From Salon: Death to high school English

[XemaSab]

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.

For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

I've stared at the black markings on the page until my vision blurred, chronicling and triaging the maneuvers I will need to teach them in 14 short weeks: how to make sure their sentences contain a subject and a verb, how to organize their paragraphs around a main idea, how to write a working thesis statement or any kind of thesis statement at all. They don't know how to outline or how to organize a paper before they begin. They don't know how to edit or proofread it once they've finished. They plagiarize, often inadvertently, and I find myself, at least for a moment, relieved by these sentence- or paragraph-long reprieves from their migraine-inducing, quasi-incomprehensible prose.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/05/10/death_to_high_school_english

[Drale]

1. I've always enjoyed writing

mostly research stuff though. I was a baseball player in high school and probably would have entered the draft once I graduated from college, until I blew out my knee and now I can barely run, I always wonder what could have been with baseball but now I'm dedicating my life to history.

[LiberalLoner]

4. You are a good writer. I have enjoyed reading your posts because you are talented at writing. n/t

[Drale]

8. Well thank you

Hopefully I'll be a world famous Historian one day. lol

[Odin2005]

11. I'm a history buff myself and like writing history essays on another site I frequent.

[LiberalLoner]

13. You are a good writer, too! Actually I would have to say that DU'ers are

much more literate than the average slice of the populace.

We are just smarter than the average bear, LOL! All our children are above average, too!

I know I sound silly but in truth, I do find it easier to read posts on this site than the occasional dribble that gets posted here from the evil site that shall not be named.

[Drale]

16. I do enjoy pick-a-nick baskets

:rofl:

[Odin2005]

18. Thanks!

[glowing]

2. This is what the wonderful years of testing and NCLB.. Now race to the bottom (oops mean top)

programs have done...

Its not that they are unteachable; its that they haven't been taught.

[LiberalLoner]

3. There is a program called In2books if anyone has some time to help struggling

students just learning to read. It is a penpal program that doesn't require much of your time and gives a lot of satisfaction. You get to encourage a young person to learn to love reading and love books, and that's a real blessing and honor to be able to do. I've been part of that program for a couple of years now and I hope people from DU might (if they have time and energy) sign up to help mentor students too.

It's the best feeling in the world when you feel like you have helped a young person in even just some small way.

It's a program that works with teachers who match the grown-ups with the struggling, at-risk students. Anything we can do to help our young people learn to love reading is surely worth the time and effort. It's on the internet if anyone wants to learn more about the program.

[tishaLA]

5. I'm amazed at the level of writing I have to grade

at supposedly one of the best public universities in the nation. I joke with my students that I need vodka and vicodin to grade their papers....but it's only half-joking.

[Carolina]

20. V&V ...

love it, but what a sad commentary!

[Leopolds Ghost]

77. This makes me weap for the future of humanity.

</famous freeper quote>

[Davis_X_Machina]

6. If you can't read, or won't read..

...you'll never write, not well anyways. The teacher writing this more or less cops to this in the first paragraph -- she is/was a reader.

There's no direct-instructional substitute for the slow accumulation over years and years of tens, hundreds of thousands of correctly-formed sentences, paragraphs...like lead poisoning, but in a good way.

Doesn't have to be all deathless prose. Two newspapers a day -- our parents' diet -- did the trick.

[hatrack]

14. That's about it. I couldn't have told you what a direct object was with a gun to my head.

But since I read all.the.time I knew what was right, and what wasn't.

It wasn't about parts of speech or diagramming sentences, I just knew by a sense that approached instinct (though it certainly wasn't something I was born with).

[Davis_X_Machina]

19. It's not instinct...

...its accumulation. I'm not a big Malcolm Gladwell fan, but his 10,000 hours theory has a germ of truth.

[hatrack]

22. Oh, believe me I know it's not - but when you're to the point when it feels that way . . .

Wonderful feeling!

[MedicalAdmin]

28. Great link.

I once studied with Alex Acuna - http://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/Alex_Acuna.html

And he told me that the only difference between me -

and him - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxAKFlpdcfc

was about 10,000 hours of playing time.

[Sonoman]

29. So, what IS a direct object.

I can be a pretty good writer, but I never took any grammar or composition classes (as in, I never attended school) and have no earthly idea what those kinds of things are. I know what noun, verb, adjective, and adverb mean but that's about it.

