A lot of my recent posts have been about bear. It's just what is happening in my life at the moment. Today I was blessed to help bear with his homework.
As I have mentioned, I didn't have a good education until I was around 13 or 14 and standards have changed a great deal since then. Bear doesn't ask for help with the maths. On one hand, he really doesn't need the help. On the other hand, he knows it would be utterly futile. I've been outclassed by bear when it comes to maths for years. Today it was English, and it was identifying parts of a sentence.
I have vaguely heard of the idea of parsing a sentence, where you go through and point at nouns. I didn't come across the concept of nouns and such until High School, but I had a fighting chance with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I have always had to think twice about what a preposition was, and I have no concept of tenses, but today bear was trying to work out the determiner.
I can bluff with the best of them, but I hadn't got a clue. I was complete at sea. Bear was frowning over his paper and he needed a hand but I couldn't have found the determiner with both hands and a road map. I was honest with bear and googled it. I found this on Wikipedia and we talked things through. Apparently he did okay.
I like to think that I can write clearly. I have faith that I can put together a paragraph and it would make sense. However I couldn't tell you what the parts of the sentence were, or how they were supposed to fit together. I read the Wiki entry and wondered if I knew anyone who could explain the explanation. DH has an English degree, including quite complicated stuff about Anglo Saxon and phonetics. He just shrugged. We didn't cover anything like this when we were at school.
When we were at the meeting about SATS the very nice teacher told us that the staff were finding new concepts that they were supposed to be teaching. Some of the contents of the SATS were apparently completely new to the teachers. This is why they need their training days.
And bear isn't even in High School. I am not looking forward to his homework then!
Don't worry about determiners. It's just the powers that be trying to make things appear more complicated than they need. It makes somebody feel important so they can snigger behind their hands when someone professes not to know. Rather like the stupid way they use for long division these days which takes up two pages of working for no reason rather than the easy way we did it back in the days when things were simple and schools were allowed to teach instead of continually trying to reach markers set by others. Bear's High School will be fine. IF they've any sense (and most good schools have lots of sense) they will ignore all this new rubbish and teach pupils how to write clearly with good understanding of how sentences work including use of the vocative case when addressing individuals (something I continually try to point out to American writers who think it doesn't matter because Latin is a dead language!) Tenses are more difficult to ascertain in English rather than other European languages. German is a good language to understand them all. Just remember that all writing is done in the perfect past tense but it's always better to keep things active rather than passive.(Which you know already!) OK rant over. :)
ReplyDeleteThank you! I think you're right. They do make things so complicated. I feel a little reassured that I have a fighting chance. I have grumbled at bear's English homework because a lot of the examples are very badly constructed and he has been encouraged to write long and overcomplicated sentences. I may share the next lot we struggle with if I'm feeling cross enough. LM x
DeleteIf I think about the lessons I've learned from my writing group it's a)keep sentences as short as possible b)excessive use of adjectives and adverbs is the sign of a "young" writer,(I got hauled up last night for using one too many -ly words in an action scene!) c)remove every "that", most "the"s and replace and by ; + present participal d)develop your own distinctive voice. We must be doing something right as our second member out of nine has just signed a publishing deal and his book comes out in November. Two more are actively seeking agents. I've just sent off my first competition entry for about fifteen years and this third novel may just be publishable. Please share the overcomplicated sentences and we can have fun "improving" them.
ReplyDeleteYou are obviously doing something right! If stuff comes out, please let me know so I can share. I don't know if you are on facebook, but Lyssa Medana is out there and I'm happy to share links to books LM x
DeleteI'm like you. I couldn't tell you what part of a sentence was what but I know how it goes together. It's the same with when to use certain words - effect, affect - that sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteI remember quite clearly the days of homework. Luckily hubby is good at maths and I am better with the written word so between the two of us we managed to get them through it.
I suspect bear is better at maths than DH and I put together! I'm glad he's going to a good school and fingers crossed he'll be okay! LM x
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