Welcome. I'm Bill Miller, a language arts teacher from Rapid City, South Dakota, and I'd like to tell you about an old pair of hiking boots I own. They have a fabric membrane inside that theoretically makes them waterproof. I've come to believe that every student in my English class owns a pair just like them, and that a lot of those learners have splashed their way across the language arts fork of the Curriculum River many times over without once getting their feet wet.
Our language arts waterways are a mile wide and an inch deep. Overburdened curriculum demands continually put English teachers in a quandary. We can choose to teach a few programs at the expense of many others, or we can use our limited time and resources to cover everything lightly. Should we choose the latter, our hikers once again splash their way rapidly across the shallows, and the water invariably falls harmlessly on the shore.
My old hiking boots generally do a good job, but I've found that soaking them for a while in a good strong current will let water seep in. If we want to let the water seep in and soak those toes, we need to ford our hikers frequently and unhurriedly across the narrowest and deepest sections of the language arts watercourse where full immersion and strong swimming skills are the order of the day.
A good share of our modern language arts textbook publishers encourage splashing, not swimming. They are far too stingy with the crucial resources required to introduce, reinforce, and maintain a viable language arts curriculum.
Over the course of a thirty-five year career, I've spent countless hours creating materials to replace their typically pitiful offerings. I've recently published this comprehensive collection of absolutely effective, classroom-tested materials--worksheets, notes, quizzes, tests, study guides, and answer keys. I've included suggestions that show how to implement these resources successfully, and I've started every lesson with a generous helping of confidence-building background information. A detailed step-by-step language arts curriculum guide is included as well as a superb section on sentence diagramming. Indeed, this is one grammar book that truly offers an abundance of everything! To every parent, tutor, home-school instructor, teacher, substitute teacher, and independent learner who needs an extraordinary language arts resource, I humbly offer Syntax For Sailors Navigating the English Channel.
