posted by Mike Madison at 1:16 PM /
At her Center Court blog, School Commissioner Jo Posti has a provocative post up about English instruction in the public schools, and specifically about the relevance to Mt. Lebanon of a debate posted elsewhere regarding reading, literacy, and the role of English teachers:
The underlying debate focuses on the role of text and the role of what Kevin Kelly called "visuality" in last weekend's New York Times. Should students continue to be taught the basics of the former; to what extent should "visual" literacy education be part of the curriculum; what about reading and great books, and so on.
Jo's blog doesn't allow comments, so here's my feedback. My observation is that there is nothing amiss with what kids (at Mt. Lebanon, to continue the local example) are being asked to read or watch. We live in an increasingly visual society. Visual literacy *is* important. "Reading" imagery is as difficult as "reading" text; it can be taught; and it should. There are differences in kind but also differences of degree, and I don't doubt that our current teaching staff is and will continue to be up to the task of learning and teaching them.
There is much more to be said here, but I'll cut to my own personal chase:
There *is* something amiss in English education, and not just at Mt. Lebanon.
Our kids can't write. They can't write for beans.
I know this in part because I see some of the best and brightest of Mt. Lebanon (and USC, and Bethel Park, and other Pittsburgh area districts) in my classes at Pitt Law. Most of them can put nouns together with verbs. Few of them can construct a paragraph of analysis, let alone string several paragraphs together in some logical order.
When I ask whether they learned how to organize their research and prepare an outline of a paper (even a short paper, let alone a long research paper), the answer is universally "no." Diagram a sentence and learn how to use syntax to make a point? Bah. It's all pre-writing and free-writing and editing to suit.
I do not know the details of how composition is taught in Mt. Lebanon. I know what I observed with my own children, which is that they get and got well-intentioned, thoughtful guidance that did *not* focus on outlining and structure.
This is an area where pedagogy can make a difference, in part because ensuring that high school students learn the basics of literacy means that those same students can more effectively engage with advanced materials in college and beyond. Instead, they are often condemned to repeat their uncorrected errors -- or be subjected to teachers like me, who try to fix them at the last possible moment before the students are launched into the world of work.
In my own teaching, years ago I gave up offering exams to students and started assigning writing projects -- lots of writing projects. Because in law as in the rest of professional life, you need to know how to communicate effectively and how to communicate effectively in writing. With my students -- even students who have degrees in the humanities! -- I do a lot of remedial work on sentence structure, word choice, paragraphing, and outlining. I do it because no teachers did that in these students' earlier careers, and it's too important to leave entirely undone.
When I talk with English teachers and with teaching educators, I learn that "free-writing" and "pre-writing" and editing is the accepted method. Outlining and sentence structure disappeared years ago; students who learn to write today benefit from teachers who remember the old days, parents who remember the old days, and writers who involuntarily (but thankfully) serve as models to budding writers. Some people remember teachers who instilled a love of learning; I also remember teachers who taught me something concrete that I use every day. I remember the first of my teachers who taught me writing, as well as reading: Mr. McPhaul, in seventh and eighth grade English. I'm not alone in my memories or in my gratitude. One of my junior high school classmates won a Pulitzer Prize last year (for biography). If you read his book, you'll see that he, too, thanked Mr. McPhaul for teaching him not how to read, but how to write.
Update (11/26/08): I wish that I could post some of the anonymous comments that have come in, responding to this post. But I can't (see our policy on anonymous comments!). One anonymous commenter is apparently a Mt. Lebanon HS parent who is quite unhappy with poor writing instruction. A second sees irony in a law professor's critique of writing; law school allegedly aims to teach lawyers how to write poorly. (We don't teach badly; allegedly we teach bad writing.) On that second point, the anonymous critic is obviously no lawyer. Well-trained lawyers know that poor writing is the bane of the profession.
But any good writer knows the audience, and vagueness or incomprehension (or at least lack of narrative clarity) is sometimes the goal. That good writer therefore sometimes writes incomprehensibly on purpose. You don't need to stereotype lawyers to find greatness in incomprehensibility; re-read your dog-eared copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. The problem, in other words, is people who write carelessly or vaguely but who think that they are writing clearly and carefully.
