Nouns & Verbs :(

So, after Monday's class, I did feel a little insignificant...
That insignificance caused me to dig through my last semester's notebook to find the English 321 notes, from Mai Kuha's class.

Here are some examples from her class:

BE verb:

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

The decision was controversial.

Linking Verb:

Iguanas became popular.

Transitive Verb:

Elmer ate Dinner.

I think that it's such a necessary part of our lives, that we become comfortable with what we are taught as children. In my English 496 class, we're talking about the "structure" that we learn when we're young, and how we develop as a result of it. How we can look at a sentence and off the top up our head, we'll know what the noun is. We might not be able to describe it, but we just KNOW it. That's kind of how I felt in class Monday. (My mom would have been soo disappointed!)
I thought it was interesting that Professor McKinney said that high school is the time that our brains are most responsive to what we're being taught. I think that if that's proven in a study, why doesn't the high school curriculum show these things? I didn't have any English teachers help me study grammar, or anything. All they seemed to care about was vocabulary and punctuation, oh and Romeo and Juliet!
When I teach my second/third graders, I notice that they seem to be very confused when it comes to nouns and verbs. One little girl in my class refused to do anything until I began writing the answers on the board. She even went as far as to copy MY name on her paper, because she didn't realize she had to do her own work!
I think we need to teach these kids more.