Sonoman

[XemaSab]

35. It wasn't until I took a grammar class LAST YEAR

that I could have even told you what a clause was.

I had one teacher senior year of high school who spent time going over punctuation marks and what they're for, but that was in an honors class.

Other than that, it was all osmosis, and that's not optimal at all. Never teaching kids grammar and punctuation isn't doing them a favor.

[Odin2005]

37. Here is an example:

"John gave Sally the ball." or "John gave the ball to Sally"

John is the SUBJECT (also called the Agent), the ball is the DIRECT OBJECT (also called the Patient), and Sally is the Indirect Object (also called the recipient). The SUBJECT is what is "doing" the verb. The DIRECT OBJECT is what is "being done" by the verb. The INDIRECT OBJECT is the "beneficiary", positive or negative, of the action.

[Mopar151]

67. I'm right there with ya!

95th %ile on verbal SAT's, couldn't tell a participle from a peashooter.

[XemaSab]

81. 95th? You imbecile.

I got 1420 on the SAT's without knowing a noun from a verb. I was busily flunking algebra at the time. :P

[ecstatic]

69. So true. And once you stop, your skills slow down

I was an excellent writer 15 years ago, but I stopped reading for pleasure because it consumed too much of my time. I literally could not put an interesting book down. My writing has suffered big time as a result.

[Odin2005]

7. I think some basic linguistics should be a part of any high school English class.

IMO students (and, sadly, a lot of English teachers) should learn things like the difference between formal standard English and informal, nonstandard (NOT "incorrect") speech and where and when one or the other is appropriate. Students also should learn some of the linguistic theory behind the grammar of a language, what case, tense, aspect, mood, voice, and semantic role are. I have heard a lot of anecdotes about English teachers lambasting how evil the passive voice is, but not knowing what it actually is and how it works.

The reason I think this is so important is because language ALWAYS changes, and the colloquial language will only become more and more different from formal standard English, which is destined to become a classical language much like Latin.

[XemaSab]

38. I don't think the difference between colloquial and formal English

is as broad as it has been in times past.

For example, compare the dense prose of Henry James or Jane Austin with the colloquial English spoken by poor people in the South during those times. If one was only familiar with formal English, the colloquial English might even be mistaken for another language.

Most "street" English is clearly recognizable as the same language as is found in the New Yorker, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, or whichever publications are our modern paragons of proper usage.

I worry that dismissing formal English as a relic while making excuses for informal English merely serves to create a social expectation of low standards. I think everyone should be taught formal English as a norm, and if people wish to play with the rules after having learned them, then so be it.

[Odin2005]

43. And the Latin in the streets of 1st Century AD Rome was the same language as...

...the formal literary language used by Virgil. It's only the same language because there has only been about 200 years since the formal standard we use today became fully established.

And there is plenty of change going on in spoken English that falls below the radar. One example around here is that we tend to stick on spurious -en suffixes on past participles when using The Perfect.

I've caughten
I've taughten
I've cutten
I've pullen
etc.

The funny thing is that I never noticed this until recently, it never even popped up in my writing even though I use these dialectisms every day.

Another has been the development of 2nd Person Plural pronouns: y'guys, y'all, youse, etc.

[Art_from_Ark]

51. Spurious -en suffixes

I've caughten
I've taughten
I've cutten
I've pullen
etc.

Maybe there is a lot of German heritage in your area?

[Odin2005]

62. It's NW Minnesota, so yes.

[Art_from_Ark]

65. My grandmother would sometimes talk like that

but she liked to say "geschnitten" instead of "cutten". I think she did that either to tease me, or get me interested in learning German. LOL.

[Zoeisright]

9. My husband is the sole English teacher at an alternative high school.

The type that has the kids who have been expelled from conventional schools, kids with felony records, pregnant girls. He will buy any book any child is interested in. He reads to them, using different voices for the characters, and speaking in accents (he is a wonderful ham). He bought bean bag chairs and sets aside time for the kids to snuggle into them and read. And he's converted many kids to the love of reading.

He does have to teach to the test, but he also hammers grammar into their heads, testing them often on tricky words like "their" "there" and "they're", subject, verb, adverbs, etc. But he considers his greatest accomplishment the silent classroom when all the kids are reading, and when a student tells him that he or she now loves to read.

