The education filter

In my college years, I acquired a BS in linguistics, meaning I earned a Bachelor of Science degree and could bullshit about linguistics. At that time, the field of linguistics had a celebrity in its ranks named Noam Chomsky. He was the star of a linguistic faction that theorized about transformational grammar. He held that what we hear as speech is the surface structure of a language. It’s generated when a speaker applies an unconscious set of rules to the deep structure of the language. Thus the undetected form of a language is transformed into its manifest form.

Hardly anyone today knows about Chomsky the linguist. Those that recognize his name think of him only as a social and political critic, and many classify him as a communist. I don’t, simply because the label only leads to false assumptions about the man. It’s true that he’s a staunch unionist and an opponent of large accumulations of private property, but he ardently supports freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and democratic institutions.

He’s very quotable, probably because he never minces words. Here’s a quote on the subject of education that caught my eye and made me think.

I’m sympathetic to this observation, but it shows that even Chomsky, a paragon of rationality, can give in to hyperbole. The American educational establishment is indeed a filter but a blunt, blundering one, not at all “elaborate.” It’s like a layer cake whose layers come from different cakes. Congruity between layers is more often an accident than deliberate.

Furthermore, there is no “weeding out.” Administrators in our middle schools and high schools don’t have special-purpose tools for the surgical removal of students. Instead, they use repellents, the repellents being their own noxious values that guarantee an environment toxic to learning. For example, the curriculum and the textbooks that support it are far more important to administrators than the people they hire. This message soon reaches the teachers. Some are thankful that a lifeless teaching style, subject-matter weakness, blindness to student angst, and an inability to make knowledge relevant are of no particular concern to their administrators. Most of the other teachers curse the disrespect and regimentation. Whatever sense of mission they had at the outset of their careers is tested all too soon. They struggle with cynicism.

What of the students? The inadvertent lesson that most learn is that learning itself is unappealing and pretty much a waste of time. The only joy left to them is socializing. This became clear when many of them were schooled via the Internet during the Covid pandemic. The requirement to learn without socializing brought on a wave of depression. What was the point of enduring tedium when no reward was offered?

It’s nearly the same in colleges and universities. The only negative that isn’t present is subject-matter weakness, but even this is often on display at community colleges. The biggest difference is in the mindset of the students. Many are free of parental influence and, for the first time in their lives, they are accumulating large debts. This is the context in which Chomsky is dead right. Students who can think for themselves will ask whether they’re getting value for money. They will conjure visions of themselves in a job setting or a career. Often those visions are of working in “institutions” — in corporate or government jobs. Some will find these visions appealing; they see themselves accumulating wealth in as an investment banker, a partner in a law firm, or a corporate executive. But many others will have no interest in a regimented ride to a dubious payoff. They want to follow their bliss. They’re in touch with their sources of energy and delight. If they can’t find them in higher education, they leave. This phenomenon was true when Chomsky pointed it out and is even truer today.

Implied in the Chomsky quote is an urgent call for reform. And who wouldn’t ask for the same? Who would tolerate an educational establishment that frustrates its best teachers, gives learning a bad name, and accommodates the fat cats of tomorrow? Well, incredibly, nearly everyone tolerates it. In American society, curricula are shaped by state politicians according to their stance in the culture wars. Their stance, in turn, is shaped by the ill-informed opinions of their electorate, whom the politicians manipulate. These are the same people who elect school boards and school superintendents. This top-down model is what we proudly refer to as “public education,” where there is “local control.” It’s a sick joke.

I want to leave you with another quote, one that’s magnetized to our refrigerator door.

There’s something not quite right about it. How about, “Teaching rarely touches a life forever”? That’s the truth, and we’re stuck with it!

Let a cartoon be your guide

A new school year will begin soon. Germany, France, and Denmark will resume in-person education. Switzerland is likely to do the same. Trump is urging our schools to join in and threatening economic sanctions if they don’t.

Meanwhile, our school districts and teachers unions deliberate. Some have already declared their positions. In my neck of the woods, the San Jose Teachers Association announced that its members will not return to in-person teaching when schools open. They choose to continue with online classes. The teachers in Los Angeles say the same. New York City, home to the nation’s largest school district, will ask students to be in classrooms no more than three days a week. Class sizes will be cut to a dozen people, and that includes teachers and aides! I assume that the students will have online class time as well. This plan has come to be known as the “hybrid model.” Many school districts will adopt a form of it, with differences in class sizes, attendance days, class time, and the number of classes offered. In Portland, Oregon, they plan devoting Wednesdays to cleaning their schools.

We can be sure of three things. First, there will be dozens of different school district plans in America alone, and perhaps more than a hundred across the world. Second, no one knows at this date what the best plan is, not even people in the medical community. When it comes to school attendance and health risks, there is no definitive data. Everyone is guessing. There are both thoughtful guesses and stupid guesses. Third, we are about to embark on the biggest uncontrolled public health experiment of all time. There’s no precedent for this. The whole world will become an open lab, and some of the guesses will have dire consequences. We can’t stop this from happening. The best we can do is to take good notes.

I have no trouble deciding what plan I’d go with. I use this simple rule of thumb: If I’m forced to choose and must do so in a state of ignorance, I choose the option with the least risk. I make way for the intrepid fools who are drawn to risk like a moth to a flame.

My attitude is well expressed in this old cartoon:

So I support what the teachers in San Jose, Los Angeles, and many other cities plan to do. I differ with them in just one respect. I would not rely on public health authorities — a roll of the dice — to sound the all clear. Rather, I’d trust only the trained observers who will document this experiment and report evidence-based conclusions. It will be late this year or in early 2021 before we can stake a claim to knowledge.

Indoctrination

In my last post, I came out in favor of indoctrinating our young. If some of my readers were surprised, they had probably assumed that I’d never advocate something as malevolent as shaping the perceptions and values of children. But let’s be honest. Indoctrination happens, always. It’s an inevitability, right along with death and taxes. Trying to avoid it is not only a fool’s errand but a failure of responsible living. We should not be asking whether to indoctrinate but what and how to indoctrinate, and when to take our foot off the pedal and let auto-indoctrination take over.

The what, as I wrote last month, is an awareness of the historic crossroads we occupy, a regard for each other and for the habitability of the planet, and a recognition that force and cruelty are flawed tactics for resolving conflicts.

