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Thursday, October 25, 2007

True confession: When it comes to predicates, I'm not smarter than a 5th grader

The twins were studying for their 5th grade grammar test the other day and were having a bit of trouble identifying their predicates.

"Oh, well..." I said. Then I tried that old teacher/parent trick of lapsing into a Socratic bluff: "What do you think the predicate is? How would you identify it?"

Because the truth is, I couldn't identify the predicate either.

I learned what it was, once, I'm sure, back when we used to diagram sentences. And in the 30 to 40 years since -- even through three years of studying Latin, two studying German and more than a quarter of a century as a professional writer -- the concept of the "predicate" had never come up.

No professor ever quizzed me on it or even used the word. Not one persnickety reader has written to chide me for a lapse in predicate etiquette.  Not one gimlet-eyed editor has taken me to task for misplacing one or leaving one out altogether.

Now I am not one to argue that everything taught in school needs to be obviously relevant in later life or that because you forgot something, there was little point in having learned it in the first place.

A good part of education is training your mind to think. Stuffing it full of names, dates, definitions, formulas and factoids that you then synthesize, regurgitate and forget is an important part of that process. When you wrote a paper about the life and times of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the point wasn't to have a lifelong command of Longfellow trivia, it was to begin to develop a lifelong ability to gather, process and present information while at the same time getting a sense of all that awaits those who study history.

Still, I feel vaguely embarrassed not to have been able to tell my children what a predicate is and to have simply nodded approvingly as they explained the concept.

Time for your true confessions: What is it that you should know but, honestly, don't?

  On the Web:



If you handed me a circle and said, "draw me a cosine" I'd have no idea what to do.

Didn't know what a predicate was either!

You mean stuff I knew when I was in school but now I have to look up? The list is endless, starting with how to diagram a sentence. (Ironically, I remember that I loved to do that when I was a kid. I remember the day in 5th grade when suddenly all the parts of speech made sense; and I actually remember thinking what a clever and helpful thing it was to be able to diagram a sentence. I couldn't do it now to save my life.) Other things I no longer know: state capitals, all the presidents in order, Avogadro's number, how a bill becomes a law. I pretty much just get by on my looks these days.

ZORN REPLY -- Avogadro's number, from memory, 6.12 x 10 to the 18th power? The number of molecules in a standard
unit of gas??
From the Internet: 6.022 x 10 to 23rd (not bad!!) -- it's the "number of atoms, molecules, etc. in a gram mole of any chemical substance."

But honestly, you're not embarrassed not to know that. No one really thinks you should. What about, say, whether Benjamin Franklin was a president (he wasn't, of course, and maybe that's too easy).

I recently bought a house. The previous owner did a good job with the landscaping (such as one can landscape an 1/8th of an acre). When I try to explain what they did that was nice I realize I have no idea what any of the plants or bushes are. (The one exception is that I can identify the Pear tree from its having produce a large number of pears this fall).
Does that fit the kind of thing you are looking for?

ZORN REPLY -- Yes. That's not exactly book learnin', but it's a gap in one's education.

I never even *heard* of diagramming a sentence until I was in college. I still don't know what it means or how to do it.

I'm in the same boat as Lon: if it's not an easily-identifiable tree, I don't know what it is. Really embarrassing since all of my other family members are intimately familiar with landscaping greenery.

Aside from that, I just realized I probably couldn't name more than half of the state capitals from memory.

Oh, I'm with Lon on plants; 99% of the time, I'm horrible at identifying them. It's the same with birds; unless it's a really common, easy one like a starling, robin or cardinal, I usually have no idea.

My grammar gap is the gerund. I still can't quite remember what it is or how to use it.

Geeeeze, EZ! I admitted to three things that anyone who ever attended school should be embarassed not to remember, and you call me out on the ONE thing that I shouldn't be embarassed about? AND that you just happen to be able to call up from memory? Bully for you! I've always known you were smarter than me. But I'm still a lot better lookin'. So there. Cancel my subscription.

