English Professor friend vindicates Narration and Diagramming. Thanks SWB JW

[Kalmia]

I just returned from a lovely visit with one of my English professor friends who teaches at a small Catholic liberal arts college. She has complained before that the vast majority of her students need one-on-one tutoring on how to read college level literature and poetry. Now, of course, she does assign some challenging works such as Shakespeare and Milton, and her students aren't in the habit of reading for pleasure much less for mental enrichment, but she said that when she sits down with them it wasn't basic reading skills or vocabulary, instead she sees very quickly that the actual problem is that they cannot read a paragraph and "recite the meaning of a passage in their own words." They will tell her what they think it means which is usually way off or, in fact the opposite of the intended meaning, because they have failed to take into account important small clue words such as "If...then" or "Unless." They are also incapable of attaching the modifying phrases to the words they go with in the sentence causing confusion in their explanations. 

 

And as she described their inability to "recite the meaning of the passage in their own words," I thought "NARRATION!" 

 

And when she described their inability to notice important qualifying words and phrases and apply them to the right nouns, verbs, etc that they modify, I thought "DIAGRAMMING!"

 

And I silently thanked  Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise for providing us with the stepping stones to college success one narration and one diagram at a time.

[shawthorne44]

I read the title and thought that the professor was complaining about narration and diagramming.  So I had to read to see what possible complaint there could be. Good to see it was the opposite.

[Kathryn]

Have you read "The War Against Grammar?" The author encountered this same problem.

[Kalmia]

I was thinking of vindicate as someone who actually sees the end result of modern educational methods should have mastered the "old fashioned" skills of narration and dictation thus vindicating them against current detractors of classical methods.

 

Love "The War Against Grammar."