The first of these requires us to develop a historical sensibility. That means grasping the inevitability of change, the interaction of human events, and the significance of large numbers. Most children aren’t cognitively ready for this combination until they are 9 or 10 years old. More about historical sensibility later. Indoctrination in the latter two can begin in the first years of childhood.

Modeling

The best way to instill a regard for living things is to model that behavior ourselves. The same is true of teaching the rejection of force and cruelty. Indoctrination through modeling is by no means easy or even natural, but it’s a duty that must be answered, even though it means acknowledging our own lapses. If we model hypocrisy, the results will be disastrous.

Along with modeling, we need stories — stories of the kind that Aesop and the Brothers Grimm told. Such stories can play an extraordinary role in developing the superego. They also let us model the act of reading and offering observations along the way. Of course, age-appropriate movies are also excellent, as they are stories amped by imagery.

Here a caveat is necessary. Stay away from Bible stories! They introduce a hogwash cosmology that children will have to reconcile later, and they set up a punitive super-being whose wrath becomes the undergirding of all moral behavior. Such stuff is mind poison. On the other hand, I see nothing wrong in talking about the parables of Jesus, so long as he’s portrayed as “a wise man who lived long ago.”

Historical Sensibility

The key to explaining this idea is context. History is, after all, the arrangement of events in a temporal context. Sadly, our schools butcher context. They offer up history in disjointed courses, and even then, the courses are limited to political and military history, with a dollop here and there of cultural and economic history. But what about the history of time (a la Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin), religion, government, mathematics, science, technology, economics, ethics, and the arts? All of these kinds of history interact with one another and produce a multi-dimensional picture of humankind across time.

There’s much to say about each of these histories and not much space to say it in, so I’ll focus on just two, science and economics. The history of science has this shorthand: observation -> explanation -> prediction -> new observation -> contradiction -> new explanation -> new prediction, and so on. This process of refinement answers the question, “How do we know what we know?” Because we are living in an era of dishonesty on a massive scale, that question has become urgent in our civic and social lives as well. We can address it only by insisting that historians, journalists, and the mass media adopt a professional rigor akin to that of a scientist. If I were a teacher, I’d raise this issue in my history of ethics class.

The history of economics is about who does the labor; how and by whom labor is compensated; who owns the workplace; how laborers and owners relate to each other, to their communities, and to their government; how much domestic wealth depends on colonialism and cheap foreign labor, and whether the systems thus defined are sustainable. Among the systems that arise from these questions are tribal communism, slavery, serfdom, mercantilism, capitalism, Marxist communism, socialism, social capitalism, and what some call “Benioff capitalism,” named after Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com. Benioff capitalism is a new phenomenon that was endorsed by 181 CEOs at the recent Business Roundtable. It asserts that stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, and communities — are as important to a corporation as its stockholders are.

Our Challenge

It’s a travesty that no public school system offers a hologram of entwined histories as a gift to its graduates. Instead, they get a burden, the burden of starting an adult life barely moored to the past. If the past is prologue, then that prologue is for us a cupboard, sparsely stocked with both truths and lies.

The development and education of our children must adopt a new, methodical kind of indoctrination, one that is kinder, more truthful, and more effective in producing thoughtful adults. It’s an existential imperative.

Why Johnny can’t write

Reading and writing are unnatural acts. They are taught skills, not an inevitable result of maturation. If taught properly, the result is literacy. If taught improperly, the result is semi-literacy.

It’s hard to fail when you teach reading because it’s mostly teaching the correspondence of sight and sound. The hardest part is dealing with silent letters and letters that make multiple sounds. English is replete with these nuisances, but they’re nothing flash cards can’t fix.

Writing is altogether another matter. Writing is an act of building. When done, writers have a construction to show for their effort. It may sound easy, but it’s incredibly painstaking. Teaching writing isn’t just teaching carpentry; it’s teaching architecture.

This post is for writing teachers. The ideas I’ll offer will work only if all the writing teachers in a school system agree to four premises:

1. Writing is a act of building.
2. Writing must be continually presented as building to students.
3. Writing must be taught in prescribed, graduated lessons.
4. Grammar and punctuation should be taught only in the context of a writing construction. They are derivative subjects and never the focal point of a writing lesson.

If there is no consensus about these premises, Johnny will have to settle for semi-literacy.

The sizes of constructions

A writing construction might be one word: Silence. A sentence fragment: (which that was). A simple transitive sentence: Joanie loves Chachi. A simple intransitive sentence: I gotta lie down. And an enormous variety of other sentence types —interrogative, imperative, hypothetical, compound, complex, compound-complex — until, at the outer limits of the craft, you reach this monstrosity: When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Beyond this, there are the long forms of writing: essays, speech writing, reportage, biography, textbooks, narrative fiction (short stories and novels), play writing, and the many genres of poetry. Each of these is an architectural study unto itself. For the purposes of grade school instruction, it suffices to teach the forms I’ve italicized.

Word roles

Teaching should progress from the smallest building block to the largest. That means starting with words, but from unfamiliar perspectives. Students know that words differ by spelling and meaning, but they’re not aware that words differ by role. To say or write something meaningful, words with different roles have to come together according to a set of rules. Scream my sometimes sister me makes is incomprehensible. The word order (syntax) is a mess. But the necessary roles (parts of speech) are present, so something can be made of this hash.

Ask students to group lists of common words by role, and then choose words from the role groups to form partial and complete sentences. You’ll have to start each of these tasks and interact continually.

Keep your introduction to verbs simple by dealing only the present and past tenses, the active voice, and transitive versus intransitive constructions. Handle conjunctions similarly by discussing only those in the FANBOYS mnemonic (the coordinating conjunctions). A deeper dive into verbs and conjunctions will come later.

Word music

From our lips and in our heads, words make music. Just say or think the word melodious, and you know this to be true. Moreover, words have rhythm. Every multisyllabic word has an emphatic syllable. If you string words together to produce a pattern of emphasis, you create a rhythm: But soft! What light from yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun.

Rhyming is the most common form of word music. When a a rhyme is sounded, ears and minds take notice, but it isn’t necessary to rhyme to catch someone’s notice. Merely repeating consonant sounds (alliteration) does the job: Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary. So does repeating vowel sounds (assonance): Hear the mellow wedding bells. Poe finishes this thought with a flourish — more assonance, alliteration, and a rhyme: Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!

