Do you remember English 101?

That question can not be answered. Which part of, "Mom, me and Henry are going to the store," am I supposed to address?

Frankly, in posting that particular sentence, you were telling me which word you think is the subject. It is not the correct one.

EVery text book designed for use in developmental (remedial) English for college students offers several identical chapters.

One chapter always deals with the fact that the subject of the sentence is never the object of a preposition.

My contention -- shared by each and everyone of my colleagues who teach remedial writing and reading -- is that if you can not identify the subject of the sentence, you can not comprehend what the sentence is about and what the author is telling you.

JTT wrote a sentence without explaining his intention. I asked him twice what he is suggesting.

I assume that he is saying that "store" is the subject of the sentence. Store is not the subject of the sentence.

I didn't want to state that because JTT takes exception to the fact that were I to reform education in America, I would bring back diagramming, although I would probably use the Montessori method rather than the Catholic school method.

...

If people working in developmental English, with students who can not read (in some cases) beyond the third grade level, advocate a return to sentence diagramming to boost their reading level, why does JTT take umbrage on the matter?

What he expects me to correct in the sentence he created is beyond me. If he thinks store is the subject of the sentence, then he is in a sorry state.

My contention -- shared by each and everyone of my colleagues who teach remedial writing and reading -- is that if you can not identify the subject of the sentence, you can not comprehend what the sentence is about and what the author is telling you.

Again, a crock of sour owl manure. I've asked before but it seems that you are unable or reluctant to think about it. These kids have grown up discussing the subjects of innumerable sentences. They form ideas and put all the right words in the word order that English grammar demands.

They do this so quickly and with such ease. They haven't gone through a fog of misunderstanding since the age of five. They don't use a preposition in the position of the verb, or the object, or the subject. Their word order causes no concern to the adults around them. The adults understand, the adults are not shocked by a foreign word order.

The corrections that adults normally provide have nothing to do with mixing up verbs, relative pronouns, nouns, ... . When adults do offer corrections, it's
usually misguided notions [prescriptions] about English.

How can a sentence without underlining and/or a description have a yes or no answer? IT IS NOT A YES OR NO QUESTION!

Pom wrote: Every developmental text book has a unit on teaching the fact that the object of a preposition is never the subject of a sentence. I laughed. No one thinks the object of a preposition is the subject of a sentence, I thought.

Let's Is the problem an ill-defined word?

No, not all kids "put sentences together in the correct order the language demands."

There are also some that can speak fluently but can neither read nor write and others that can speak fluently, but can read in terms of rendering the printed words as sounds but can not assign a meaning to them, even if they are able to write.

The ability to read can be quantified. Most students taking remedial level writing classes can not read on the college level. Many taking English 101 can not read on the college level.

When you ask students, what is the subject of a sentence such as yours, they will answer, "the store." They do this because their understanding of their own language is deficient.

What they were not given -- or what they refused to receive -- were the tools necessary to navigate in their native tongue. The words noun, verb, adjective and preposition are codes, short-hand if you will, for their function.

Perhaps, you can conduct yourself reasonably without knowing them, but, the truth of the matter is that people who succeed know them so well they do not have to think about them. The tool has become as much a part of the person as their name.

These kids admit that they create run on sentences because they can not distinguish one thought from another. Run on sentences are the companion to the preposition-object problem in terms of understanding.

Now, you fail to understand but you can not ask in a non-belligerent manner.

You also seem not to able to research the problem on your own.

Store is not the subject either in grammatical terms or real life terms.

subject

an idea, problem, situation, etc. that you discuss or write about
Can we talk about a different subject please?
subject of: He’s never mentioned the subject of money.
The subject of our debate today will be the environment.
bring up a subject (=deliberately start talking about a subject): It was Carol who brought up the subject of sports facilities.
get onto a subject (=start talking about a subject without planning to): Somehow we got onto the subject of education.
drop a subject (=deliberately stop talking about a subject): Look, I don’t want to talk about it, so can we drop the subject?
get off the subject (=stop talking about something because you have become interested in something else): We’re getting off the subject here – let’s get back to your book.
change the subject (=deliberately start talking about something else to avoid an argument or embarrassing situation): Can we change the subject, please?

The situation described is one of two people telling a third where they are going. No matter how you wish to construe the sentence, it means that two people are announcing their intention.

Because I was not about to insult to your intelligence, which I presumed you had. Your attitude says, "I am superior to you because I know there is no need to teach this stuff. Just look at me!"

My contention -- shared by each and everyone of my colleagues who teach remedial writing and reading -- is that if you can not identify the subject of the sentence, you can not comprehend what the sentence is about and what the author is telling you.

...Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

.....They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

....For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn't go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

http://www.slate.com/id/2288402/

Speech doesn't have question marks, commas, periods;

Grammar is a tool. These kids do know what the word subject means.

They can not apply it to all of the sentences they see. That is part of their inability to read even at the eighth grade level. They lack the tools they need.

Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century.

All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

I will say one thing: Gargamel's post is looks[sic] to be a comment on you. You're missing the sarcasm.