High School Grammar: Crucial Information for Parents
“I won’t hire people who use poor grammar,” states Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit in San Luis Obispo, California. In fact, Wiens gives perspective employees “a writing test, which is essentially a grammar test, at the beginning of the interview process,” he states. He has found that a grammar assessment “is a better indicator of how [employees] will do on the job than all the other technical stuff and rigmarole we put people through,” he states in an interview in Grammar Revolution, a documentary film by David and Elizabeth O’Brien. Elizabeth is the founder of Grammar Revolution: Teach and Learn Grammar the Easy Way, at english-grammar-revolution.com. Furthermore, in an article published in the Harvard Business Review, Wiens states:
If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.
Of course, Wiens readily admits that employees of his company write for a living. Other companies, however, are following suit and making standard writing and speaking a prerequisite for employment. They are also unnecessarily spending millions of dollars training their employees in basic English grammar and speaking skills---skills that should have been learned in high school. Guess who absorbs the cost of this on-the-job training? The consumer does! In terms of college, such a deficiency may not keep a student out of college at schools with open enrollment, but it will, prospectively, hinder his/her admission to schools who have admissions requirement and his/her success in college.
Recently, a parent said to Mr. Garrett at a “Meet the Teacher” gathering that she felt she could teach her child(ren) grammar at home. It was the math and science that she was interested in at HIS Classes. This may or may not be true. However, Garrett retorts that his experience in teaching homeschoolers for almost fifteen years is that the majority of them DONOT know grammar very well at all. In addition, the teachers at HIS Classes are increasingly experiencing homeschool moms who are working full-time jobs and are not technically “homeschooling” their children. They’re leaving that task entirely to the instructors at HIS Classes. However, Garrett further contends that the students of these parents MUST NOT limit their curricula to only math and science. In addition, maybe parents who have taught grammar at home over the years might consider that their students may need a good refresher before they go off to the university.
See the grammar course description on the HIS Classes website at hisclasses.org. Please enroll your student with great haste! We have only a couple of weeks before classes begin!!