Word power

Students need to learn that words vary in power. This is especially true among verbs. Take, for example, Jack showed Paula his magic tricks versus Jack dazzled Paula with his magic tricks. If Jack really dazzled Paula, the writer should say so. Dazzle has much more descriptive power than show.

Adjectives also have power. Consider these sentences:

The cat followed Amy home.
The dirty cat followed Amy home.
The grungy cat followed Amy home.

The first is the dullest; it doesn’t describe the cat at all. The second fixes that problem, but the third is more vivid. Writers should prefer vivid.

Using words figuratively

When writers write figuratively, they provoke their readers’ imagination and summon them into the text. They can do this by making surprising but apt comparisons and by calling out their readers’ senses. Here are three common methods:

Imagery: The cat’s approach was so near that Amy feared she’d trip. We can visualize their awkward progress.

Simile: The cat was as smelly as an open garbage can. The comparison works like a powerful adverb that puts the cat in our noses.

Metaphor: From a distance, you’d swear a small compost heap was stalking Amy. Here, the cat is associated with a bizarre image.

You’ll want to discuss many more examples of these methods and expose your students to less common methods as well. I suggest dividing students into teams and asking each team for a presentation on a different assigned method. Their presentations should include at least four examples.

Building word groups

When students begin putting words into groups, help them discover the three results compatible with written communication: phrases, dependent clauses, and independent clauses, also known as sentences.

Be careful not to label stand-alone sentence fragments — phrases and dependent clauses — as writing errors. People say a sentence can “stand by itself” but a fragment can’t. True, but this merely means a sentence, unlike a fragment, can be taken out of context and still be understood. That difference is a trifle. Put a fragment in context with sentences, and it’s perfectly understandable.

The message here is that language puts a rich variety of materials and techniques at the command of writer-builders. Nothing stands between them and creating their own voices.

Phrases

A phrase is a group of words that do what an adjective does, what an adverb does, or what a noun does. It’s much like a clause but does not contain a verb. Examples:

Adjective phrase: Frank always wore a T-shirt with a skull on it.
Adverb phrase: I could think only of Tammy Parker and her lustrous brown hair.
Noun phrase: Nathan, the class clown, was at home with the chicken pox.

Your task is to show many more examples and discuss how the phrase in each functions as an adjective, adverb, or noun. Then ask your students to create a dozen or more sentences containing the various phrase types. Each phrase should be underscored and labeled. Let the class comment on the results in an open discussion.

Note: Whenever you give students “proof of understanding” homework, ask them to write examples of their own. Never ask them to mark up your examples.

Dependent clauses

As you may have inferred, a clause is like a phrase in all respects except that it does contain a verb. Examples:

Adjective clause: Frank, who lived to shock people, had a cobra tattoo on his left arm.

Adverb clause: Tammy Parker blushed when Ken gawked at her lustrous brown hair.

Noun clause: Nathan will tell you that the chicken pox is no laughing matter.

Your task is to show many more examples and discuss how the clause in each example functions as an adjective, adverb, or noun. Then ask your students to create a dozen or more sentences containing the various clause types. Each clause should be underscored and labeled. Let the class comment on the results in an open discussion.

Verb complexities

Verbs are shape-shifters, the trickiest part of speech to master. There is so much to learn about them. Is a given verb regular or irregular? Active or passive? Main or helping? And how do verbs change to express present, past, future, continuous, and hypothetical action?

Can verbs even become different parts of speech? Yes! They can transform into verbals, of which there are three kinds: participles, which are verbs acting like adjectives; gerunds, which are verbs acting like nouns; and infinitives, which are verbs acting like nouns, adjectives, or adverbs.

Explain and exemplify the foregoing topics in the context of full sentences. Assign homework that asks students to do the same with their own sentences, according to your requirements. For example: “Write a sentence containing a form of buy as a passive main verb in the future perfect tense” or “Write a sentence containing run in a perfect participle phrase.” A class discussion of the results is essential.

Don’t talk about verb aspects. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, as are verb moods. The moods that grammarians attribute to verbs are more accurately attributed to sentences. I’ll elaborate in the next section.

Sentence purposes

Besides differing in complexity, sentences differ in purpose. There are six purposes:

Decalarative: The robin ate the worm.
Interrogatve: Did the robin eat the worm?
Dialogic: “Dear robin, there’s a worm right in front of you.”
Imperative: Eat the worm already!
Exclamatory: It threw up the worm!
Hypothetical: I wish it had eaten the worm. This purpose has been called, unhelpfully, the subjunctive mood. Its effect on the past tense of to be verbs will need explaining.

Sentence flow and complexity

You may have noticed that I’ve been discussing sentences, implicitly and explicitly, for some time. It would have been impossible to discuss the properties of words, phrases, and clauses without putting them in context, and that context, of course, is a sentence. Now it’s time to look at flow and complexity within a sentence.

Flow and complexity are largely controlled by conjunctions, but ones your students might not be familiar with. For example, correlative conjunctions:

No sooner had I washed my car than two pigeons flew by.
Not only do I like spotless cars, but I’m also a bird admirer, usually.
Either I’ll turn on the hose again or get my shotgun.

Many subordinating conjunctions are familiar but infrequently thought of as conjunctions:

Please don’t disturb me while I’m eating.
Now that I’ve finished the salad, you may talk until the lamb arrives.
If you’re going to talk about Bruce, I’ll have indigestion for sure.

After you’ve presented these conjunction types, hand out lists of them. Here’s a list of correlatives and a list of subordinates you can use. Ask your students to create a half-dozen correlative examples and a dozen subordinate ones. Let them comment on their work in a class discussion.

Sentence transitions

Adverb phrases are useful in moving from sentence to sentence (or to sentence fragment). Examples:

Never give money to people you don’t know. Above all, if they contact you from Nigeria.

From childhood, I’ve put my spare change in a big glass jar. As a result, I drive a Lamborghini today.

Howard hated big, slobbery bulldogs; on the other hand, Bichon Frises delighted him.

Even simple adverbs work well as a transition aid. Examples:

Dorthea put cyanide in Alfred’s cocktail. Fortunately, he’s a teetotaler.
Rodney knocked on Gina’s door. Apprehensively, she opened it.
Phil was listening to iTunes through his headphones. Heedlessly, he crossed the boulevard.