[LiberalLoner]

12. I think he is right, that the most important thing we can give to children is to teach them

to love reading. Everything else they do in life will stem from that one skill.

[izquierdista]

23. Careful

If kids can read, they might start to think, and the powers that be can't have that. They need obedient workers.

[MedicalAdmin]

30. Reading is the gateway to vicarious learning.

Without it most of the the sum of human experience is denied to a student. Which is a pity.

[KittyWampus]

17. IMO, ALL good teachers are hams.

[MedicalAdmin]

31. I used to team teach large groups of kids with a great teachers.

We called ourselves the ham sandwiches after hearing some students refer to us that way.

Student one: Mr F is so weird.
Student two: Yah, Mr. S is corny. Kinda like a ham. y'know? Hammy.
Yah - hammy. And they are worse when they are together.
Student one: Like a ham sandwich - but without the mustard.


So the next day - voila - class was taught by the ham sandwiches. (loud groan)

[Mopar151]

68. My hero!

And I bet "his kids" can write up a work order, or leave a coherent note for the day shift. A book they might enjoy together: "Michigan Madman" by EJ Potter
A brief synopsis at http://www.bangshift.com/blog/The-BangShift-Interview-EJ-Potter-AKA-The-Michigan-Madman.html

My favorite EJ quote:“Ignorance is a powerful tool if applied at the right time, even usually surpassing knowledge.”

[ecstatic]

70. Making students aware of their mistakes is a very important

component of learning. I'm glad your husband does that!

[xchrom]

10. Hmmm... It's not the fault of Plath or Yeats the college kids can't write.

Schools are afraid to teach to the same rigors that they used to teach.

My god - I remember miss Dalton, miss Harlen, miss Costello, - tough women
Who didn't permit not knowing a thing & principals who backed them up.

& btw - like every good teacher I have ever had - they composed their tests - w/ some, some outside authoritative guideline.

[Odin2005]

21. My English teacher, Mrs. Hovdenes, was one of my favorite teachers.

She looked like the stereotype of "the stern old lady" English teacher, but she was a great teacher and loved to put the slackers on the spot in a way that made for great humor. She retired the year I graduated, 2004. She must be pushing 70 now.

[Carolina]

15. I feel your pain

I am appalled by the sole emphasis on science and math in education, to the detriment of both society and those students whose talents are in language, visual arts, humanities, etc. Meanwhile, sports and celebrity nonsense rule!

I am a physician, but blessed to have come of age when a solid LIBERAL ARTS background in high school and college were de rigueur. My beloved grandmother also taught all her kids -- in school (she was a teacher by vocation) and out -- a mastery of language and a love of reading. Now, when I review applications for medical school or residency training, I am amazed by the scientific acumen of the students while totally dismayed by their inability to write simple essays!

Instant messaging, texting and teaching to test further undermine education of the written word and its significant value. We truly are a culture and a nation in decline. :pals:

[XemaSab]

41. Standards in science teaching

are a subject for another thread.

Let's just say that IMHO memorizing parts of the circulatory system of a shark isn't half as important as understanding the water cycle, how plants grow, how landscapes are formed, how different organisms work together to form an ecosystem, and so forth. On an even more dismal note, I have a friend who works with Native and Hispanic kids in a small town in New Mexico and they couldn't name a single wild bird in their area. :(

[calimary]

73. I'm concerned about this too. Call me prissy or something. But I think the IMs

and texting are encouraging the dumb-down. Now you have a justifiable reason NOT to spell correctly. Gotta get that stuff in, in 140 characters. Shortcut mentality.

I got an email from a kid who shot some video for my kid's band. This kid wants to be a film/video director. Seems to have some good ideas. And his mom already is in the business.

But the email!!!!!!!!!!!! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!!!!!!!!

I tried reading through it and I was truly, seriously HORRIFIED. No exaggeration. My jaw dropped and it quite literally made me gasp out loud. It looked as though someone damn-near brain-damaged wrote it! And this kid was 18 or 19. It looked as though he had not been educated, and I knew him as a classmate of my kid's, from K-6. This email was a mess. Barely literate. It was one wandering paragraph, just a thick block of text. No punctuation to speak of. The spacing between words wasn't reliably there. Spelling - HORRENDOUS. There was nothing even remotely resembling a sentence that made sense. Proper capitalization was non-existent. I had to read that email several times to glean anything out of it that he was trying to communicate.

