Sorry for the recent radio silence, Blogosphere, but there's been a lot going on lately and frankly I've been pretty exhausted.
Aside from a new job, one of the things on my plate right now is an online grammar class. It's part of a copy-editing certificate I'm doing through the University of California. Apart from improving my grammar and editing skills, I'm hoping that the certificate will eventually help me to get a job in publishing.
Now, we never actually learned grammar in the California school system. We learned that a noun was a person, place, or thing; a verb was an action word; and an adjective was a describing word. That was pretty much the extent of it. My grasp of English grammar was good, but almost entirely instinctual, gained from reading a ridiculous amount of books at a young age. In fact, it wasn't until my senior year in college that I took a grammar course and began to learn about parts of speech in any real detail.
My question is, why? Why on earth are children not taught grammar in school? Judging from what I see on a daily basis, kids today are in desperate need of grammar lessons. When there are high school graduates who don't know the difference between "to" and "too," who use "your" and "you're" interchangeably, who have no clue about punctuation or capitalization, then there's something wrong with the system.
Can anyone shed some light on this? Why is PE mandatory while grammar, apparently, isn't worth our time?
