CHAPTER XXV
THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR
We made various experiments in teaching grammar, and must confess that no one of them succeeded in our aim of rendering this study attractive. In the summer, in the second and first classes, a new teacher made a beginning with explaining the parts of speech, and the children—at least some of them at first—were interested, as they would have been in charades and enigmas. Often, after the lesson was finished, they recurred to the idea of enigmas, and amused themselves in puzzling one another with such questions as, "Where is the predicate?" or
"What sits in the spoon,
Letting his legs hang down?"
But there was no application to correct writing, or if there was any it was rather to erroneous than to correct sentences.
Just exactly as it was with the wrong use of vowels when you say you pronounce a but write o, the pupil will write robota for rabota, "work," and molina for malina, "blackberry";[1] when you say that two predicates are separated by a comma he will write, "I wish, to say" and so on. To expect him to recognize in every sentence what is the subject and what is the predicate is impossible. But if he learns to do so, then in the process of searching for them he loses all instinct which he must have for writing the work correctly, not to speak of the fact that in syntactical analysis the teacher is all the time obliged to be subtle before his scholars and deceive them, and they are very well aware of this.
For instance, we hit on the proposition: On the earth there were no mountains.
One said the subject was earth, another that it was
- ↑ In Russian an unaccented o is pronounced like a.
