Death to high school English
My college students don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay. Is it time to rethink how we teach?
Like so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class. I struggled with math and had no interest in sports. Science I found interesting, but it required studying. I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility -- no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading. I spent so much of my adolescence feeling different and awkward, and those first canonical books I read, those first discoveries of Joyce, of Keats
, of Sylvia Plath
and Fitzgerald, were a revelation. Without them, I probably would have turned to hard drugs, or worse, one of those Young Life chapters so popular with my peers.So I won't deny that I owe a debt to the traditional high-school English class, the class in which I first learned to read literature, to write about it and talk about it and recite it and love it. My English teachers were for the most part smart, thoughtful women who loved books and wanted to help other people learn to love them. Nothing, it seemed to me at the time, could make for a better class. Only now, a decade and a half later, after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I've begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test
preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.
preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.
Good article with lots to respond to.
ReplyDelete(How do you like that? I started a discussion of teaching English conventions with a fragment!)
It seems late to start teaching composition in high school. We should be focusing on the middle grades. Students can and should master writing conventions by the end of middle school (and this is a Common Core Standard), just as they can and should master arithmetic by then.
Why, in MY day, Sonny, we had to spell and punctuate correctly in every class from sixth grade on, and in the early grades we regularly took dictation in English, just as we did dictee in French. (And I had to WALK to and from school, uphill both ways, with mashed potatoes in my mittens to keep my fingers from freezing.)
The author notes that teaching and grading writing conventions is hard, time-consuming, and a magnet for student whinging. Yep. But if a strong principal set and enforced a policy of minimum writing standards schoolwide, the whinging would be reduced to a low background grumble, and students would start internalizing the standard.
As for whether high schools should stop emphasizing literature in order to teach composition -- that's a false dichotomy. Of course they should teach both, and in the same class. Reading good writers is an important way to become one. But I wish the schools would also expose students to more nonfiction. The Little Dears will need that in college (and out).
Second Eskarina's comment that they need to both read and write, and that reading more nonfiction would be good (most of which the article author also says, but it's a bit buried).
ReplyDeleteBut why, oh why, did the article author decide to name the salary ($80,000) of a tenured English professor who would double hir lit load rather than teach comp, and not name her own presumably much lower salary (for what still sounds like a pretty cushy load -- two 15-student sections. I taught that load, once upon a time, and if I had it again I'd be willing to -- and would have time to -- teach students to write sentences and paragraphs, and maybe even move them from there to research papers, in the space of two semesters if not one. I suspect the author is an adjunct, and, even then, I'm surprised that any school with 15 students per comp section isn't selective enough to weed out the ones who can't write sentences and paragraphs. Maybe it's an expensive but otherwise not very selective private school?). She also mentions "summers off" and sabbaticals in connection with said proffie, feeding the stereotype of the overpaid, under-worked tenured English proffie. And she implies that high school teachers make less and work more than college professors -- not necessarily the case. In fact, in most places I know, at least in the state system, professors make less than high school teachers with a similar amount of experience (and the slight bump in salary that comes with an M.A. or Ph.D. in no way makes up for the many classroom years lost while the teacher pursued that degree). I'm still not volunteering to be a high school English teacher (and not only because I've been told that my Ph.D. would actually be an impediment to getting hired, since they'd have to pay me more), but the argument that they're paid less than we are, even when you compare apples to apples (full-time state employee to full-time state employee) doesn't wash.
I prefer teaching comp to lit and would do an all-comp load in a heartbeat if I could be guaranteed 15-20 students a section. Instead I request mostly lit because we don't differentiate numbers of students allowed by class type. We are fast approaching caps of 30 for both classes. So I can do a research project and two essay exams in a lit class (along with smaller assignments) for 30 students who for the most part can at least do the basics, or I can do two essay exams and four papers of at least 1,000 words each and a writing journal, peer editing, and reader response exercises for the same number of students in a comp class.
ReplyDeleteI know most of the comp students don't know how to write. I get notes of gratitude for teaching them basics such as how to use semicolons and what the phrase "comma splice" actually means. They are also thrilled to learn (well, at least some of them) that essays don't have to be five paragraphs long with three reasons for a thesis and a conclusion that regurgitates the introduction. It's not covered on Semi-Literate Southern State's high school exit exam, so no one has taught it to them.
