I just can't deal with it any longer. What is it, you ask? Excellent question. It, is the way English composition is being taught all around the U.S. Now, some will be apt to point out that my grammar is faulty and I should not, therefore, criticize those that wish to improve the grammar of students. I say this with all due respect, but go screw yourself.

Language is a living thing and for that reason is constantly changing. Some rules are important; some rules are necessary for legibility. I agree; I even strive to make my students more than legible. But shoving helpful exercises down their throats about active vs. passive voice, dangling modifiers and the like. Good writing involves knowledge of grammatical rules, absolutely—good writing involves the writer both wielding those rules knowledgeably and breaking them knowledgeably. But we don't tell our students about breaking them, or how scholars, respected, venerated scholars break them all the time for fear that they won't first learn the right way. They won't understand what they are doing; they won't be a knowledgeable enough writer to make those sorts of decisions. They'll just hear, oh it's okay, and run off to wreak havoc on the literary culture of America.

To them I say have a little faith in humanity please. And if you are just to wounded, bitter, jaded, whatever, to have faith than stop writing manuals on how to write and let me do my job. I will have the faith for you. Those that use good grammar use it because they've managed to internalize it. It sounds right to them and they can, therefore, remember the rules. People that have no idea what academic sounds like learn nothing by completing exercises. Instead they participate in wrote memorization that falls completely by the wayside when trying to write something the least bit difficult.

So what is the answer? Well first you enable students to wield their own thoughts (regardless if those thoughts agree with you are what you know) with authority and power, and then you help them shape it into something academic. It is much easier to transfer from discourse to discourse after recognizing one's place in their own discourse first. But just throwing exercises at them and then punishing them for neglecting to perform correctly is akin to teaching a kid the C major scale and then yelling at them for not immediately playing all scales quickly and cleanly. Knowledge of similarity does not mean knowledge of all. Understanding that grammar makes your writing more legible, more correct, more powerful even, does not help you to say what you mean more clearly, correctly, or powerfully. And it also doesn't mean you're stupid! It just means someone threw a book at you (like the one I have to teach from right now) and made you recognize the nouns, verbs, and direct objects in your sentences than required that you research the state of minorities in American society and gave you a D for not making sense. Kids write incredibly incorrectly to their friends via text messaging and email, but they don't make any of the same mistakes they make in classroom writing. Figure that one out.

Why don't teachers recognize that raising the bar throughout the semester does more good than hitting them with rules and exercises devoid of context and expecting them to understand? Oddly enough, most English majors wrote reasonably naturally, so why on Earth do we expect our students to learn the same way we did? That's the most idiotic thinking I've ever encountered. At least outside Texas.