ZORN REPLY -- Well, I was off by a factor of, what, five? Just don't ask me about Planck's constant.

My husband has been studying for the GED (he lived in Africa and his family couldn't afford a consistent school education) and when it comes to the math section, I have to admit to some major embarrassment. Once we got past the fractions part I was learning as much as he was. But I was pleasantly surprised on all the other sections - if you could earn a GED by passing 5 out of 6 sections, I could do it. Fortunately, the State of Indiana long ago signed off on my diploma.

'lie' &or 'lay'
their tense forms and when to use which.
sr viatrix, osf, is very unhappy with me i'm sure.

Subject/predicate I've got, if only because I've always been a reader and a visual learner. My most memorable English class experience, pre-HS, was the time my 7th grade teacher had us diagram sentences on the chalkboard.

Not the greatest school district, that ... I think sentence diagramming should start around the same time as multiplication tables, which was 3rd grade for me. That stuck.

I was just trying to remember what pi (r) squared amounts to, the other day... Circumference? Would it entertain you to know that I started musing about pi while I was trying to figure out the formula for determining the length of the longest side of a right triangle?

I can't bank a shot, either. My HS geometry teacher was on my paper route, and he didn't tip. And my sixth-grade math teacher physically attacked me, once. And ... I just don't like math.

My first trip abroad revealed a startling lack of awareness about other cultures and (current) world geography. But I'm learning.

Whether you remember it or not, the of the most practical and useful tidbits from days of school past is the Pythagorean theorem: a squared + b squared = c squared.

Read it, learn it, live it!

If you knew something once, forgot, but were able to remember what it was as soon as someone told you what it was, there's no need to be embarrassed. I don't think that's the same as "things you should know, but don't."

For that second category... I can't name all nine Supreme Court Justices. I can't name all the amendments in the Bill of Rights, and definitely not in order. My understanding of the causes and reasons behind the first World War is pretty much non-existent.

Not as important but still somewhat shameful... I can't explain the infield fly rule, and have no idea of what constitutes offsides in soccer.

I was going to mention Planck's constant! Avogadro's number is just "funnier," as Neil Simon would say. But the truth is, you were very close in your recollection of the number and its importance. All I honestly remembered is that I once knew of Avogadro, and the fact that he had a number. And if he didn't have a funny name, I probably wouldn't have even remembered that!

Remember "The Tale of Mr. Morton" from Schoolhouse Rock? "Mr. Morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says, he does." If you are of a certain age, the tune might be coming back to you right now...

I can't remember what a Markov Chain is. [pun intended]

But then, heck, I don't even know if Schrodinger's cat was dead or alive. [I got a million of 'em]

Things I don't remember that I wish I did:

- Algebra (even though I loved it and took three years in high school)
- All the state capitals
- Cooking from scratch
- American Presidents and what they're remembered for

Things I never knew that I wish I did:

- Gilbert & Sullivan
- What different birds look and sound like
- Illinois history (but I can name all the monarchs of England!)
- When different fruits and vegetables are in season
- How to knit something besides a scarf that just gets longer and longer and longer....
- Chess

EZ: "I was off by a factor of, what, five"

Well, there's another hole in your memory--you were off by 5 orders of magnitude, which is a whole lot more than 5. Like 20,000 times as much.

I find more interesting the flip side--things that you didn't really understand in school that occasionally light a bulb years later.

ZORN REPLY -- Well, there you go. I fixed your spelling of "occasionally," by the way.
I don't have any examples of light-bulb moments from school except that just about everything I remember reading in high school was MUCH more meaningful for me when I became an adult and had a broader understanding of the world and human nature. Lots of that was lost on me in the solipsistic world of a high schooler.

Check out the Tale of Mr. Morton here:
and you'll never forget what a Predicate is.

See; for some, staying in school after the fifth grade is a waste of money and time.

And besides, doesn't government provide us with everything we need ? It do; and that proves the predicate is irrelevant and useless for most of the sheep.