I don't know about the author's neck of the woods, but at the community college level, a starting high school teacher with a BA earns MORE than one of our starting proffies with an MA unless said proffie is in the nursing department. The salaries start to level out when entry-level proffie has been teaching for us for five years and goes back to take some more hours. But once the high school teacher gets the MA and five years of experience, things go out of balance again until the proffie gets up to 36 hours past master's level, moves up in rank, and has been with us for ten years. I haven't done doctoral comparisons because only about a third of us in my system have them. I suspect they'd be similarly depressing.
Considering the standard CC load is 5-5 (and even 6-6 in some places now) and we have mountains of committee work and advising to do, I think she might want to reconsider that stereotype. Even among my research and SLAC colleagues, liberal arts teaching loads tend to be fairly large, and some of my friends doing R-1 or R-2 work tell me they have sections of over 100 students for comp that they then have to teach TAs how to help them manage. I don't think many of us have it easy.
I'll second Contingent Cassandra: I was with the author right up until I learned that she was complaining about teaching 2 sections of comp capped at 15 students (and mentioned her $80K colleague). What would she do with 3 sections of 24? Or EngDoc's 5/5 load?? Each of us has had to figure out how to deal with the students (and their skills, or lack thereof) that we have--and yes, I will say that after 15 years in higher ed, I have noticed more grammar problems--and we're not likely to get better ones given the current rhet/comp theory that pretty much puts grammar and sentence structure in the category of "Things You Would Find in a Gulag".
ReplyDeleteSo I have a rubric sheet for each of the 4 major paper assignments that concentrates on Higher Order Concerns (intro, thesis, organization, support) and Lower Order Concerns (grammar, punctuation, proofreading) that shows them visually where they need to work. I comment on their papers, and each one takes at least 20 minutes to grade (works out to about 24 hours of grading per assignment between my 3 sections). Their short work (posts and responses on discussion board topics) gets checked off for completion rather than content (and fulfills the rhet/comp touchy-feely "get them writing ANYTHING without 'fear' of correction" direction).
I agree that their writing practice needs to start in middle school, but I've notice Thing One's homework sheets (she's in 1st grade in public school) are already covering comma placement and apostrophe use in sentence structure, so I don't know where the gap gets going...
The gap gets going when students opt to return to tabula rasa format following each successive intermission from academe. They are being taught and they are learning--or electing not--across their entire student careers; crapping upon each other and our processes does not help.
ReplyDeleteAnd every. single. day. I feel more and more sorority with and compassion for Natalie Munroe. Remember her?
Who's crapping?
ReplyDeleteNobody here, in this instance, of course--though the title of this entry feels like a jab, I try to avoid being reactive to that. There is on my level some occasional rancor and railing against whatever is presumed to be going on in middle school/elementary, and one does get the erstwhile "if only those high school teachers would..." smackage with fair regularity. We need to mindfully avoid that when we have a moment to be mindful is all I'm sayin'. It's a tough time to be a teacher on any level (and it's been a really, really rough two weeks for me personally), and fraternity helps.
ReplyDeleteI understand that writing skills have diminished over a number of years and for various reasons. I'm more forgiving with my students and their poor writing skills than I am my colleagues, though. Students actually call one professor the "Comma Nazi" or "Comma King" because he takes off letter grades on papers with "improper" punctuation. He doesn't teach English; he teaches in the social sciences. He also has no actual idea of how commas are supposed to be used, but that doesn't stop him from lowering students' grades.
ReplyDeleteAh, a return of a lost post, but sans the decent discussion that was ongoing all up in here before the great Blogger debacle of May 2011 (I still think it was a salvo in the Google-Facebook war).
ReplyDeleteWord is that comments will be reappearing staggered across time, but I will believe it when I see it. My own site lost some stuff, but none of my students' work that wasn't already noted and credited by me in the hours before the place went blooey; how'd ya'll fair? (Hey, maybe the stuff of a thirsty?
A grammer is just one of those diehard metric believers. They are like a cult, I tell ya.
ReplyDeleteAll I can write about the subject is that in order to be a semi-competent writer you have to practice a lot and read books with an analytical eye. At my crazy insane Christian schools we pretty much did the same grammar workbook (a 500-page brick)* every year after 5th grade, and we had to write book reports, historical reports, and bible crapola every semester; thus it forced a lot of skateboarding idiots and wannabe Valley Girls into being pretty decent with the written word for their age. That written, you have to WANT to be a good writer, and because our "culture" shits on the literary trade most people back away and become cube drones.
ReplyDelete__________________________________
* The examples would change every year, but the structure of the book never did; it began with the typographical stuff, then nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.....then on to sentence diagramming, writing paragraphs,culmnating finally in book reports, business letters, and mutipage school reports. We had a seperate spelling book and a hard-bound literature textbook, but those are other stories.