When I was still working full-time, I did an extensive on-air series about job-hunting - how-to's, resume-writing, dressing the part, the job interview, all that stuff. Looking good ON PAPER was really important. Seems to me it still is, even in this day and age. If this kid wrote a pitch to some studio or potential client, the recipient would glance at it and not even bother trying to read through it. One look would tell you everything you needed to know (as in: DON'T GO NEAR THIS DUDE! LOOKS LIKE SOME PSYCHO-FLAKE!!!!). For a moment I wanted to call him up and tell him to get over to our house straight away so that we could edit his emails and go over some basic grammar and spelling and punctuation - that should have been handled in second and third grade!!!!!!! Of course I remember back in second and third grade and how he was one of those renowned for not paying attention in class, to put it delicately.

But it really shocked me. "Shocked" actually doesn't express it adequately. "Horrified" is much a more accurate word choice.

[immoderate]

24. They should read their writing out loud.

I'm not an English teacher but had lots of opportunities to coach writing skills. I would hand the paper back to the student and say "read it to me."

Most of the time they can't, but they don't realize that it is incoherent because they never had to read it. They just put words on paper.

I wouldn't say it eliminates every problem, but it sure helps a lot of them.

(Lesson 2: "Sing it to me.")

--imm

[MedicalAdmin]

32. Great suggestions. n/t

[XemaSab]

42. .

:thumbsup:

[hifiguy]

25. I learned how to write by reading a lot of good writing.

Everything from history to literature, Halberstam to Tolkein to Orwell and Bradbury to Hunter S. Thompson. But I can never remember a time that I have not loved to read.

Dropped out of high school at 16, tested through all frosh English Comp requirements when I entered college at 24. Never had a comp course after ninth grade. I was shocked to find comments in my freshman college exam books praising my writing - and this was in history and humanities classes, not English. I now write professionally as an attorney and on the side as a reviewer of audio equipment and trade show reporter.

I think you have to get kids to READ first and enjoy reading for its own sake. If they really love to read, some percentage will want to learn to write. Many won't. You can lead a horse to water...

[MindPilot]

26. High School?! I remember diagramming sentences in 6th grade

By High School I had read and written about Heart of Darkness, 1984, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, The Good Earth, and I'm sure many I don't recall.

I also recall science, history, math, phys ed, civics...and Latin.

[patrice]

47. I'm afraid teachers themselves are un-prepared to teach that sort of thing.

But the diagramming DOES help teach the logic of our language. Reading a LOT also helps.

[patrice]

60. Yep. Some kind of foreign language makes you think about the logic of what you are saying/hearing in

any language.

[kurtzapril4]

27. I read like crazy

a book or so a week, the local newspaper, and online sources, too. I have been an avid reader all my life. I learned about grammar, punctuation, etc., from reading on my own. However, writing does not come easily for me. Given a choice, I'd much prefer taking a test to writing a paper.

I read the article mentioned, and left some comments. For once, the comments thread was not populated by the usual trolls, and was an interesting read in itself.

I really do think one of the problems is that the books you are forced to read(this is called the "canon")in English class in Jr. High and High School are quite frankly....boring. Boring and irrelevant. Shakespeare? The Scarlet Letter? Please. I think that giving kids stuff to read that is interesting, well written, and relevant to the modern world would help in making them better readers, thinkers, writers and students. JMO.

[themadstork]

36. The scarlet letter is irrelevant?

I'm shocked that anyone would think that during this legislative cycle.


Shakespeare has never not been relevant.

[XemaSab]

52. I admit that I am ambivalent about teaching literature in high school

I suppose it depends on whether you think literature should be taught in order to give kids homogenous cultural reference points, expose kids to great writing, expose kids to a diversity of ideas, teach kids to enjoy reading, or teach kids how to analyze and interpret a work of literature.

Whether a school should teach the Bible, Wuthering Heights, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Stephen King, or Lord of the Flies in high school English class depends on what view one takes.

[kurtzapril4]

75. Shakespeare is very difficult

insofar as it uses what is basically a foreign language most people are not that familiar with. The Scarlet Letter is so packed with layers of symbolism, I recall the teacher having to spend a ton of time explaining it to get to the deeper meaning of the work.

