Remember Schoolhouse Rock???

schoolhouse rock! 

O.K. this was unequivocally the "shit" when I was young. I learned all kinds of very helpful shit.....

Got home from camping last spring.
Saw people, places and things.
We barely had arrived,
Friends asked us to describe
The people, places and every last thing.
So we unpacked our adjectives.

But here's my thing ya'll....why is it that so many black children can't pick out a subject or a noun in a sentence, much less put together a grammatically correct sentence?? Now, before I get on my high ole horse, I knooooooooooooow that I have let some of the more "refined" English skills I possess go by the wayside.....but the fact is I STILL know them! I use as many "ain'ts" and double negatives as many of my learned and urban brethren that I went to college with, but I reinterate.... I DO KNOW how to put together a sentence so that anyone anywhere (who speaks English) can understand me!

It reeeeeally grates on my damn nerves like no body's bizness to hear a child speaking incorrectly. Now some may argue that the whole black english vernacular thing IS our language and that Ebonics is rooted in our culture, yada yada yah.... the fact is that in THIS HERE white ass AMERICA...that shit ain't (how ya like that word for hypocrisy sake).....I repeat, that shit AIN'T gon get you a job in corporate America, nor will it even allow most of "us" to take you seriously in your own community if you decide not to venture into the "white debbil"'s world, all because you sound like you don't know what'chu talkin' 'bout!

Interjections (Hey!) show excitement (Yow!) or emotion (Ouch!).
They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong.


So, why don't kids learn the same kinds of grammatical lessons these days that we did? (or rather, that some of us did??) It seems like the cool thing is to be as gremmatically INCORRECT as possible, but maybe that's the way it's always been. I know one thing, my child will have grammar lessons starting REALLY early and you can be guaranteed that he will go to a school where everyone (or at least most) speak as most of white america does, for I would rather him be teased and have his black friends say he sounds like he's "trying to be white", than to have my son be ill-equipped for the "real" world! Because what comes out of your mouth is MORE important than what's on your resume, how you dress and how ethnic you look. Because all of those qualities can be in place and if you sound like you don't know a verb from a noun.....you're done fer.

(Verb! That's what's happenin')
I can take a noun and bend it,
Give me a noun -
(Bat, ball, rake, and plow)
Make it a verb and really send it!
(Show me how)
Oh, I don't know my own poweeeeer. (Verb!)

Now i know that Schoolhouse Rock doesn't come on t.v. on Saturday's with the frequency that it used to, but maybe if it did, we could goad kids into believing that it really is "cool" to be smart and to sound intelligent when you speak (O.K. I know I'm reaching with the "cool" comment..heehee). But it is truly my opinion that our black youth need all the encouragement and advantages that we can give them. Let's start by teaching the some of the spoken fundamentals......After all.....isn't that what our parents did for us???

Conjunction Junction, what's your function?
Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.
Conjunction Junction, how's that function?
I got three favorite cars
That get most of my job done.
Conjunction Junction, what's their function?
I got "and", "but", and "or",
They'll get you pretty far.