By the end of this course, students willidentify the requirements, including basic equipment standards, preparation (e.g.,warm-up and cool-down exercises, training requirements), and specific safety issues that maximize performance and participation in recreation and sport activities;
Somehow, I need to demonstrate, in tabular form, where our textbook enables students to do this. The only problem is that I can't parse this sentence! How the heck do requirements include issues? And how does a requirement maximize performance?
Okay. So drawing on the skillz I employed when reading ancient Greek texts for class, I am going to isolate the main clause and identify the parts of speech:
Main clause:
(So far so good. Subject: students. Main verb: will identify (third person plural, future, indicative, active). Direct object: the requirements. There must be a subordinate clause in apposition, that will modify the requirements, and tell me which requirements. Let's put a bracket around the participal phrase " including basic equipment standards, preparation (e.g.,warm-up and cool-down exercises, training requirements), and specific safety issues"—it's clearly in apposition to the direct object. So now I need a demonstrative adjective, which will tell me which requirements students will identify. Oh, look, there's a "that," followed by some a subordinate clause. We'll parse that next.)
the requirements that maximize performance and participation.
Yep. That's what the text says. Really. So somehow, some criteria (requirements) are running around enhancing or getting the most (maximizing) activity (performance and participation).
Oookay. If I were reading Lucian right now, I'd be checking what the Loeb said, sure that I'd made some sort of error in my reading. But look, we have a prepositional phrase!
"in recreation and sport activities" goes with "performance and participation" and tells us what the maximized performance and participation pertain to. What the entire subordinate clause means, however, is still kind of unclear to me.
So, the sentence, without the annoying participial phrase, and with synonyms substituted for the unclear terminology is
Students will discover the preconditions that make as great as possibletheir performance and participation in recreation and sports activities.
That's what the text says.
Now for that last appositive, modifying "requirements": We have the gerundive (I think?) "including." So the requirements that maximize performance and participation include a bunch of noun phrases. These noun phrases are basic equipment standards, preparation (e.g.,warm-up and cool-down exercises, training requirements), and specific safety issues
In other words, it really does say that standards, preparation (for example, training requirements) and issues are types of requirement.
I really do feel like I used to when trying to read Euripides. I have all the syntax, and all the vocab., and none of it strings together in a sensical way.
Sigh.
(Yes, I can guess, if I turn off my linguist brain and turn on my editor brain. If I were editing this document, I'd write a comment, like this:
I'm not clear on how the requirements that students need to identify can include things like "safety issues." I think that, in our desire to be complete and to use appropriate language, we have sacrificed clarity. Do we mean that students will indentify what they need, in terms of both equipment and preparation, in order to safely get the most out of their participation in recreational and sports activities? Can we say this? Please clarify.
But I've guessed at what the curriculum team meant. That's not really what the language says. Problem is that I can demonstrate that our resource enables students to do what I wrote, and tell teachers where the exercises that demonstrate this are. Not so much with the requirement as worded.