I am not saying that these are not great works. I am saying that they are entirely too difficult for most Jr. High and High School students to understand and/or appreciate. As I got older, I aquired the vocabulary, the ability to focus, and life experience to enjoy literature. In high school...not so much. I was bored silly. I feel that there are modern works that would be just as useful to educators, and way more interesting to students, "The Catcher in the Rye" being an example. This book has been used as part of the curriculum for a long time in a lot of schools, and my friends high school age kids enjoy it, as did I when I read it in high school.

[themadstork]

79. Shakespeare is not too difficult for upperclassmen in high school.

I mean, if we don't expect them to be able to read Hamlet, say, by that point, then our expectations have really plummeted, IMO. Does our standard of literacy not include a considerable cognitive component--working with ambiguity, linguistic self-consciousness, the abililty to engage aesthetically? I think these our crucial for our democracy's survival.

[Enrique]

71. those books are too advanced for H.S., imo

not boring and irrelevant, but just too hard for most kids.

I think it would be better to start them with easier books, which can still be very good.

[jobendorfer]

33. From the Article: Who uses calculus besides math majors?

Uh ... everybody majoring in the physical sciences, everybody studying medicine, and everybody majoring in engineering.
The last item being particularly why the person who made that comment can sleep easy knowing that the building they live in won't collapse on them in the middle of the night, and that their car will start and run tomorrow morning. Among many other things.

That said: the only way to get better at writing is to a) read a lot, and b) spend as much time writing as you do
reading. If we would throw resources at the problem of teaching middle school and high school students how to write in the
same way that we throw soldiers and bombs at the third world, I suspect we'd make some headway on the issue.

J.

[laundry_queen]

48. It's useful in business too

Calculus is important. I don't think that's what the author is saying. She is saying it is not nearly as widely used in daily life for most people as writing is, and that the current trend is toward marginalizing English and writing as subjects - something no one would ever think of doing with calculus.

[Polly Hennessey]

34. High School English

My English teacher was Mrs. Hobgood. Enough said.

[RebelOne]

39. I am a retired copy editor. and I am appalled

by all the grammar and punctuation errors in the published writings and TV ads. And I am ashamed to say that I watch the Jerry Springer show, and I cringe anytime some of the guests say "me and my girl friend," "me and my husband," etc.

[tishaLA]

40. ....or "my girlfriend and myself"/"my husband and myself"

[Odin2005]

49. I think EVERYONE says "me and X" in the subject at least sometimes.

It's part of how most people normally speak, no matter how good their formal English writing is.

[patrice]

57. Pronoun case is extinct. That has a logical effect upon communication; think especially of foreigner

s in highly complex business environments. CONFU$$$$$ION$$$$$$$$$~

[themadstork]

72. Yeah. I'm a grammar freak and routinely use it where casualness is more appropriate.

[patrice]

58. Some people ARE picking up on it, but they don't make the appropriate case distinctions, so they

use the subjective case when it should be objective. It at least sounds a little better, but it's grammatically incorrect, because they don't understand the logical differences between the cases.

[moc]

44. I have many graduate students who can't write worth a lick.

It's both frustrating and depressing at the same time. Many of them got all the way through high school and college without being required to write. It's appalling.

[patrice]

45. Been there. Done that. It's staggering, looking at a pile of senior-in-highschool papers

and realizing how profoundly unprepared they are.

I also hear exactly the same thing from the young teachers in our family.

[madamesilverspurs]

46. In the mid 1990s

I went back to school after thirty years. My work-study arrangement had me grading papers for one of the professors, and I was stunned by the level of writing displayed by so many students, further stunned that those kids had made it out of high school.

One paper had 82 misspelled words on one face of the paper. It was puzzling. I'd spoken often with this student and knew she had a grasp of the material, but nothing on the paper made sense - until I read it aloud. Along with letter arrangements that comprised no known words there were numerous homophones (war/wore, mined/mind, our/are). After speaking with her further we discovered that her reading skills were just as bad; she got all her information from oral lectures. There was no way we were going to let her go through four years and then fail to graduate because she couldn't pass the English essay exam. So, we arranged for her to get help through the writing lab and bribed her with raising her letter grade with improvements. It broke my heart when she told me that no one had ever spoken with her about her reading and writing difficulties; she was, in my view, abused by those who failed to educate her.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have grown up in a family that values reading. My brother had all the Hardy Boys books, I had all the Nancy Drew mysteries. Both parents were avid readers, newspapers in the morning and evening, books before bed; Mom, at 92 and with only one functioning eye, still devours every new book that comes into the library. One of my very earliest memories is of a visit to the Berkley Park Library in Denver when I was so small that I kept track of Mom by reaching up to hold onto the hem of her skirt; I've loved the smell of books ever since.