To help your students with their homework, you can hand out this mixed list of subordinate conjunctions and adverb phrases.

Paragraphs

If your students can write two sentences together without producing a non sequitur, they can write three or four or five cohesive sentences. The result will be a paragraph, a group of sentences that state an opening idea and then elaborate on it. The trick is to start with a provocative sentence, one that makes the reader think, “Oh yeah? — prove it!” or “Please tell me more!” Here’s an example of each:

America has never been at peace. It was born in war, and from that moment on, it has been at war for 93% of its history. “What about the other 7%?” you ask. Call that “peace” if you like, but I call it “getting ready for the next time.” Not only did America spend money on new armaments and training in each successive gap, it spent more money with each iteration. All in the name of preparedness.

After only a week at summer camp, I knew in my soul that I had to kill my counselor. His name was Wesley Shitbag, but most people called him either “Wes” or “Seabeck.” He was skinny and a runty 5’ 9”. A permanent leer possessed his face, and his first words to me were, “Carl, right? You’re kind of a fatty, Carl, but by the end of camp, you’ll be something a girl can look at.”

The “Never at Peace” example could become the first paragraph of an essay. I’d follow it with paragraphs about the undeclared war against Native Americans, expansion into Texas, the growth of jingoism, and so on. The “Summer Camp” example could become an autobiographical sketch or a short story. In each case, you should ask the class, “What would you add to this beginning?” and build an outline together. Then send them home with the outlines and an assignment to write the next two paragraphs of one or the other. Offer extra credit for each additional paragraph a student writes.

A reminder

I hear you asking, “What about subjects, predicates, subject-verb agreement, cases, direct objects, indirect objects, verb conjugations, pronoun declensions, and syntax? And there’s nothing about commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, and quotation marks.” So I remind you that all of these subjects must be taught in a writing context. Your best opportunity to teach them lies in examining your and your students’ examples of writing constructions. Never teach a stand-alone lesson like “What is Subject-Verb Agreement?” or “What Are the 10 Uses of a Comma?”

Most of all, you’re thinking, “What are this guy’s credentials? Has he ever taught anything?” My answer may be less than satisfying. I’m an opinionated old man with a laptop and an Internet connection. I also spent 38 years writing and editing for Silicon Valley employers. Plus, I have a solid connection with someone who actually teaches writing.

Signal and noise

Any message conveyed to our senses—a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch—has two components, signal and noise. The signal part is pure, uncorrupted information, devoid of any confusion or interference. The noise part is the opposite: anything that confuses the message or interferes with it. If we want our communications to be clear, it makes sense to try to keep the signal component high and the noise component low. The people responsible for radio and TV broadcasts know this well. They do signal processing to maximize the amount of signal that reaches us.

It’s not just broadcast engineers who should care about eliminating noise. Suppose you’re having company over, and everyone agrees to watch “The Voice.” Up steps a performer with a thrilling voice and, just as she begins, your Uncle Louie decides to make it a duet. Now, unless Uncle Louie has an extraordinary singing voice, you’ll immediately think of him as noise. If you say, “Knock it off, Louie,” you’re doing signal processing, too!

Most of us don’t sing often, but we do a lot of talking. So let’s look at signal and noise in conversation. Imagine that you’ve just returned home after visiting with your neighbors. You spouse says, “Oh, there you are! It’s been found! In a McDonald’s parking lot of all things. I thought you never went there. Well, it was found there by a guy named Greg — or maybe it was George. Some name with G. Whatever. He called just minutes ago. There are credit cards in it but also a few empty slots, so some cards might have been taken. He doesn’t know. And there are several small bills in the billfold. But you might have had big bills in there, too. How would he know? You’ll want to call back. I wrote down his phone number.”

That message is swimming in noise. I won’t dissect it sentence by sentence, but I will offer this alternative message: “Hey, somebody just called and said he has your wallet. I wrote down his name and phone number.” I think you’ll find it has much more signal and much less noise. Is it wrong to be curious about visiting McDonald’s? No, but that’s a different conversation for a different time.

Noise in writing shares, unsurprisingly, many similarities with noise in conversing. A mispronunciation is noise and strikes us much as a misspelling does. When we confuse words that sound alike — that no-good Clarlie just loves to flaunt the law — we make noise in conversing and writing, as we do when we capriciously change subjects. The same is true of logical inconsistencies, excessive embellishments. and grammatical errors — but writers alone contend with punctuation errors.

You might suppose that noise is a much bigger problem in conversing than in writing. You would point out that conversing is, for the most part, spontaneous, a case of speak first, think later. Writing, on the other hand, is a carefully considered think-and-rethink product of our minds. But I’d point out that the give and take of conversation serves as a self-correction mechanism for rooting out noise. As writers, the burden of clear and concise communication falls entirely on us.

Writers, alone with their thoughts, need to proceed methodically, lest their thoughts explode into noise. So we’re taught to write in paragraphs, cohesive groups of sentences that state a topic and support it. In essay writing, we’re supposed to write an introductory paragraph that contains a thesis statement — an assertion, a point of view. The thesis is, in effect, our signal. There follows a number of paragraphs that support the thesis with evidence of its truth. Last is the conclusion, where we assert the thesis is valid and say why that matters.

Journalists have their own methods. Their reportage has a headline, a title that serves as a barebones signal. They amplify the signal by anticipating and answering the readers’ questions: What happened? Who took part? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Why did it happen? Anything else is noise. The concision gratifies the reader and saves expensive print space and air time. (I recommend you stream Teacher’s Pet, an old movie with Clark Gable and Doris Day. It appears to be a romantic comedy, but I maintain it’s all about noise in journalism.)

Narrative stories have the most complex signals. The signal comprises characters who act within a setting to resolve a problem. Along the road to problem resolution, the signal modulates. Minor characters, scene changes, and unexpected hurdles come and go. The plot moves forward with tension and conflict. Every scene, character, and event must be essential to the resolution. Any element that doesn’t serve this purpose is noise.

All these kinds of writers are at war with noise, or should be. How’s the battle going? I’d say, poorly. Our education establishment regularly reports that Johnny can’t write. When I hear that, I ask, why can’t Johnnie learn to control the noise in his prose? When I see the news on TV, I ask, how did journalism get swamped by opinion programming, and how did opinion programming get swamped by noise? Further, how did so much of journalism turn into news about celebrities, all of which I regard as noise? When I sample contemporary fiction and poetry, I often ask, where’s the damn signal?

