A Sad State of English Affairs

I am teaching a 200-level English course this semester. We are moving into a series of lectures about grammar. Yes. Grammar.

It is everyone's favorite subject. Well, it's mine. So, back off.

There's something about punctuation that just does it for me: ellipses, brackets, parentheses, braces, the full stop, commas, semi colon...

Whew. I have to stop.

I'm starting to sweat.

I digress.

This morning, I held an introductory lecture into the subject of grammar. The discussion centered around the history of grammar, the difference between the Big G, "Grammar" and the Little G, "grammar," as well as some basic topics such as parts of speech.

Well, I gave my students a short refresher quiz to get things going.

The questions were as follows:

1. Name as many punctuation marks in the English language as you can.
2. Name as many of the parts of speech as you can.
3. What is a noun?
4. What is a pronoun?
5. What is a verb?
6. What is an adverb?
7. What is an adjective?

Twelve students could define a noun.
Six students could define a pronoun.
Eight students could define a verb.
Nine students could define an adverb.
Ten students could define an adjective.

Needless to say, I was shocked by my students' collective knowledge of the basics of English. Now, I grew up in an intellectual household -- I had the great pleasure of having a father who got me interested in reading at a young age. I do realize that I am an English nerd and I teach and write for a living. I also understand that many of my students had unfavorable experiences with English in high school, were not taught very well, or simply don't care about English.

But we're talking about the basics.

I want to pose a couple of questions to all the people in the blog-o-sphere:

What were your experiences with learning English, particularly grammar?

Why do you think we no longer put a premium on understanding our own language?