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Location:Dunoon ferry

I and me and chord sequences

Oh bother. I'm feeling a grump coming on. Having spent longer than is sensible reading old green Penguins - see past entries - I buy a couple of books at the church coffee morning. One, the first Simon Serrailler thriller by Susan Hill, I enjoy immensely and am glad to discover there are many more - though a chance conversation with a pal who has most of them leads me to guess at the dénouement earlier than I would have liked (deduction based, if you're old enough to recall it, on memories of the TV series The Virginian).

There is, however, one fly in that particular ointment - a solitary grammatical howler that stabs me to the heart in the middle of such a well-written book. As it's about two-thirds of the way through, I find I'm slightly on edge for the rest of it. Will it happen again? But it doesn't, and I'm glad.

And now I'm onto an American murder story - just started it. The Faces of Angels by Lucretia Grindle. Follow the link and read the reviews - sounds good, eh? Set in Florence, interesting perspective on a murderous attack near the beginning - all very promising. And then the glaring errors slip in, one after another. "I" instead of "me" - that sort of thing. I don't know if I can go on reading it, for I suddenly find myself becoming critical of descriptions, names (Kirk. I ask you...), vocabulary. I develop a sudden loathing for the word "gotten".

I used to get irritated when Mr B didn't like some piece of music because of some poor chord progression or somesuch (many a modern hymn suffers from this). But I shall not be irritated again. Not by that, anyway. Because I am just as bad, and right now I'm sufficiently irritated at myself, let alone at writers who should know better or composers who didn't do enough harmony at school.

As I said: bother.

Not a conjunction

It's happened again. I'm riveted by Sarah Dunant's latest novel and enjoying the intricacies of life in an Italian Renaissance convent and I'm pulled up sharp by a grammatical infelicity, such as happened in each of the other two novels I've read by this author. Each time it occurs in the latter stages of the story, and each time it comes as a shock because of the obvious linguistic skill displayed up to this point. What on earth happens? Does she too become so caught up in the story she's weaving that she grows careless?

I'll come back to this book when I've finished reading it, but for anyone out there who cares about such things, the sentence in question is this: "Instead, he, like she, had been a master of deception." "Like" is not a conjunction - I can hear my father's voice as I write this - and the subsequent pronoun should have been "her" - the object of the preposition "like".

Do dinosaurs say harrumph?

Calm restored. For now.

Well well. The Dunoon Observer appeared today with my piece over which the argument arose intact - complete with the "Ands" which a hapless sub deemed unacceptable. I must say I was pleased to see this; perhaps there are areas in which people are prepared to bend after all. I should jolly well hope so anyway.

Thing is, of course, when you teach in a small community, everyone knows who you are and what you do - and if stuff with your name under it starts appearing in a form which anyone you've taught would wonder at, then it's time to stop. In today's edition of the paper, for example, a swift skim discovered a split infinitive (I know - I'm old-fashioned), a singular subject with a plural verb and an example of the word "nice" in its customarily lazy usage.

But at least it's not under my name. Whew.

House style in the sticks

Urged on by Tim, I was going to blog about hymns. But the grim weather has turned my thoughts instead to the irritation caused by our local rag, the redoubtable Dunoon Observer (and Argyllshire Standard, if you're feeling long-winded). Every second Sunday, more or less, I bash out an account of the service at Holy T, just to remind people that we're still alive, so to speak. I landed this job, along with Mrs Heathbank, because "you can write". And usually, my copy appears more or less as it left my Mac.

But not, it would seem, this week. This week my usual contact, a journalist to whom in the distant past I taught the odd thing, is on holiday, and I was mailed by another. This other informed me that as well as cropping my headline (not unexpectedly) he had "altered a couple of grammatical errors". Dear reader, I felt the blood pressure rise. Tell me, I requested, what you regard as a grammatical error. Back came the mail. It was not, after all, a matter of grammar. He apologised for that. No, it was a matter of "house style". Apparently all who write for the paper, paid or not, have to adhere to this. (First I've heard of it) From this, no contributor, it seems, may be allowed to stray. And that includes beginning a sentence with "and".

Whether or not I shall bother writing for this publication again remains to be seen. But am I being horrid when I find it hilarious that a paper which abounds in comma-splice and other linguistic unpleasantness talks about "house style"? But maybe I've got it. Maybe I need to go back a bit. How about this kind of thing:

Mrs Blethers, in giving her vote of thanks, expressed her gratitude to all who had given so freely of their time and talents to make the event so successful. It was agreed, as the congregation wended their way home, that a good time had been had by all.
(Submitted)

The curse of me and my friend Elsie

I've decided there are some conditions - or is it some forms of conditioning? - which amount to a kind of curse. Nothing as bad, you understand, as having everything you touch turn to gold, but annoying nonetheless. This morning it was the book I'm enjoying. I may well blog more about the book as a whole when I'm done reading it, but for now I'm at the stage where the narrator is becoming recognisable, so that I begin to care what happens to him; the historical setting is enjoyably unfolding in such a way as to convince, and the grounds for the story are beginning to be laid in a way which promises further involvement. In other words, it's becoming a book I'm enjoying, in the classic manner of a summer read which won't over-tax the brain but is at the same time intelligent and engaging.