While I attribute a great part of my and my husband's decisions to major in English in college to our experience at Mt. Lebanon, I'd love to hear how today's students feel about our current English curriculum. Today's curriculum has evolved into survey courses, introducing students to a variety of authors and genres based on a common theme rather than courses developed around a common genre. While I'm much more interested in knowing what students are learning rather than whether they enjoy it (a requisite, according to Schnog, a consequence, according to Morris), I hope there's some enjoyment, too! I look forward to the feedback.
The underlying debate focuses on the role of text and the role of what Kevin Kelly called "visuality" in last weekend's New York Times. Should students continue to be taught the basics of the former; to what extent should "visual" literacy education be part of the curriculum; what about reading and great books, and so on.
Jo's blog doesn't allow comments, so here's my feedback. My observation is that there is nothing amiss with what kids (at Mt. Lebanon, to continue the local example) are being asked to read or watch. We live in an increasingly visual society. Visual literacy *is* important. "Reading" imagery is as difficult as "reading" text; it can be taught; and it should. There are differences in kind but also differences of degree, and I don't doubt that our current teaching staff is and will continue to be up to the task of learning and teaching them.
There is much more to be said here, but I'll cut to my own personal chase:
There *is* something amiss in English education, and not just at Mt. Lebanon.
Our kids can't write. They can't write for beans.
I know this in part because I see some of the best and brightest of Mt. Lebanon (and USC, and Bethel Park, and other Pittsburgh area districts) in my classes at Pitt Law. Most of them can put nouns together with verbs. Few of them can construct a paragraph of analysis, let alone string several paragraphs together in some logical order.
When I ask whether they learned how to organize their research and prepare an outline of a paper (even a short paper, let alone a long research paper), the answer is universally "no." Diagram a sentence and learn how to use syntax to make a point? Bah. It's all pre-writing and free-writing and editing to suit.
I do not know the details of how composition is taught in Mt. Lebanon. I know what I observed with my own children, which is that they get and got well-intentioned, thoughtful guidance that did *not* focus on outlining and structure.
This is an area where pedagogy can make a difference, in part because ensuring that high school students learn the basics of literacy means that those same students can more effectively engage with advanced materials in college and beyond. Instead, they are often condemned to repeat their uncorrected errors -- or be subjected to teachers like me, who try to fix them at the last possible moment before the students are launched into the world of work.
In my own teaching, years ago I gave up offering exams to students and started assigning writing projects -- lots of writing projects. Because in law as in the rest of professional life, you need to know how to communicate effectively and how to communicate effectively in writing. With my students -- even students who have degrees in the humanities! -- I do a lot of remedial work on sentence structure, word choice, paragraphing, and outlining. I do it because no teachers did that in these students' earlier careers, and it's too important to leave entirely undone.
When I talk with English teachers and with teaching educators, I learn that "free-writing" and "pre-writing" and editing is the accepted method. Outlining and sentence structure disappeared years ago; students who learn to write today benefit from teachers who remember the old days, parents who remember the old days, and writers who involuntarily (but thankfully) serve as models to budding writers. Some people remember teachers who instilled a love of learning; I also remember teachers who taught me something concrete that I use every day. I remember the first of my teachers who taught me writing, as well as reading: Mr. McPhaul, in seventh and eighth grade English. I'm not alone in my memories or in my gratitude. One of my junior high school classmates won a Pulitzer Prize last year (for biography). If you read his book, you'll see that he, too, thanked Mr. McPhaul for teaching him not how to read, but how to write.
Update (11/26/08): I wish that I could post some of the anonymous comments that have come in, responding to this post. But I can't (see our policy on anonymous comments!). One anonymous commenter is apparently a Mt. Lebanon HS parent who is quite unhappy with poor writing instruction. A second sees irony in a law professor's critique of writing; law school allegedly aims to teach lawyers how to write poorly. (We don't teach badly; allegedly we teach bad writing.) On that second point, the anonymous critic is obviously no lawyer. Well-trained lawyers know that poor writing is the bane of the profession.
But any good writer knows the audience, and vagueness or incomprehension (or at least lack of narrative clarity) is sometimes the goal. That good writer therefore sometimes writes incomprehensibly on purpose. You don't need to stereotype lawyers to find greatness in incomprehensibility; re-read your dog-eared copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. The problem, in other words, is people who write carelessly or vaguely but who think that they are writing clearly and carefully.