And when I look at modern art… well, I don’t look at modern art.

Metaphor, Learning, Discovery

A couple months ago, the results of a brain scan study were published in Psychological Science. The article, written by a team of neuroscientists, asks, “How is it that our ancient brains can learn new sciences and represent abstract concepts?” To find out, they scanned the brains of nine advanced physics and engineering students as they considered 30 physics concepts, among which were momentum, entropy, and electric current.

The researchers answered their question—or so they believed—when they noticed that the same region of the brain was stimulated in every case. They concluded that this region had originally been used to learn simple ideas and then had been “repurposed” to learn abstract concepts that were in some way similar. For example, the brain activity that was stimulated by the scientific concepts of “frequency” and “wavelength” occurred in the same region as when people watched dancers, listened to music, or heard rhythms, like the sound of galloping. In all these cases, the brain recognized “periodicity.”

So far so good, but then the researchers went off the rails. They fixated on the finding that all the activity they saw occurred within the same brain region, as if that should be a surprise. In school, I learned that regions of the brain are specialized for processing certain neural functions, like sight, hearing, speech, and so on. Why, then, would there not be specialized neural networks for abstract ideas? They went further still. They wrote of their determination to continue in the same vein, looking for neural networks that are stimulated by other abstractions that our ancestors knew nothing of, like genetics and computer science. Their aim is to point out the school subjects that are most easily learned when taught together.

If the article I read is an accurate summary of the research, the word metaphor never arose. Rather than tell us what a thing actually is, a metaphor is a figure of speech that tells us what it is like. It’s the likening of an x to a y. Trying to understand “frequency,” for example, the brain reaches for similar things it understands, thinks of the rhythms of life, and gets a foothold on the subject. Suppose a teacher wants to go further and describe kinds of frequency, like radio waves, colors, and  gamma rays. She might ask her students to think of a spring that can be drawn out or compressed. Fully extended, the spring is a metaphor for radio waves; tightly coiled, it’s a metaphor for gamma rays. Somewhere in between, the spring is akin to the wavelength of visible colors. Of course, the metaphor of a regular drum beat has only a tenuous connection to the metaphor of the hills and valleys of a spring, and the dissimilarities would bother some people. But the learning brain cares nothing for tidiness. It’s just aching to connect the known with the unknown. So pile on the metaphors—it’s all good!

I have no doubt they’ve helped me come to grips with abstractions. For instance, an image of one of those wooden puzzles from my childhood works as a metaphor for parsing sentences or solving algebraic equations. In all cases, the job is disassembling something complex into its constituent parts. To parse, you commonly draw a diagram that breaks a sentence down into its syntactic elements. To solve for x, you have to turn every arithmetical operation into its opposite—addition into subtraction, multiplication into division, and so on—until you’ve completely recast the equation (itself a sentence) to highlight one isolated piece, x.

The metaphor of a trampoline, a bowling ball, and a marble helps me come to grips with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. According to Einstein, gravity isn’t an attractive force between objects but a deformity in spacetime caused by the mass of an object. The more massive the object, the greater the deformity. Think of a bowling ball on a trampoline. The space around the bowling ball is concave. (Yes, I know a trampoline isn’t 4 dimensional. It helps me to think of a 3-dimensional mesh that changes color from point to point.)

Now, at the side of the trampoline, release a marble. It will fall down the slope of the deformity and strike the bowling ball. We perceive this motion as falling. (If I give the marble just the right amount of sideways momentum, it will neither fly off the trampoline nor fall into the bowling ball; it will orbit the bowling ball until another force intervenes.)

I think of learning as a special case of discovery. When we learn, we discover; it’s just that we aren’t the first to make the discovery. When we think about the two ideas, we realize they are nearly alike. That means metaphor, a vehicle for learning, should also be a vehicle for discovery. And so it is. Every conceptual breakthrough has its genesis in the common experiences of everyday life. One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon involves Richard Feynman, one of the most imaginative physicists who ever lived. He was having lunch in the Cornell University cafeteria. One of his colleagues, just for fun, tossed a plate into the air. Feynman watched it wobble slightly as it spun and noticed the Cornell logo on the bottom of the plate spinning as well. He wondered how the rate of the logo’s spin was related to the rate of the wobble. He worked out an equation that showed how the two rates were related (because he was that kind of a guy). Then he began to think about how electrons move relative to an atom’s nucleus. Some more thinking and, voila, he had made a discovery that would win him a Nobel prize!

I’m not trying to denigrate brain research. If anything we need much more of it, but it will do little to benefit learning. At best, it will show how to stimulate the unconscious wellsprings of metaphor. To abet the project of lifelong learning it is enough to acknowledge metaphor as our best friend. It’s the braid in which the strands of thought are interwoven.

American mythology

Brace yourselves. Here comes an appalling assertion: None of our teachers is doing an adequate job of teaching American History! What do I mean by “adequate job”? you ask. An adequate job is presenting a reasonably accurate and complete picture of the events and ideas that have shaped American society.

To do this, teachers have to talk about what is positive in our history, of course. This includes topics like the establishment of a Constitutional republic, the enumeration of human rights, the ingenious effort to balance the powers of government, wars that won personal freedom and defended against foreign threats, the progressive expansion of civil rights, and increased attention to the welfare of the poor and elderly. But the negative must also be included. For example: the slave trade and the degradation of slavery, the theft of much of the West from Mexico, the abominable treatment of Native Americans, the Robber Barons, Jim Crow, the Prohibition debacle, the endless cycle of booms and busts, government lies and ineptitude in recent wars, and the decades-long weakening of the middle class.

We know that much of our negative history is whitewashed in textbooks and in classroom discussions, particularly in the Red States. Worse, however, is that no course in our middle schools or high schools deals with American mythology. This is the set of ideas that Americans generally believe to be true that are never exposed as illusions. Why never? Because any teacher who did more than hint at them obliquely would be severely disciplined and probably fired. So as the decades roll by, a gullible electorate remains under the spell of myth spinners and misguided convictions.