My own all-time favorite high school class was College Prep English. The required reading materials included Shakespeare, Chaucer, the King James Bible (for style, not substance), William F. Buckley, Tennessee Williams and a modern author of our choice. Our only final exam was a term paper typed on non-erasable bond paper with the watermark upright, facing forward and centered, ibids and op cits properly rendered. And my mother still has that old typewriter.

If I could, I'd give that experience to every kid in the country.

[patrice]

50. "...don't know how to outline ..." I run across tons of people, even here on DU, who have

almost no perception of analytic concepts: the general to specific logical construct. NONE!!!

[XemaSab]

54. I used to think that forcing kids to make a formal outline was a refined form of torture

The more time goes by, the more I think that's one of the most important things to learn in an English class.

[patrice]

56. It's a good starting point for just about anything. Good for sharing. Another under-rated

practice is turning definitions and paragraphs and stuff into your own words, one by one to get an exact correlation between the statement and your comprehension of it. You ask people what something means now days (and you hear this ALL of the time in the media) and they'll pretty much just repeat or re-arrange what has already been said/written. Examples are another good mental exercise to demonstrate comprehension. That's all stuff that can be turned into writing, which is part of the problem, no one seems to know what to say and no one is telling them any of the "hows", none of tricks of the word-smith trade. WHATEVER comes out is fine! :eyes:

[Missy Vixen]

53. People don't read.

Half of the households in America, IIRC, did not purchase or read a book last year.

HALF.

It's one of the saddest statistics I've ever seen.

[patrice]

55. Huge part of it right there. And many of those who do read read exactly the same sorts of things all

of the time, NO variety.

[WinkyDink]

59. By the time I retired as a H.S. English teacher, we were being told to "Be a guide on the side, not

a sage on the stage."

IOW: Group learning is what it's all about, and you're not in the group!

Reaping what we have sown.

[MineralMan]

61. As a graduate student in an English department,

I got assigned to teach a class all the other staff hated, "English for non-majors." Since it was mainly an engineering school, engineering majors made up most of the students in the class. I was my first teaching assignment, and I had little direction about how to proceed.

So, on the first day of class, I had the class write a short essay in class describing the past four hours of their lives. The goal was for me to get some idea of their writing skills. That evening, I read the essays. Horrible, with a couple of exceptions. Almost incoherent in many cases.

At the next class session, I gave a lecture about the value of writing decently. The key point in the lecture was that communication in writing was the difference between a career doing the same type of work as the day you started working and becoming a project engineer, supervising a group, or even better. That caught their attention. The rest of the semester, I led them, step-by-step through the process of creating coherent short documents. Most did pretty well by the end of the semester.

Sometimes, it's just a matter of understanding why you have to learn something.

[patrice]

63. Frakking CHECK-MARKS!! I worked in the office one year, right out of college, I saw whole grade-book

s of nothing but check-marks. Probably kind of okay for certain kinds of classes, but it does bring up a subject near and dear to my heart and no one wants to talk about it. Exactly HOW are grades arrived at? What is the process by means of which value is assigned to work? I used to try to get other teachers to talk about this and it seemed that no one wanted to. This topic was fundamental to my master's research.

[lolly]

64. Been teaching college writing for over 20 years

And, contrary to what folks have been saying for at least a century, it's not getting better or worse.

I'm correcting the same mistakes now that I was correcting in 1985.

I believe it was James Berlin who published a book with writing samples from freshman at Harvard in the early 1900s, including grading comments that sounded pretty much like the same complaints made about freshman writing today.

My pet peeve? I doubt if there are any high schools in the US that recognize that literature and composition are 2 different subjects.

High school English teachers are people who majored in English literature in college. They love literature, and love to teach it, but generally are not rhetoric or composition experts. So they have students read a novel or a play, and then write papers (or journal entries) describing or reacting to something in that novel or play or poem. Most learn to teach writing/composition, but it is still crammed in a course with literature, so classtime is split between 2 different subjects.

