My Favorite Whine: But Who has Time??

Mina P. Shaughnessy (1977):

"Rather, the teacher must try to decipher the individual's student's code, examining samples of his writing as a scientist might, searching for patterns or explanations, listening to what the student says about punctuation, and creating situations in the classroom that encourage students to talk openly about what they don't understand."

I must confess that I am rather enjoying this book on grammar. Shaughnessy has such a wonderful wit about her: she demonstrates her own control and usage over the language as she discusses specific topics. For example, as she examines why students do not begin sentences with and or but, she states:

"But until the student has stable criteria for recognizing the sentence, he is often likely to begin not a sentence but a fragment with and and then think his error lies in using and rather than in failing to follow and with a sentence."

Isn't that terribly clever?

On another note, at first, I was annoyed with what I considered Shaughnessy's lame excuse for relying on the masculine pronoun for the student all the way through 8 chapters. But she also uses the pronoun to discuss teachers as well:

"After having tried various ways of circumventing the use of the masculine pronoun in situations where women teachers and students might easily outnumber men, I have settled for the convention, but I regret that the language resists my meaning in this important respect. When the reader sees he, I can only hope she will also be there."

I want to think that she settled on the masculine pronoun because through most of the book she discusses the errors that students make and that she didn't want to make that student a female (who needs more negative energy on female out there?). But the truth is that she was probably just another woman caught in the 70s power struggle and needed to comply with conventions somewhat in order to get this important work on the shelves. Still. I feel a bit clobbered over the head.