12 Comments:
It really is sad how bad writing has been ignored in our daily lives. And that's coming from a Computer Science graduate (Bachelors and Masters).
Five years back when I was a TA at Pitt, and before that in my undergrad work and Hiram College, I had the pleasure or grading lab reports and other assignments. When I graded, I always took off points for serious grammar, spelling and punctuation problems (my biggest pet peeve was when students used made-up words like "inputted", as the past tense of "input" is "input"), and some of the students would pitch a fit.
They'd always claim that writing skills were no specified in the assignments. I'd always counter them by pointing out that if they cannot convey their thoughts clearly, then writing them down is worthless. Most of them walked away grumbling, but I was pretty adamant with my position.
Grad school was even worse as I spent much time reading published papers and advanced textbooks written in broken English. If that's gold standard placed in front of you as a student, you're going to set the bar pretty low.
I'd love to see writing skills once again emphasized, not only in the classroom, but in all facets of life.
Excellent (and well written) post. I can only add two things.
1) Oftentimes the best writers
turn out to be the kids that
spent the most time reading
and comprehending actual BOOKS.
2) Text messaging is only making
things worse.
My kids are still too young so pardon the ignorance, but isn't there some sort of standardized writing testing in high school that enables one to advance to the next grade level? You hear often about how our kids are behind in math and science compared to the rest of the developed world, but how can we be failing so badly at writing?
I somewhat disagree with your analysis of the English program at Mt. Lebanon, Mr. Madison. In my experience, English classes always emphasized analytical writing, outlining, and even occasionally grammar. From 9th grade on, nearly every writing assignment involved turning in outlines and drafts during the writing process. Admittedly, my experience was limited to the honors track, but I feel the same teaching styles could probably be applied to other English classes without any trouble.
I must also disagree with your assertion that Mt. Lebanon students "can't write for beans." That seems a bit of an unfair generalization to me. We may not have produced any literary geniuses, but we can certainly do more than "put nouns together with words" and "construct a paragraph of analysis." At the very least, you could point to Mt. Lebanon's college admissions rates and writing SAT scores for an idea of how our essays measure up nationally, although those statistics may not be the best indication of our skill.
There are certainly some parts of the English program that need to be changed. Focusing more on critical writing than reading comprehension in middle school would undoubtedly improve writing abilities across the district. Diagramming sentences, though a pain, would probably not kill anyone either. But overall, I don't believe that the writing of my generation is any less sophisticated than that of our parents.
-Rachel Fabi '07
Rachel,
I appreciate your comment. I don't mean to single out Mt. Lebanon; my observation is that writing instruction and writing competence is mediocre to poor everywhere.
College admissions rates and SAT writing scores are poor indicators of anything related to real writing competence. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and my eating is the writing that I read every month of every semester that I teach. And that writing is, on the whole, lousy. Some writing and writers are better than others, but those lousy writers include -- but are hardly limited to -- Mt. Lebanon grads, Bethel grads, USC grads, grads from city schools, grads from Philly area schools, etc. etc. They include Pitt grads, Penn State grads, CMU grads, Allegheny grads, Ivy League grads, etc. etc. (As it happens, you happen to have chosen a college that is one of the very few to take seriously the proposition that every single student should know how to be a good analytical writer, regardless of major.) And I've taught law students at other law schools, some much more highly regarded that Pitt. On the whole, their writing is no better.
Is student writing today worse than it was 30 years ago? ("Sophisticated" isn't really a relevant measure; I don't care about "sophisticated." I care about competent!) That's hard to say. I do think that the quality of student writing wasn't so universally poor 30 years ago, and the pedagogical move away from structure and toward "freedom" -- which is well-documented generally, if not (thankfully!) universally embraced in Lebo -- has something to do with the shift. My students today are, generally, worse writers than my students of a dozen years ago.