Fortunately, it’s never too late to disabuse ourselves of misinformation and plug the holes in our formal education. Perhaps this summary of the worst of the American myths will help…

America is a nation of, by, and for the people. Like any other country, ours is “of” ordinary working people. That, in itself, is trivially true. The “by” part, however, is not. The representatives we govern through do not, in fact, represent us. Rather, they represent the wealthy and powerful, who finance their electoral victories and hire lobbyists to set legislative agendas. Naturally, the “for” part—the beneficiaries of the process—are again the wealthy and powerful. To make Lincoln’s formulation true, a great many unlikely changes would have to occur. For starters, the abolition of gerrymandering, the apportionment of senators based on state population, election campaign funding with taxpayer dollars, and limits on the access to legislators by lobbyists.

Our Constitution is a fixed star to navigate by. As the legend goes, it was set in the firmament by a founding group of geniuses, who built in an amendment process to keep its guidance relevant over the centuries. In truth, the Constitution is a creaky old thing that hasn’t been amended nearly enough to keep pace with a changing world. To cite some examples:

• The War Powers Clause, which was written in ignorance of ICBMs, stealth aircraft, drones, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, worldwide air travel, suitcase bombs, terrorism, etc.—modern threats that can devastate us or our allies before Congressmen can get their pants on.
• The rules by which the houses of Congress conduct their business—there are none! Each house is free to draw them up as they please. So the House speaker can invoke the so-called Hastert Rule and keep any bill from coming to the floor. In the Senate, the minority party can block most legislation with just 41 no votes. The silence of the Constitution on such matters has made Congress a moribund branch of government.
• Trial by jury, which has it roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where “peers” really meant “peers.” Today, jury selection is an absurd ordeal, with voir dire examinations and character consultants. Jury trials are an American obsession; we conduct about 80% of the world’s total. Other democracies rely much more on judges, individually and in panels.
• The Second Amendment, which establishes the the right of people to bear arms (read “muskets”) to ensure the existence of “a well regulated militia.” Well, there are no militias today. Instead we have the National Guard of the United States, a reserve force that comprises the National Guards of the states and territories. Its members do not rely on privately owned weapons. In effect, the Second Amendment is obsolete. It should have been amended long ago to say that gun ownership is a privilege, not a right, and therefore subject to strict regulation, as owning a motor vehicle is.
• Birthright citizenship, as stated in the Fourteenth Amendment. It was meant to confer citizenship on former slaves and their progeny. But Section 1 gives an incentive to people to enter the country illegally, have children who are automatically citizens, and use that as a lever to gain citizenship for themselves.

Freedom is an absolute good. Don’t get me wrong. Freedom is a good thing, generally, but we are mesmerized by the concept and value it beyond any rational limits. Here’s some evidence:

• In explaining the necessity of separating from England, The Declaration of Independence made a case for armed rebellion: “… when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government….” Add to these words the paranoia that our government has its tentacles in our daily lives, and you get a paranoid population that owns hundreds of millions of unregulated firearms and stands ready to fight for freedom. So passionate is this vigilance that no amount of routine horror has been sufficient to instigate prudent controls on gun ownership. We can regulate driving, drones, drugs, and tobacco to protect public safety, but we can’t regulate guns. Ben Carson summed it up for the gun nuts: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.”
• Another irrational freedom is the freedom to have a secret life, a black box to everyone but especially to the government. This paranoia is no doubt another symptom of the perceived British tyranny in colonial American; authorities could be ruthless in pursuing troublemakers. It’s another paranoia we have never purged, despite the very different times we live in. We file tax returns, we share our medical records to facilitate health care, we apply for bank loans, and we post our opinions on social media. Yet we don’t want the NSA to look for patterns in telephone records, even though we know that some among us are plotting mayhem. Of course, authorities must always establish a credible “need to know.” Beyond that, we have to let them keep us safe.
• We have a great dread of losing freedom to our federal government. It’s so profound that we created a Constitutional amendment to check federal power, benign or not, by reserving all unspecified powers to the states. We fought a civil war because slavery was a right reserved to the states. Women’s suffrage and income taxes would have resided with the states were it not for Constitutional amendments. Old-age security and gay marriage had to be upheld by the Supreme Court to be instituted nationwide. The Bill of Rights itself did not originally apply to the states! It was only in the 1920’s that the Supreme Court used the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to “incorporate” the Bill of Rights into state law.

“That government is best which governs least.” It’s not at all surprising, given our mania for freedom, that many Americans applaud the idea of living close to the edge of anarchy. The obvious way to achieve this condition is to make government as trivial as possible. Jefferson got the ball rolling with ideas like, “It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.” The sticky wicket here is what he thinks “our rights” are. A slender few, I’ll bet. Thoreau tried again with the quote shown in bold. He subscribed to a movement called Transcendentalism, which preached the dopey idea that human motives, pure and benevolent by nature, had been corrupted by society and institutions. Transcendentalists believed that by maximizing individual freedom and self-reliance the good in people would emerge (a view of human nature antithetical to the one held by our founders). The movement waned in a couple of decades but not before Thoreau’s maxim was lodged in the national ethos.

The Constitution gives the federal government the power to make war and to regulate commerce with “foreign Nations and among the several States.” Of course—no one state or subset of states can perform a task that requires nationwide coordination. So what about other tasks that affect citizens no matter where they live? Tasks like maintaining highways, bridges, and rail systems; providing life-sustaining services to the indigent; guaranteeing the delivery of health care without undue economic hardship; ensuring, through public education, that new generations are well informed and able to function well in adult society; protecting the consumer against unethical business practices; and funding beneficial programs that lack sufficient private investment (for example, energy development, space exploration, and medical research). If we leave these tasks to the states, they will be ignored by some and done to differing degrees of adequacy by the rest. If the laws of State X produce more impoverished, sickly, and poorly educated citizens than State Y, how can we say that “equal protection of the law” exists? The test of whether the federal government is governing enough is how little it allows states to undermine the rights or their citizens.

