Grammar

Growing up, grammar always seemed to come easy to me. I made great grades in English with little effort. That was,until college. I took a class that required us to diagram sentences. This included naming the parts, and not just noun, verb, subject, and predicate. I mean the works! Had I missed all this in my previous years of school somewhere?

One thing that really stood out to me in that class was a project that I completed on dialects. I had never really paid any attention to dialects. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I just thought that people who spoke in different dialects were just too lazy to speak "proper" English. Also, in my research I found that we view dialects as a sign of intelligence. Those who speak a lot of slang and with heavy dialects are thought to not be as educated as those who spoke "proper". I use quotations when using the word proper, because what is seen as "proper" English today, varies from what was "proper" fifteen years ago. Even in documents and letters words such as who, and whom are becoming scarce.

I wish that I had learned more about sentence structure and parts of speech, not only when speaking, but when writing as well. I feel that I can speak "proper" English well, but I have a very hard time writing in it.
I do agree with a need for a Standard English and think that we should be teaching our students to use it. It is important to know sentence structure, spelling and vocabulary.However, I think that we should also steer our students from judging others based on their dialect.