My second pet peeve? Assuming that 18 year olds should all be accomplished writers before they get to college, and assuming that high school teachers have failed if they aren't. Even students who have gone to high schools with very strong programs still have a lot to learn about composing a well-written essay (no, not a 5 paragraph essay). The maturity and cognitive skills required for thoughtful, compelling writing just aren't there with most 15-17 year olds. We don't expect 10 year olds to be able to master calculus; not sure we should expect 17 year olds to write Pulitzer prizeworthy essays.

[patrice]

66. "accomplished" "Pulitzer prizeworthy" - Those were not my expectations. I don't think it was

too much to expect sentences and at least one functional paragraph from seniors.

Kind of a uni-dimensional characterization of what people expect, don't you think? - as though no one does a reality check. I really am ASKING about what appears to be an rather one-sided assessment of the various perspectives very possibly represented in this thread.

We're also talking about after college out in the real world, where people STILL do not know how to write or communicate about relatively simple things.

[kurtzapril4]

78. Bingo! Spot on from stem to stern! n/t

[hunter]

74. Bloody hell. I hope nobody's grading my DU posts!

I almost missed graduating from college because the chair of the English department wouldn't sign me out, which was pretty cold because I was officially minoring in the subject... I pestered her for weeks and weeks, she stood me up twice in office appointments, and then she flew off to Europe for a year's sabbatical. It was her opinion that I should have concentrated more on my Biology major and never been let loose in the upper division English courses.

Fortunately the Dean of the school of Letters and Sciences wanted me out. After I'd explained my predicament he advised me, "Hunter, I think you should apply to graduate school. But not here." Then he signed the papers that allowed me to graduate.

I love to read and write, I love the language, but it tends to get mangled in my head.

There are two kinds of bad English: that which is structurally bad but still reflects an underlying coherent thought process, and that which is incoherent because the underlying thought process is incoherent. (I'm capable of both.)

Most bad writing isn't bad because it is structurally deficient, it's bad because it has nothing to say. Expecting fresh material from every undergraduate is futile. Even well written stuff can be dreary soul sucking crap.

[Leopolds Ghost]

76. Given how many technocratic, affluent children of privilege actively root for the death of books

And handwriting, I have to say...

Sucks for them. Better chance I have of getting a job. See ya! :hi:

[Manifestor_of_Light]

80. Had a bad English teacher who was a traffic cop.

Early 1970s. Senior English, high school. This was the kids in college prep classes. We all went to college.

We were reading "Macbeth" and she gave us a pop quiz. The class average was 36.

She said "I guess you don't care much about Macbeth." Some of us were silently shaking our heads.

She told us nothing about the psychology of the characters. All she cared about was "Did MacHeath come onstage in Scene I, Act III, before McDuff?"

She should have been a stage director instead of an English teacher.

She also made us read "Billy Budd" which I consider to be cruel and unusual punishment. It is a short novel, about 100 pages with one page of dialogue.

I also don't understand why they made us read "Great Expectations" in the 9th grade. I got nothing out of it so I read "Oliver Twist" on my own, which was much better and more understandable.

I don't understand why they made us read "Silas Marner" in the 10th grade. I got nothing out of that as well.

I read a lot of other books on my own and I think they were probably better selections for English class than the stuff we had to read. I read "Elmer Gantry" and "Sister Carrie" on my own.

[tishaLA]

82. For shame! Billy Budd is a wonderful book

it's one of my favorites. But it might be because I read it after queer theory had gotten its hands on it and made it even more interesting than it might otherwise be. http://books.google.com/books?id=u5jgaOhhmpgC&pg=PA91&lpg=PA91&dq=Eve+Sedgwick+billy+budd&source=bl&ots=l4nac9Y8EP&sig=ME-Y_A7mz1M7O1XvVoDfz7-0q7w&hl=en&ei=a7fMTfqhL8KcgQfe27jeBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Eve%20Sedgwick%20billy%20budd&f=false

But Barbara Johnson's sublime Melville's Fist is, in its own way, even more amazing: http://www.jstor.org/pss/25600211

[indepat]

83. You are echoing exactly what my daughter experienced while teaching in the University of

California system three years ago. Mind-boggling. ;)