Free-market capitalism is the ideal economic system. This is two myths rolled into one. The first is that a free market—a market with zero regulation—can even exist. It can’t; such a market would soon annihilate itself. So when people talk about “free-market capitalism,” they mean capitalism with a bare minimum of regulation (sound familiar?). The second myth is that such a system is economically ideal; that is, most likely to produce sustained prosperity. In fact, the market of goods and services we have today is so unfettered by regulation—so tilted toward a “free” market—that it cannot sustain widespread employment, and sometimes collapses. The collapses and more severe contractions are usually due to consumer ignorance and runaway greed. Investors buy with borrowed money, banks purposely make bad loans, insurers offer protection they cannot deliver, finance houses risk exponential losses in the quest for exponential gains—all due to a lack of government regulation.

We are a secular nation with separation of church and state. I’ve written about this before. We give lip service to being a secular nation, but there is no end of evidence that we are a Christian nation. Ask for a creche to be removed from public property, and there are howls. Ask for God to be removed from our money, our pledges, and our public oaths, and there are howls. Ask public officials and private citizens to offer their services to gays who want to marry, and there are howls. Sure, there is no legal basis for a bias toward Christianity, but no matter; it is grounded deeply in the American culture. So deeply that any legal victory for secularism begets cries of Christian persecution!

The larger our military, the safer we are. If we changed our name to Fortress America, no one would have a legitimate reason to object. We spend as much on our military as the next 12 nations combined. We spend a third of all the military spending in the world. Every year. The U.S. Army stations soldiers in 9 foreign countries. One of these countries, Italy, has 113 facilities; Japan has 84; Germany, 56. The U.S. Marine Corps has camps in 3 foreign countries, with a multitude in Afghanistan and Japan. The U.S. Navy is in 14 foreign countries. The U.S. Air Force is in 21 foreign countries. I won’t bother to count the military facilities located here. Suffice it to say, there are dozens. The big question is, have we bought safety for ourselves? Of course we haven’t—not even close. Yet every year we spend more, and presidential candidate Donald Trump says, “I’ll make our military so powerful that no one will dare mess with us!”

Briefly after World War II, we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons; now nine countries have them, and Iran is within a hair’s breadth. Once we alone could put these weapons in missile warheads; now that capability is common. How long before stealth and drone technology are common? Not even a decade, I should think. How long before computer hackers can take down an electrical grid? It could probably be done now. How long before satellites are weaponized? Maybe that’s happened already—I don’t know. The point is, we keep spending more on military technology without getting any safer. Surely we have long passed the point of diminishing returns, but no one in government has bothered to examine that likelihood. Worst of all, we spend a pittance to combat a genuine global threat: climate change.

America is exceptional. In an insignificant sense, this assertion is true: we are home to an exceptionally high concentration of wealthy people. Our economy is exceptionally productive. We have an exceptional entertainment industry. In the same sense, a great many nations do one thing or several things exceptionally well. Many have an exceptional cuisine, an exceptional musical tradition, an exceptional literary and artistic tradition, an exceptional electronics industry, an exceptional automotive industry, an exceptional reputation for fine craftsmanship, and so on. But when a fellow American proudly says, “America is exceptional,” he doesn’t mean any of those things. He means we are exceptional as a civilization; as remarkable in world history as the Greeks, Romans, or Chinese of bygone centuries; greater in all important respects than any nation that exists today. If you agree, you should listen to the rant in the first episode of “Newsroom,” a TV show that dealt bravely in hard political truths. All I would add are a couple of items in which America really does lead the developed nations of the world: incarcerations and child poverty. Anyone proud of that?

As I reread what I’ve written here, I’m struck by what a formidable challenge it would be to de-mythologize the America that’s presented to us in our schoolrooms and media. Not only would we need teachers who cared nothing about employment, we’d need to recast the social studies curriculum to present the American past as a blend of American history (the usual fare), sociology, political science, and critical thinking. How thrilling to think of the difference that would make! How sad to know it will never be.

The madness is spreading

Apropos of last February’s education post, I came across this article the other day. Take a look, but be warned: it may make you crazy angry.

One of the points I tried to make in my post is that the education establishment is in a continual state of deluded masochism. Every time a comparison is made between the achievement levels of students here and students abroad—or between this year’s college prep students to those of years past—the self-flagellation of American educators is ratcheted up a notch. “We’re failing!” they cry, and then they beat their brains to find the miracle de jour that will turn things around. Never does it occur to them that the failure lies within American society.

We are not a child-nurturing people. Our rate of child poverty is a disgrace. So is our inability to connect the dots: child poverty… parental poverty… little food on the table… broken homes… compromised child development… poor school performance… bitterness… disaffection from learning… poor job prospects… new generation created… repeat cycle. A society that does little to mitigate disadvantages cannot possibly produce students who compare favorably with students from societies that do a lot. This is about as simple as causality gets.

Why don’t we see it? Because, as religious as our country is, the lesson of “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is no match for our ethos of self-reliance and social Darwinism. And so our educators become the scapegoats for a failure we all own.

My complaint about educators is that they are willing scapegoats! As such, it’s impossible to feel sorry for them. In accepting blame, they’ve served us badly twice over: they’ve obscured the root causes of educational mediocrity, and they’ve created a frenzy of inane action that has only made everything worse.

Farewell to cursive?

Only hours after I published my last post, I came across a bookmark that I’d saved for possible inclusion in that post. It linked to a piece that argued against teaching cursive handwriting. I decided not to raise the subject because that post was about weightier things, but now the time to discuss cursive has come.

I’m no scholar on the subject of how cursive has evolved. Suffice it to say, it has become less and less ornate over time. At the time of the Civil War, the dominant form of writing taught in American classrooms was Spencerian Script. To our eyes, it was preposterously ornate, the kind of script you see today on college diplomas and little else. Why would we torment generations of school children with a script so difficult to produce? I’ll take an educated guess. I don’t think sadism was the reason. Rather, beautiful handwriting, also known as calligraphy, was a mark of education and refinement. To write with a beautiful hand was the complement of good manners, etiquette, and deportment. But in time, the virtue of being plain-spoken gained importance, and so being “plain-written” also made sense. The fancy flourishes of handwriting began to disappear.

By the 1920s, the Palmer Method was predominant in the classroom. Its small letters were simple and clean, but the capitals were still afflicted with unnecessary loops and curls. It looked like figure skating on paper. In the 60s, it was supplanted by two similar cursive scripts, the Zaner-Bloser Method and the D’Nealian Method (shown above). The small letters retained their simplicity, and the capitals lost their excessive loops, for the most part. However, some of the capitals looked contrived, like the F, G, and T.

