Beginning with Prepositions

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Catherine Doobie from Garland, Texas.

Well, hello, Catherine Doobie. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a couple of kids in middle school, and we have found that the English language tends to be abused a little bit for our middle school-aged kids and their friends.

And when one of their teachers, their English teacher specifically, was teaching them that they don’t start sentences with prepositions, I went a little bit ballistic because I’m the grandma police in our family.

So I had never heard that before, and I thought after I went and addressed the teacher and told her, you don’t end sentences in prepositions, I understand that, of course, but what I didn’t understand was why you wouldn’t start sentences with prepositions and how boring our English language would be if we did that.

So then I started thinking, well, maybe I’m off base. Maybe there is some reason you wouldn’t start sentences.

And I thought you guys might be able to shed some light on that.

Wait a minute, Catherine.

Prepositions?

Are you sure she meant prepositions?

I am sure she meant prepositions.

What did she say when you talked to her about this?

Yeah, give us an example.

Well, she didn’t want the kids to start sentences just with prepositional phrases.

She thought they absolutely needed to modify the object of the sentence and be immediately following those.

So you couldn’t start a sentence during the fifth grade.

This happened.

In the swimming pool, this happened.

In the beginning, God created, I mean.

And that is the exact example that I used with her because this happens to be a Catholic school.

What did she say?

Wow.

King James got it wrong, huh?

Well, she backpedaled a little bit and said, well, I think what I’m after is that our kids are using prepositions just excessively.

Five sentences in a paragraph, all starting with the same preposition.

And I said, okay, maybe if you’re trying to teach them a style where they wouldn’t have all one type of sentence.

Yeah.

I could understand that.

But she had told me that her professor in college had told her that she could not start sentences and prepositions for a research paper.

So then maybe I thought there was something I’d missed in college about specific writing for research.

Catherine, I appreciate what she’s trying to do.

She’s trying to stop her students from using a crutch.

But what she’s doing is inappropriately transmitting her own personal preference as if it’s somehow a universal rule about English.

And it’s not. I’ve never even heard that as a rule, ever.

I mean, vary your sentence structure, yes.

Yeah, sure.

I remember getting those kind of comments from my teachers in the fourth and the fifth grade.

Sure.

And that makes sense, right? As you said.

Well, let’s just take this another way.

Martha, we get calls all the time from people who say things like, you know, Mrs. Frobisher in the fifth grade said that I wasn’t ever supposed to do X, Y, Z.

And we’ll be like, you know, Mrs. Frobisher was just simplifying for you.

You were supposed to figure that out a little bit later on.

It does stick with people.

It does stick, though.

That’s the thing is when you get these adamant black and white absolutes from teachers, people believe that they are true forever.

And they’re just, I mean, what a difficult task it must be for a teacher, right?

How hard it must be to like let your, you know, because nuance kind of falls away in a classroom, right?

You got time for the basics.

You got a really simple point you want to make.

And you don’t have a lot of time to be wishy-washy about it.

Exactly.

You’re teaching this stuff for the first time to people.

They’re hearing it for the first time from these really tall people with a lot of power.

And so, of course, they’re going to want to please the teacher.

But, whoa.

I wonder if we were to talk to the teacher, if we could help her come up with a better way to teach that lesson.

Oh, that would be interesting.

That’s a great question.

Well, you know, she’s welcome to call us, Catherine.

So, Catherine, where does that leave you?

What are you going to do?

What do your kids think?

Well, I will offer for our teacher to give you guys a call.

We could certainly do that.

I do think I have resolved it with her.

To my satisfaction, I’m glad you agree with me because we’ve had the conversation a couple of times, and I believe she did see that through a variety of sources that is perfectly acceptable.

And I agreed with her that if she’s trying to teach my kids overuse in this paragraph of the same sentence structure, it’s what we want to avoid.

Catherine, thank you for giving us a call today.

This is incredibly interesting.

And thank you for sharing the dilemma with us.

And let us know if she wants to talk to us.

On the air or off, by the way.

Great. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Okay. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And if you’ve got a teacher’s dilemma that you want to share with us, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

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