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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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What a wonderful excursion into the experiential devotion of a teacher who every student would be blessed to have at their side. From hereon in, your reputation for talent and dedication precedes you, Wordwind!  My niece is an elementary ed major at the University of Maryland...I'll make sure she sees this, if you don't mind.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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True, the words but, concerning, considering do function in some sentences differently from prepositions.
I don't have a lot of time* and won't till probably Thursday, but I'll just say that, maybe you can shoehorn those words into the preposition cubbyhole but it's not something I'd do to poor, impressionable, young schoolkids.
*I haven't even had a chance to get caught up on this thread, so I apologize to any chopped liver I've left scattered about.
Addendum: I am reminded that a quick scan has indicated that there are a whole lot of posts in this thread that I won't have to read, so my catching up may not take so long.
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I apologize to any chopped liver I've left scattered aboutI'm the only "chopped liver" I know of on this thread, Faldage.
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Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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WW: applause, applause! Thank you for taking the time to share with us. Your students are indeed lucky to have you.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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But is a whole nother issue, but I've had a chance to dig into the question of words such as concerning that were nicely established as participles until some well meaning but misguided prescriptivists decided to try to give them extreme makeovers. A glance at the AHD usage note on the word participle might be useful at this time. The note is at http://www.bartleby.com/61/74/P0087400.html, but I'll just quote this brief portion of it: A number of expressions originally derived from participles have become prepositions, and these may be used to introduce phrases that are not associated with the immediately adjacent noun phrase. Such expressions include concerning, considering, failing, granting, judging by, and speaking of. Thus one may write without fear of criticism Speaking of politics, the elections have been postponed or Considering the hour, it is surprising that he arrived at all. I have often said that it is easy to be a prescriptivist; just memorize a few rules and weep and wail and gnash teeth when presented with usages that don't follow them. Here we have a brave attempt by prescriptivists to actually describe the language, but their attempts fall short. They should leave the describing to the descriptivists. Realizing that the problem of the so-called dangling participles isn't going away they have picked a few instances of usage that may have become particularly well established and tried to cram them into some semblance of existing rules. The root of their problem is in such sentences as Turning the corner, the view was quite different. The prescriptivists call Turning the corner a dangling participle because the sentence has no noun or pronoun for the participle to modify. This is no different in grammar from the examples cited above with Speaking of politics and Considering the hour. Recasting the participles as prepositions is not the answer. The answer is recognizing the grammatical category known in other languages, notably Japanese, as the topic of the sentence. The topic may be identical to the subject but need not be. In the case of sentences with so-called dangling participles they are not identical. Regarding but, I'll withdraw my objections. A little research has shown that but has been both a conjunction and a prepostion since OE.
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journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Nov 2004
Posts: 95 |
In reply to:
i hadn't realized (duh!) that
i am
you/ are
he/she/it is
we are
they are
i have been
you have been
i was, she was, he was
we are being
they were
etc..
were all the ROOT same verb. i never put it together.
It's also interesting that the verb "to be" is irregular in nearly every language, primarily because it's so common in speech. It's a pain learning sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt, or eimi, ei, esti, esmen, este, and eisi - and it just recently struck me how equally annoying it must be for people learning English.
"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." -Tom Lehrer
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Here's my learning 'poem' for the forms of 'to be'...said with a certain rhythm:
'am are is was were
be been have has had
can could do did may
shall should will would might'
'Nother of those old memorization things from the early 50s, and still stuck in my oft forgetful head.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Just for S&Gs, let's assume, for sake of argument, that we have somehow magically converted these participles to prepositions. Let's take the sentence Considering the hour, it is surprising that he arrived at all.
Why is it bad to treat Considering the hour as a participial phrase? The standard answer is that it is a dangling participle, i.e., it is not modifying anything in the sentence. What do we gain by thinking of considering as a preposition? Not much; prepositional phrases need something to modify, too. We don't say things like: Into the house, I saw a cat. All we've done is change a dangling participle into a dangling preposition.
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Why is it bad to treat "Considering the hour" as a participial phrase?All things considered, I'm on your side on this one, Faldage. But, seriously, how does it advance the argument by even mentioning parts of speech [if that's what they are] such as "prepositions" or "participles"? Those terms may have some meaning for the initiated, but the initiated are already initiated. We need to get to the uninitiated -- the one's who are being left behind. Surely, every educator can agree about that. Let's approach this from a different angle -- the angle of "Common Sense Writing". Let's ask students without any comprehension of terms like "prepositions" or "participles", and certainly no affection for them, to judge particular examples by their sound. I would call this part of the lesson "sound judgment". Let's use your own examples, Faldage. 1. "Considering the hour, [we should wrap this up]", and 2. "Into the house, I saw a cat" My guess is that most kids in Grade 6 [or above] would tell you Example #1 sounds OK, and Example #2 doesn't make any sense -- even if they can't tell the difference between a dangling participle and a dangling fishing pole. Any kid who says OK to Example #1 and "Huh?" to Example #2, would get a pass in "Sound Judgment", and that's that. Any kid who thinks Example #2 makes sense, certainly needs help, but teaching them the meaning of "prepositions" and "participles" is like putting a kid who failed Grade 6 into Grade 10 to straighten them out. Anyone who has a taste for this type of esoterica, should write learned essays about it to the profession. But are children under the age of consent fitting subjects for this sort of thing?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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hell, plutarch, why teach the bulk of the kids to read to begin with? why not just plop them down in front of 'educational' tv and let them learn to be good consumers. (ie, buy what ever is being advertized) we can have tv shows instructing them how to look at pictures and work the cash registers at mcdonalds (which don't have dollar values, but picture icons so illiterate idiots can learn to work the cash register.)
i have made the point that knitting (Of all things!) helped me understand binary math and other numbering series, as well as giving me a huge insight into boolian logic.
lots of people scoff at knitting, (a nice hobby for old ladies, usless, but harmless--but then again, knitting needles were banned from airflights right after 9/11 so some thought knitting needles could be used as lethal weapons!) but knitting aside from teaching fine motor skills (good for learning to write) also teached a new way of thinking--ways of thinking i continue to use.
human beings always have insights and understanding based on their current knowledge.
3000 years ago, the egyptians thought the heart a useless organ...even as they 'understood' the lungs (the lungs were 'bellows' that flamed the 'fire' of human life. bellows they knew and understood.
understand of the function of the heart came with the industrial revolution.. as engineers understood pumps, they came to also understanding the pumping action of the heart--
the action of the heart didn't change.. but understanding the action arrived when there was external analogy that could be understood.
what is a measure of practical knowledge? You understand grammar, and you have mastered english and consider understanding part of speech and rules of grammer to be useless.
many disagree. maybe only 1 in 1000 kids truly benefits from the knowledge. SO WHAT? What is the goal? Are we interested in education or in giving children job training?
if the goal (of schools) is to give job training--sure we can dump grammer, 99% of the kids don't need it to be clerks in mcdonalds or wal-marts. but if our goal is education (even if 50% of the kids resist it, and end up in jobs like mcdonald or wal mart where they don't need it) then part of being educated is to understand the language we speak.
a few days ago, you were humbled and agreeing with Word wind, but now you are back to your original position.
for homework to night, reread the essay!
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