Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Oy Vay!

My wife informed me last night that the teachers' guide to a popular home school grammar text read like a tax form. I opened it, and YIKES was she right. It brought back memories of grammar in school, where that subject represented a few weeks of unmitigated torture, and its end was a blessed respite from the same.

Why exactly the teaching of grammar is such torture for most kids is beyond me. Although English does suffer from being a "mongrel" language, our grammar is actually simpler than that of a lot of languages.

Maybe it has something to do with our failure to grasp "genre." Drawn away from real literature by schools that are training kids for factory jobs that no longer exist, are we failing to realize that a simple concept like grammar does not need to look like the IRS's desperate attempt to codify the ramblings of 535 drunks?

Apparently. Mrs. Bubba and I are hoping that someone else agrees, and we're hoping to find something better. Thank God for the choice!

5 comments:

tim said...

Hi Bert- Do you know anything about libertyclassicalacademy.org? Would love to discuss and explore your thoughts on the whole educational arena sometime.
Tim Emslie

Bike Bubba said...

I know about the Christian Liberty academy in Illinois, but don't know this group. Pull my ear anyways and I'll take a look at their site.

Bike Bubba said...

Looking at their site, it looks like they've at least got the basics of the same thing that goes on at Veritas school in Pennsylvania and Logos School in Moscow, Idaho. You'd have to talk to teachers and other parents to really get a good feel for how the school is, or is not, working.

My hunch is that by the time your first child is ready for school, the school will either be rocking the educational world of the Twin Cities, or defunct. It will be a pretty easy choice for you.

tim said...

I'm liking what I see of the classical model, but am staggering at the implementation of said model by myself and the Mrs.

Bike Bubba said...

I did, too. As I get assimilated by the Borg--I mean as I start learning myself now what I should have learned as a child--I'm finding that it's not a burden, but rather the lifting of a burden.

How so? Hard to phrase in this forum, but once you start making the connections between what are mistakenly labeled as "subjects" in today's schools, you find that there really aren't that many boundaries, and what you learn about A also applies to B, making both easier.