Education Begins In The Home.....Doesn't It?

At many schools, the first bit of the school year is the teacher's best chance to use classroom time to assess the skills of new students and review with all students the new skills learned at the end of the previous year.  Our school is no different.

This year, my 7th period class is Language Arts with 8th graders.  What follows is a retelling of an actual encounter I had with an 8th grade boy in this class today.

The assignment today consisted of worksheets with several sentences that needed to be corrected.  They were missing capital letters and punctuation.  There were misspelled words and instances of improper word usage.  Space was provided on the worksheets, and the students were supposed to use the spaces to rewrite the sentences correctly, fixing all the errors.  They had to do this on their own first, and then we would go over it as a class so that the students could make changes to correct errors they might have missed on their own.

A student raised his hand, so I went to see if he had a question about the assignment.



Student: There any trick questions on this paper?
Me: No...what makes you ask that?
Student: I don't understand #3.
Me: Ok.  Let me read it out loud to you.  Sometimes it's easier to hear the mistakes than to see them.
Student: Ok.

I picked up his worksheet and read the incorrect #3 sentence, exactly as it was written.

werent their no milk in the refrigerator yisterday

Student: See?
Me: See what?  Can you tell me what needs to be fixed in this sentence?
Student: OH, yeah!  They forgot to put a period at the end!
Me: Is that all?
Student: Um.  Capital letter at the beginning?
Me: Ok.  What else?
Student: I don't know. Sounds ok to me. Let me think about it some more.
Me: Ok, you keep working on that one.

I moved on to monitor other students and keep everyone on task.  A little while later, I walked back past the first student's desk and noticed that he was working on the back side of the worksheet, picking the correct verb tense for each sentence.  I asked him if I could see what he had done with #3 on the front side of the worksheet.

His final answer?

Wasnt their no milk in the refrigerator yesterday? 

And people wonder why students in the US have lower reading and writing scores than students elsewhere in the world!  I'd be willing to bet that everyone this student knows, aside from the school staff, speaks exactly like the "wrong" sentences on our worksheet!  If this child doesn't know anyone who can even speak properly, how the hell is he ever supposed to LEARN to speak and write properly?  It does no good to teach this stuff in schools if the children have no need to use it once they go home each afternoon.


Note: I wish to make it known that the title of this post is not meant to in any way speak negatively of parents, homeschoolers or not, who teach their children correct and useful things at home.