So where does the curse come in? Well, towards the end of Chapter four, actually. At the bottom of a page, where I read: "Most, like you or I, are content with the hope of salvation, and leave matters in God's hands." And I feel immediately discomfited. I know people have bothers with "like" and "as", and tend to use "like" as a conjunction - in fact, I'm almost used to that in direct speech. But this isn't even that. It's just one of these sloppy moments - and I feel the writer ought to have been more assured. In fact, I feel it ought to be impossible for him to write that. And it clearly isn't.

But then he didn't have my upbringing. I knew from regular repetition that "like" wasn't a conjunction from such an early age that I can't remember not knowing. I think I used to say "like I did" for devilment. But even devilment wouldn't have me write "like I". See what I mean? It's a curse. And I can't switch it off.

I'll tell you about the book in a bit. As long as there aren't more infelicities.

English as she is spoke

My pal Kenny blogged the other day about his use of the word "amn't". You can catch the drift (and the ten comments so far) here, where you'll see that in addition to the "speaking properly" question there is a confusion about what constitutes dialect. I've probably visited this subject before, but feel moved, as I used to when teaching, to revisit.

It is the scourge of this part of the world to aspire to posh talk. Often this will have a southern English accent and a tendency to use the nominative form of the personal pronoun whatever the grammatical requirements of a sentence. I've had to deal with pupils quite adamant that "Mrs X told Jimmy and I not to do that" was correct because their mother insisted they didn't say "me" in that context - it took about twenty exemplar sentences and the removal of all other nouns to show them the principle behind it. Of course, they hadn't been parsing sentences from age seven or wrestling with Latin, poor ignorant little mites ...

But it's this business of confusing grammatical inaccuracy with dialect that is currently getting my goat. "Amn't" is a perfectly legitimate contraction of "am I not" - and the absurd "Aren't I" is simply wrong, no matter how many marbles fill the mouth of the speaker. Dialect involves words like "scunner" and "glaikit" - regional words used in sentences which may be syntactically perfect.

Am I alone in caring about stuff like this? I know that some of my colleagues complained that with my departure from the school there would be no-one to ask about the grammar bits in Interpretation passages - for my generation was almost the last to be routinely educated in this fashion. And does it really matter in the greater scheme of things? I'd say yes. For I'm convinced that a grasp on the finer points of sentence construction is what still makes people accuse me of being nippy (moi? nippy? I ask you!) because I can say what I mean with relative brevity and clarity, and that much never can be obsolete ...

And besides, I can always feel smug when I see others getting it wrong. Or enraged.

Note: There's a wee quotation hidden in that lot. Usual plaudits apply.

Ignorance isn't bliss

I had one of these moments today when you don't know whether to be insufferably smug or deeply despairing. I settled for a bit of both and a curmudgeonly blog post. The occasion of this dilemma was a text from one of my former pupils, currently on placement in a school - not in Argyll - whose name is distinguished by having in it 2 ws, 2 ls and two os. You know who you are ...

Anyway, my FP was in heated debate with some English teachers who don't know their subjects from their objects and were about to mark as an error a sentence in a pupil's essay which read something like "Come to the park with Rachel and me." They apparently agreed it should be "Rachel and I". My FP, undaunted but requiring support, texted for confirmation that he was correct in shrieking at them that the pupil was correct. In a subsequent phone conversation, he reported that he had repeated my rule of thumb about removing the other person in the sentence - a rule devised for those for whom grammar is a mystery, and one which works a treat every time. He was recalling this from at least S2, if not S1, for that was when I'd spend at least a period on testing and teaching this point. I used to tell the pupils that they could have fun spotting all the people who habitually got it wrong - including, I would say, those who should know better.

And I would argue that English teachers fall into that category. Not only should they know this simple rule of thumb; they should know the grammar behind it. Dammit, if English teachers don't know about subjects and objects, and have at least a passing acquaintance with verbs and prepositions, what are they doing in the job? We may never have to teach parsing and analysis to a class of 10 year olds (for I was 10 when I reached my peak) but if we don't know what underpins our language then I believe we're failing our pupils and the next generation will have to rely on foreign linguists to make up the deficiencies.

Apparently his temporary colleagues were not well pleased to be told off by a student. He tells me they went off to look up a book in the hope of somehow proving him wrong. Good. They may yet have learned something.