I remember predicates - all these years later, I still think that being taught about a predicate is kind of a silly lesson - I think it could take away from learning the rest of grammar, which is far more important - adjectives and adverbs, subject/verb agreement, prepositions and prepositional phrases, etc... Maybe it was just a starting point, I don't remember, but I fear that people can just say, "well, there's your subject and there's your predicate - what more do you want from me?" I suppose I have little faith in people...sorry about that.

Hey JS, I'd grant you nobody really needs to know "blogging" is a gerund in this sentence. Noun will do.

But learning to distinguish subject from predicate is the first step toward learning about subject/verb agreement, prepositional phrases and all your other basic grammar rules related to sentence structure.

If you don't have the basic structure nailed down, it's hard to see where all the other pieces go.

Of course, if I had the Pythagorean theorem committed to memory when I started working on this small woodworking project I'm doing, I'd have had an easier time figuring out where one piece of that will end up.

I can't believe I am writing this, but I feel compelled. After numerous years in "CCD" (aka religous education) I know NOTHING- yes that's correct NOTHING about religion. I am slightly embarassed to admit it. My four year old daughter came home from preschool and was talking about "Saul and David" and I thought this was a variation of "Harry and David's" stores commonly found in the U.S. My husband thinks it is shameful that I have no clue- but all that Ican say is that I went to religous education every week until I was confirmed- and it was always to see what snack was being brought in, or (as I got older) to flirt with the "cute" boys. Yeesh. I feel free just writing that! Thank you for this forum to confess my ignorance!

It's might be ok to forget how to solve a square root or diagram a sentence. But, it's terrible how I've all but forgotten how to make a decent friend, anymore. It's not that I'm super lonely -- I've got a wonder wife and child and some acquaintences in the neighborhood. But, it's just darn hard to remember how to make friends like all those close, binding friends I made back when I learned all about predicates.

I'm clueless when given directions to go north, south, east or west. You need to give me an intersection and then a landmark and then tell me to go left or right. I always show up but it's embarassing to function like this. I obviously missed the Compass class. In what year is it taught?

ZORN REPLY -- I sometimes have problems with east and west that I don't have with north and south, and I'm sure there's a perfectly honorable genetic excuse for it.

Eric: You missed the most important lesson. It's not what you remember, it's that you know where to find the answer. Also, how can you confuse east and west? As long as you're in our area, THE lake is east.

ZORN REPLY -- I know where east is, it's just when I am describing something as being east or west of another thing I can get dyslectic.

What bothers me most about people not knowing what a predicate is, isn't that they don't know—they can be forgiven that because the schools do a terrible, terrible job at teaching any sort of linguistic analysis at all—but that so many of them *don't* know a thing about linguistics and yet feel entitled to rudely lambast others over grammar "rules" that they were taught once, or heard about, or just made up; rules that no good writer actually follows, and indeed that some of the lambasters proceed to break within seconds of decrying others for their ignorance. (Linguistics seems to be relatively unusual in this regard—people who know nothing about math, for instance, are nearly as common, but rarely commit the same sort of drive-by rudeness.)

Fwiw, a predicate is just a property that can be true of some entities and false of others. So for the predicate "likes Avery", you might have some people (Logan, Pat) that it's true of and some that it's false of. One place this typically shows up is as a full verb phrase (such as "likes Avery"), but the definition is broader, which is why in a sentence like "Logan is smart", we call "smart" a predicate adjective—it's a property that is true of some entities and false of others. Defining it in this way opens up all sorts of analytical tools to how to understand a sentence (not to mention insights into translating into foreign languages), and yet probably 99% of all grade school teachers that even teach it in the first place, just teach "predicate" as a term to learn by rote that refers to the part of the sentence that isn't the subject (or worse, the part that "does something" or the "action" of the sentence), and "predicate adjective" as an unrelated rote term to label adjectives that come after the forms of "be". What's the point of that? Mostly to turn people off on studying linguistics, as far as I can tell. :P

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