My 1950s miseducation in English.

[Lionel Mandrake]

Growing up in the 1950s, I learned from my various English teachers that shall and will are synonyms, and the proper usage was as follows:

non-emphatic: I or we shall; you will; he, she, it, or they will;
emphatic: I or we will; you shall; he, she, it, or they shall.

But this is bullshit. Nobody speaks or writes this way. In fact, now very few people ever say "shall". (I sometimes say "shall", but I'm a dinosaur.)

Of course my teachers never mentioned the fact that modals come in pairs like "shall, should" and "will, would", nor that syntactically each pair consists of a present and a past form, let alone the fact that syntactically English lacks a future tense. I'm pretty sure my teachers didn't know squat about English syntax.

I also learned that the parts of speech are noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, verb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. Notably missing from this list is particle. Particles were rigorously mislabeled adverbs, and no teacher ever mentioned phrasal verbs, which in fact are about half of the verbs you hear in everyday speech. Just consider the following phrasal verbs: take in, take out, take over, take on, take up, take down. Here the words in, out, over, on, up, and down are particles, not adverbs of prepositions.

I also learned to "diagram" sentences, but unlike the tree diagrams that linguists draw, the silly diagrams we drew explained nothing we didn't already know.

I learned that the indefinite article was "an" before a vowel and "a" before a consonant, but not that the definite article was usually pronounced /ði/ before a vowel and /ðə/ before a consonant, but always /ði/ if the emphasis was on the word "the". Of course we didn't need instruction about the pronunciation of "the", because we were already doing it correctly.

In short, most of my English teachers deserved a grade of F- in grammar.