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The abandonment of grammatical rules is setting our students up for failure

According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, three-quarters of 8th and 12th
graders are not proficient in writing. In fact, for those who took the ACT test from the class of
2016, 40% of those students lacked the English and writing skills necessary to pass a low-level
English class in college.

With statistics like these, we see that by not teaching students the essentials of grammar, they’re
essentially being set up for failure.

Today we push our students to go to college, providing countless scholarships and financial aid
packages to make it possible. What we don’t provide them with is the basic education they need
to get into those schools in the first place.

It’s understandable that English class isn’t everyone’s favorite. Some students truly excel in
STEM courses. However, the English language is at the basis of everything we do and it’s how
we function as a society. This is why it is essential that our students’ teachers make the effort to
put just as much time in to teaching them the basis of grammar as they do into other subjects.

According to an article recently posted in the Wall Street Journal by Leslie Brody, teachers have
said that they’re afraid to strictly enforce grammar rules out of fear of “sucking the joy out of
self-expression”.

It boils down to this. While yes, we need teachers to nurture our students and allow them to
express themselves, their primary job is to teach them to ensure that they succeed in the future.

It’s important to have students that are brilliant when in a Socratic situation, however, it’s also
important to have students who are brilliant writers as well.

By teachers choosing to ignore students’ errors when they don’t capitalize “I” or fail to recognize
proper nouns, they are hurting those students who could one day be exceptional writers. Students
who grow to be great writers are just as remarkable as those who grow to be influential in STEM
fields.

Something that many teachers have begun to encounter are the use of texting and social media
abbreviations in homework, such as “u” in place of “you”. Teachers have said that they often
struggle with trying to decide if they should be strict on grammatical errors such as this.

Questions like this baffle me. Homework and social media are two completely different things.
Unless you are studying communications in higher education, there is no reason that anyone
should be using social media language within a writing assignment. Even then, there is a time
and a place.

By allowing our students to use these abbreviations within their assignments, we’re teaching
them that it’s okay to use these in higher education and in the workplace. How rude of an
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awakening to them will it be when they get there and they realize they’ve been wrong for as long
as they can remember.

One of the worst excuses as to why teachers haven’t enforced the use of proper grammar within
their assignments given in Brody’s article was that teachers feel “uncomfortable about being so
focused on grammar at a time of enormous conflict in America”.

America has always been going through enormous conflict. Today is no different than yesterday.

The irony of this excuse is that it feels like we’re going through more conflict than we ever have
before because of the expansion of social media in the last decade.

In the past, the only way news of conflict spread was through word of mouth. With the creation
of the newspaper, news was able to spread a bit faster.

Then came the telegraph. News moved faster.

Then the telephone. Even faster.

This was followed by the radio, the television, the internet, and finally social media. With each
new invention news moved faster and faster.

See, our world isn’t any scarier that it has been since humanity existed. We just hear about things
sooner than we would have if it was 20 years ago.

Even if we were going through enormous conflict like we’ve never seen before, isn’t it important
to hold on to a sense of normality? To remind our students that there is a reason that they’re in
school, and that they do have a future to look forward to.

Careers focused in writing still exist. We are still growing and we need this next generation of
students to be willing and ready to join us. Grammar cannot just fall by the wayside, its
importance needs to be emphasized.

If we choose to neglect its importance, there’s a whole generation of students that we’re failing.

Flesch Reading Ease: 60.2

Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level: 9.2