As Bob R. commented, it is difficult to be a good writer without also being a good and deep reader. How many high school or college students today read a newspaper or newsmagazine (in print -- not online)? How many read books that they aren't assigned for school? (For that matter, how many read books that *are* assigned for school?) My law students just about universally report being engaged with the news, which is a good thing. But that's because they get snippets of it from news sites, aggregators, Facebook, CNN, and their friends. None of them -- none of them! -- reads long-form journalism. I know some people your age (and somewhat older) who read novels and history for fun. But my sense is that they are the notable exceptions, rather than the rule.
Back in the old days (1980's) MLHS handed out to all students an "English Handbook". Somewhat like Lebo's own Strunk and White. My copy still exists and I've pulled it out and used it throughout my years even as a lawyer. 71 pages of golden nuggets like how to write a multi-paragraph paper, wordiness, how to use transitional expressions, proper comma usage.
Mike, I'll send you pictures of it and if the school doesn't hand it out still I'll offer my personal copy to Superintendent Allison to start making copies for today's students as long as he promises to return it!
Mike, I enjoyed reading your observations and posted my own here and here.
While I feel strongly that public schools have a responsibility to teach students how to write - and write well - I do wonder why you're seeing law students who did not learn how to write during their undergraduate years? This would seem to be a shared responsibility, especially if what you're seeing isn't up to snuff.
Jo,
"Not up to snuff" in your comment doesn't begin to describe the poor writing of our students at Pitt. I can only generalize from my experience, but my experience with Lebo grads at Pitt over the last decade -- and there have been a lot of them -- is that *on average* they are at *best* competent writers. My sample is very limited, but if these kids are representative, then Mt. Lebanon isn't getting the job done.
Why focus on high schools? Why aren't these kids learning more in college?
Of course, it is no defense of a high school's possibly inadequate writing curriculum that college writing curricula are inadequate. Mt. Lebanon should aspire to teach all of its graduates how to write well. If those students end up in a college with deficient writing instruction, then at least their high school training will serve them well.
As for colleges themselves, writing pedagogy in American colleges may be even worse than it is in American high schools. There are broad swaths of the college curriculum (math, science, and engineering) where writing simply isn't taught at all, though it should be. In the arts, humanities and social sciences, even if faculty were motivated to teach writing and rewarded for doing it (though they often aren't), the sheer number of students and the sheer lack of time (number of teachers, number of students in many courses) makes doing good writing instruction effectively impossible.
That is not to say that writing is not taught at all in colleges. It is taught, and in places and in certain classrooms, it is taught well. But that is the exception rather than the rule. No high school graduate with poor writing should expect to find redemption in a college program.
Journalism students often stand out amid this sad story, because good writing is their stock in trade, and because student newspaper advisors do nothing but teach the fundamentals of good writing -- that is, they teach *discipline,* not endless repetition of unsupervised mediocrity. More writing doesn't necessarily teach better writing. Practice doesn't make perfect unless there is a knowledgeable soul in the background, correcting mistakes and holding students accountable. Because journalism advisors often take their roles *very* seriously, high school journalists often grow up to be super writers.
Mike
While I can't speak specifically to Mt Lebanon, or even Pennsylvania, my experiences teaching introductory computer science to freshmen in Texas was that today's students are equally ill prepared in math. Many of them seemed to be utterly unfamiliar with basic principles of algebra, and bringing up something like proof by induction elicited blank stares from most of the class.
Formal proofs, one of the great excercises of intellectual discipline accessible to high school students, are apparently long gone even from high school geometry class. It's sad because that was many people's only exposure to formal axiomatic reasoning. (The irony of removing Euclid from the teaching of geometry is apparently lost in the modern academy.)
It seems to me that the problem with teaching these days is less about writing or math specifically than it is about rigor, the effort and self-discipline required to achieve it, and whether schools and teachers are willing and able to demand that effort and self-discipline from their students.
JP,
I'll sign on to "rigor"-based standards, for all subjects, about 90% of the time. (I learned formal proofs in Geometry in high school. That's all that we did for a full year. Thanks to Mr. Rupinder Sekhon! We're cooking on the front burner, baby!, as he used to say.)
About 10% of the time, "rigor" is academic jargon for "what I'm doing [usually old school] is worthy, and what you're doing [usually new school] is not."
You're an academic vet; you know this. It's just important for everyone else to know it, too.