So far as I can tell, no further simplification has occurred: the Zaner-Bloser and D’Nealian scripts still hold sway. Their popularity, however, has been dented by a growing conviction that cursive writing should not be taught at all. Some schools have already dropped it altogether, and Common Core makes no mention of it in its benchmarks. In reaction, six state legislatures have passed bills that require the teaching of cursive. Battle lines are forming. It’s time for parents to ask, Are smart phones, tablets, and laptops now so common among children in the lower grades that they can serve as a replacement for handwriting? Are mandatory 4th-grade typing classes in place everywhere? Are there inexpensive, easy-to-use computer apps that are designed for recording notes and composing essays?

I think the answers are no, no, and no. But even when we see the day that the answers are all yeses, is it conceivable that some sort of portable device will always be at hand when we want to write? I can’t imagine it. What if I’m on vacation, and I want to send a friend a postcard? Or I want to give someone a shopping list or “to do” list? Or I want to add a personal note to a greeting card? Or someone says, “Can you write down that title and author?” Maybe I just like the idea of coming to a class with only a pen and a notebook, or I want to write a letter in cursive because I want to reveal more of myself than a typeface would.

So I line up with the people who want children to continue to learn a cursive script. However, I think further reforms are needed in the cursive capital letters. With a few exceptions (A, E, and F come to mind), they should look like the printed capitals. It makes no sense to ask a child to learn a cursive capital that looks like neither the large nor small printed letter. Variations from a model should not be discouraged—they will happen, so why fight it? There should be only one goal: legibility. Any penmanship that can be easily read is excellent penmanship. This point cannot be made too emphatically.

When strict adherence to a model ceases and the focus becomes legibility, most of the trauma of learning cursive should fade away, and the time needed to learn it should be objectionable to no one.

The whetstone

I was taught that using tools is what distinguishes humans from the rest of the primates. Then one day, someone photographed a chimp using a straw to lure ants out of the ground, and a debate was ignited. To my mind, there was never a doubt. It wasn’t tools in general that made humans special; it was a specific tool—language. Sure, animals have their “languages,” and Koko, the famous gorilla, is said to have had a vocabulary of over a thousand signs, but such examples don’t begin to match the communicative scope and subtlety of human language.

Just consider. We can name tens of thousands of things, concrete and abstract. They can be the agents and objects of tens of thousands of actions. Both agents and actions can be described in precise and exhaustive detail. So I can point out how gracefully the quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, and you can tell me that a big, bushy bumblebee is buzzing beside my blue bell-bottoms. But that is scarcely the beginning. I can tell you that the fox’s jump is in progress—he is jumping. Or that he jumped yesterday. Or started to jump a second ago and just landed. Or will jump tomorrow. Or will have jumped by the time you turn around. Or would have jumped if the dog hadn’t been barking. Or could have soared over the dog if he had been wearing a jet pack. And so on. Can you imagine how valuable this tool is to a social animal—one that hunts in groups, that plans and gives directions, that speculates “what if,” that describes real things not presently seen and imaginary things that inhabit myth and folklore? And this is just the domain of spoken language. It has an appendage, written language, which underpins all of civilization!

There’s a catch, though. Just as language has the power to communicate ideas, it has the power to miscommunicate them. With only good intentions, I can befuddle you with non sequiturs, cloud our discourse with ambiguities, and leave you wondering who did what, when, and to whom. I can toss off subjects without predicates and predicates without subjects, and off you’d go to tell someone else the exact opposite of what I thought I had said. Such mishaps are common. Most often, they just waste our time, but sometimes they do real harm. Of course, this hazard hasn’t gone unnoticed, not with the integrity of our precious tool at stake. So humankind has invented a way to talk about language and keep it effective. It’s called grammar, the whetstone of language—a tool for a tool.

Perhaps you believe, as many do, that grammar is merely a kind of etiquette, a set of rules practiced by the genteel and sophisticated among us. You couldn’t be more mistaken. The ability to talk about the elements and structure of language is essential to studying law, drafting legislation, advocating for a cause, drafting a business proposal, writing persuasively, writing a narrative, criticizing literature, writing how-to books, writing textbooks, explaining difficult concepts, and teaching foreign languages. If we lacked this ability, how would we identify problems like the lack of subject-verb agreement, confusing syntax, unclear antecedents, misplaced modifiers, passive constructions with ambiguous agents, or disunities of topic and tense? How would we be able to recommend remedial changes like using stronger verbs, switching to the active voice, simplifying tenses, varying short sentences with periodic ones, and improving logical transitions with conjunctive adverbs. In fact, how would we be able to revise anything? Without grammar, we’d truly find ourselves in a Tower of Babel, even if we all spoke the same language!

One of the things I find fascinating about grammar is its linkage with trust. You see, our dependence on language is so profound that if we meet someone who abuses language—someone whose knowledge of grammar is poor—we mistrust that person. Imagine that your daughter’s boyfriend takes you aside and says, “Sally and me are in love, and we want to get married.” How likely are you to reply, “You have my blessing, son”? Or suppose you saw our president say on TV, “I know relations between our governments is good.” (An actual  Bushism.) Wouldn’t a wee voice in your head ask, “Can I trust a man who holds language in such low regard?” There’s nothing that will cause someone to be reappraised faster than a grammatical gaffe.

I recently heard a distressing story about a teacher of Language Arts. She reportedly said, “There’s no good reason to teach grammar. In fact, a study has shown that it actually frustrates students. It inhibits their ability to write creatively.” I have no doubt that grammar does indeed slow them up. Whenever we write, we craft an idea so that it will arrive in another mind in exactly the way we intend it to. This is no mean trick, and without a grammatical foundation, it’s next to impossible. If students wrote only in diaries, then I’d agree: teaching grammar would be unnecessary. But if they ever want to share their thoughts with others, they had better learn grammar.

It strikes me as odd that a teacher of Language Arts would miss the obvious fallacy in the “study.” Surely her reluctance to teach grammar comes from somewhere else. Perhaps she’s saying, “I don’t understand grammar very well myself” or “I just don’t know how to teach grammar.” I think it’s probably the latter. Grammar is an abstract subject, as is much of science and all of math. Our teachers aren’t very good at teaching abstractions, and in short order the teachers’ “I can’t teach it” becomes the students’ “I don’t want to learn it.”