Literacy

Today in the Muskegon Chronicle there was an opinion piece about the need for basic education to insure literacy in our high school graduates.  The writer gave an example of an adult who asked for help on a project that had several misspelled simple words.

We have done a wonderful job of making sure everyone feels good about themselves, but a terrible job of making sure they are functionally literate. The papers I grade in my nursing classes are generally well done, but several illustrate that grammar has been moved to the back burner in our schools.  Students are unable to discern between their, there, or they're, or its and it's.  They have no idea when to use an apostrophe.  They don't know how to construct sentences and  think it's completely appropriate to use common texting abbreviations.  Not only are the written assignments sometimes unreadable, today's students don't speak appropriately.

My biggest issue with speech is the improper use of seen and saw.  At least once a day, I hear a someone say, "I seen" or "I done." The people in the media add to the problem.  They frequently interview people who have no command of proper English and don't edit their responses.  Comedians have made fortunes telling jokes about people who are interviewed after their alien abductions and created laughs by making fun of their uneducated way of speaking.  Now we see that way of speaking creeping into the mainstream.

My fear is that we will grow so accustomed to improper grammar that the traditional rules will no longer apply.  I'm not at all perfect, but I try.  I also try to make a difference with my students by correcting them when I see or hear them use the incorrect tense of a word.  Truly, the English language is becoming a lost art.