"Can I come in?"
The vampire will come for Gen Z.
How can we have a common society if we don’t have a common language? How can we have a common language if we can’t agree on how to speak and write it?
It is no big secret that young people read less than those of us who are certified grown folks did. Even among my brilliant, sweet, well-behaved summer students who come from families that prize education, voracious readers are rare.
The kids come with almost no prior knowledge of grammar. When I teach words, I teach the various parts of speech that the words can become. “Pedantry” is the noun form of “pedantic.”
The kids liked this cartoon, and there was a sudden uptick in kids asking, “May I go to the bathroom?” instead of “Can I?”
Perhaps like math, grammar has been declared racist. I’ve never seen grammar taught at all in the urban schools where I’ve taught for several years now, except at the one amazing school where they teach every student Latin. Those kids know their parts of speech, by Jove!
I also notice that the kids use very few adjectives. Their speech is subject verb, pronoun verb. I recently read my friend Keith Korman’s new book, God Loves Bad Men, which I recommend, and I was struck by how many adjectives he uses. Could kids get through prose that contains enough adjectives to give you a mental picture of a scene you’ve never visited and can never see because it occurred a century ago?
My teacher friends and I would like to teach remedial grammar and vocabulary to bring even the best students up to where we were in maybe eighth grade. Yet there is never time, never enough time…
What will happen to a generation who learn to write from social media, AI, or not at all?
I fear the vampire will get them.
THANK YOU for the “Hat Tip”! I think that’s a Noun describing an Action! Like the word, “run” it can be an action or a physical place. But I “egress”—:)~
If you don't read, you don't learn language. It's that simple. People no longer read books. Even in school students are not given books to read. How are they supposed to learn to write and to develop reading comprehension skills, never mind critical thinking skills. I do think the vampires are going to get them.