I am not much of a history buff. In fact, history class was always pretty boring to me - no offense to my husband, the history teacher, my good friend Jennifer, or any of my colleagues in my building's history department. I'm sure if I'd had them as teachers I'd have had a different opinion on the subject, and I'm not just trying to kiss up. Today, history is taught through lots of fun activities. This is why I cannot fathom how my students do not know basic historical facts that almost everyone should have some familiarity with. I don't expect them to know dates or specifics, just a general knowlege enough to say, "Oh, yeah, I've heard of that before." Mix those historical smarts with some grammar and you're asking for trouble.
Well, if you've read some of my previous blogs having to do with students at my school, it goes without saying that they lack many things, some of which include common sense and exposure to the real/outside world. We recently have been working on subject and verb agreement as well as run-on sentences and fragments. A couple of nights ago, their homework was a worksheet asking them to take fragments and complete them by adding a subject that agreed with an already provided verb. One of the exercises read, "___________________ are elected every six years." I think maybe three or four students filled in the blank with the word "senators" but many wrote "presidents", "the president" or even "Barack Obama." Not only historically and civically wrong, but grammatically incorrect as well.
In another exercise students had to identify if a group of words was a fragment, a run-on sentence or a complete idea. One read, "Remember the Alamo!" Okay, this one might be tricky. For those of you non-English nerds, this IS a complete sentence. The subject is implied and is "you". The statement is a command that means, "Hey, YOU, remember the Alamo!" This is all beside the point. Regardless of whether or not the student knew it was a sentence or not - NONE of them knew what the Alamo was! Another part of the exercise was to re-write the fragments and make them into complete ideas. Although this particular one wasn't a fragment, some of my genius students thought otherwise. Here are a couple of the choice submissions:
Remember the Alamo from last year?
Remember the Alamo when you go to the store. (Perhaps this student confused a historical event for a brand of dog food, Alpo. Do they stil even make that?)
I just have to shake my head and laugh. If I don't laugh, I'll cry.
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