They taught us grammar in elementary school but I never retained anything past "subject" and "object" because the main exercise...
They taught us grammar in elementary school but I never retained anything past “subject” and “object” because the main exercise by which we were trained was “Daily Edit"s of like 3 diff. sentences written wrong on the board and you had to write them right and I just did by writing them the way they were obviously supposed to go
The quizzes I treated like logic games, if we’d been learning about indirect objects or the past participle or something there’d be like 2 questions out of 10 defining it with obvious answers and you could leverage the others out from those
I was a precocious and voluminous reader, that came natural, I thought I was aware of it and not taking it for granted until I took a freshman writing seminar at my Ivy League school and we swapped papers, I ended up getting my partner to read his aloud and being like “Would you say that and expect it to make sense? Then how would you say that? Now write that down.”
My elementary school didn’t do any grammar (that I can remember, I think we probably did parts of speech) and I didn’t encounter any until a brutal 8th grade english teacher: the day after a grammar lesson, we were given a worksheet with enough sentences such that there were >100 marks to be made, each incorrect mark you got was minus a point, each missed correct mark was minus a point, and it was out of 10 (so 90% accuracy got you 0) ((and this was all in a bespoke diagramming fashion that nobody I’ve met seems to recognize)), starting from subject/verb/direct object, through infinitive phrases and gerundives
which seems to have mostly functioned as preparation for high school Latin, as the teacher was a demanding and crotchety old man, who when people failed what he considered to be “basic grammar” (i.e. all the stuff learned in that 8th grade class, although thankfully he explained things like the passive periphrastic), they were told to sit in the back of the class and do relevant exercises in Warriner’s and so the only people who made it through 4 years of that were those in that particular 8th grade english class, particularly bright ESLers (basically all Chinese), and whoever was fine putting up with the abuse he’d direct at them
Huh. I ended up taking a year of Latin (Spanish had been meh, our district’s Spanish teachers were like, women who spent 2 years in Spain after graduating decades ago) ((then again Latin teachers all doubled as math teachers))
and I do credit that with some share of the fact I can kind of parse any Romance language at a basic enough level, but I wonder if not consciously learning grammar ever limited me, like as alien as it was I think I picked up Japanese a lot better and more extendably cause I got a better sense for structure