School Fools

Okay, this REALLY gets to me...

Our 2nd grader is doing school at home, using the school district's online system. Aside from working at his own pace and having much more flexibility of choice as to which assignments to do in what order, and being able to get much more done in a much shorter time, one thing I really like about it is that I have the opportunity to go into in-depth discussions on various topics with the boy - going off on tangents and sharing knowledge and perspective with him. It's good quality time together. It also gives me the opportunity to correct any misinformation that is taught, or frame the information in the context of our own values.

And the other thing I get to do is nitpick oversee the way the information is presented. I mean, if anyone should be providing grammatically correct material, it should be the school. Kids are sponges, and they absorb and learn to repeat what is taught to them - even when it is incorrect.

Today (yes, that's the other great thing about online school - if for some reason it doesn't get done during the week, you can just do it on Saturday) I found myself intellectually assaulted by two grammar problems in one assignment about animal adaptation:

"What if you were having a snowball fight? You probably run away from the person throwing snowballs at you. You might even sneak up on the other person and attack them by surprise."

See the problem? The first sentence sets up a subjunctive tense, but the next sentence is missing the conditional auxiliary "would." It should have read, "You would probably..." or "You'd probably..." - it's just jarring and inconsistent without the "would." (In the third sentence, "might" serves the purpose of a conditional auxiliary.)

Next, a little later in the same presentation, we have this:

"Elephants have long trunks to eat, drink, clean itself, and pick things up."

This one has two problems, one much more serious than the other. First off, it would've been nice to have a "with which" after the word "trunks." But the part that really grates is the problem with agreement between the noun "elephants" and the pronoun  "itself." "Elephants" is plural, while "iteslf" is singular. It should have read, "themselves."

This isn't rocket science, and the educators should know better. Good thing I was there to save my child from yet another incorrect teaching from his school!

 One elephant, by iteslf.

Two elephants, by themselves.