Mike
I may regret sharing this comment, but I am (to put it mildly) more than a bit dismayed by a school board member's belief that my children should learn basic, communicative writing skills in college rather than in the elementary, middle and high school programs that she oversees.
How can (and why should) the teaching of fundamental writing skills be a "shared" responsibility? After all, a sizable percentage of Mt. Lebanon students may never attend college. Who shares the responsibility to teach these kids how to write? Or, as Mike points out, many students leave Mt. Lebanon to pursue math, accounting, finance, chemistry, computer science and economics degrees. I think we can all agree that those classes don't necessarily focus on writing. I'd hate to think that our future MBAs, bankers, doctors and scientists would be at a disadvantage because they only learned a "portion" of life's necessary writing skills while in Mt. Lebanon schools.
I only have my own experiences in education to draw from and I can tell you that my college and law school professors EXPECTED me to know how to write. If they didn't understand my essay answers, I lost points. If they understood the substance of what I was trying to convey, but the form was a mess, I lost points. Personally, I expect my own kids to face the same critique. They need to be prepared for that sort of evaluation when they get to college (and beyond) - and that is why I have chosen to live in Mt. Lebanon. I expect them to be ahead of the curve. Fortunately, I think most of them are, but others have caught up.
In my humble opinion, I think we try to do too much in Lebo at a young age and the time spent on the basics often suffers. For example, if we're spending X number of hours per year teaching our elementary school children a foreign language, they're receiving that much less instruction in reading, writing and math. STOP - before I am pounced on for being an isolationist or even anti-foreign language, my point is simply that there are only so many teaching hours in a day and we must use those hours wisely.
Please also don't accuse me of wanting something less than a well-rounded child. However, at the elementary and middle school levels, I want my kids to learn the basics more than I want them to have choices. Would it be great if my first grader could pick up a little Spanish? Sure, but only after he knows - cold - how to do those things that we expect him to know in first grade. The same goes for the rest of the elementary school years. Does it matter if my 5th grader knows the days of the week in French if I can't read them when he writes them down? When did neatness become irrelevant? When did cursive become completely irrelevant? (Don't get me started on this one . . . .)
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say, I am not convinced that we are stressing the "basics" as much as we should and certainly not as much as we did when I was in the Lebo schools. If you don't learn the basics at this age, the other stuff is much, much harder and the final product in your later years will undoubtedly suffer.
We can do better.
Having authored the PG op-ed last weekend in defense of teaching the classics, I was sent a link to this intelligent forum by a friend who lives in Mt. Lebanon. Unless I'm mistaken, it appears that no high school teacher has posted his or her thoughts in response to the argument that today's students do not adequately learn how to write analytically. Please allow me, then, to offer a few "insider" observations.
1) Typically, the best student writers are avid readers -- not necessarily of the classics, but of English prose in general. I tell parents that if their child loves sports, then subscribe to Sports Illustrated and talk about articles at the dinner table. A steady diet of professionally crafted language has an osmotic way of sharpening a kid's own prose.
2) Mountains of research suggest that class size plays a critical role in the effective teaching of writing. The National Council of Teachers of English recommends class sizes between 15 and 18. Smaller class sizes necessitate the hiring or more teachers, who, needless to say, must be paid. The budgetary implications of small class sizes do not bode well for English teachers and, I would submit, English students, too.
3) To drive home the importance of class size, let me add that I teach around 120 students per day divided over six classes. Even if I assign a 300-word, one-page response to a prompt, the evaluation of those 120 pages takes me longer than a week -- and the majority of that grading must be done at night and on the weekend. Make that a two-page assignment and a serious question arises: to what extent does delayed feedback affect a student's ability to improve?
4) Inadequate student writing is one of many serious and distressing problems found in public education. Schools are microcosms of the society in which they operate. Working on the inside, I see daily the impact of overworked or broken families, the media's glorification of materialism, and our culture's increasing complacency with the American standard of living. It's easy and not entirely misguided to ask why our schools cannot do better. Keep in mind, though, that our problems are more deep-rooted than writing labs and Strunk & White knock-offs.
Thanks for allowing me to contribute to your lively forum. I wish you the best in Lebo.
Dave Morris
Mars, PA
Mr. Morris's Post-Gazette op-ed can be found here.
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