Kay Parks Bushman Haas posted the salon.com article, “Death to High School English,” a topic that
always peeks my interest, having taught both high school and college. Brooks bemoans the
lack of writing preparedness by students coming to college and blames high
school curriculum, which may focus on literature or oral communication or group
work rather than on effective writing, a concept she seems to equate with
sentence-level grammatical accuracy and thesis-support essay writing. She ends by essentially positioning herself
as the white knight, ready to rescue students with her college composition
instruction from runaway commas.
Okay—I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much. I agree with Brooks that many students come
to college with inadequate writing skills, especially now that they try to
compose entire essays on smart phones.
Having first become concerned about student writing when I taught social
science in the 1960s though, I am convinced that the solution is more complex
than ditching a model that seems not to work.
In the first place, “English” as a term can be confusing at
both the high school and college levels.
We call the coursework “English,” but at the secondary level, depending
on the district, we may be referring to literature, writing in all its guises
(composition, creative writing, poetry, playwriting, journalism), and, in some
cases speech communications From
personal experience I can attest that no teacher can be expected to be an
expert in all these fields, but chances are that her certification will allow
her to teach any or all of the above. Moreover, the chances are good that she will be
assigned based on the school’s need rather than on her level of comfort with a
subject matter. And, given college
curricula, the chances are equally great that the only formal writing courses she has
had are Composition I and II, subjects likely to have been taught by graduate
teaching assistants with no prior experience in rhetoric and composition
themselves.
An aside: In my own
case, after getting a degree in social science education, I returned to
college, racked up the literature courses as part of an American Studies
Masters and certified to teach English.
My grammar course was theoretical, targeted at Ph.D. language candidates
rather than at teachers, and the classroom instruction in that course was
something I would not force upon my worst enemy. Because I had completed a methods course for
social science, I did not have to complete one for English, and I had no additional writing courses, having
completed the composition requirement nearly a decade before. With that, the state considered me “certified,”
and I was hired to teach sophomore, junior, and senior English. AND journalism (newspaper and yearbook,
including photography)—for which I didn’t even have high school
experience. No problem—my English
certification extended to the journalism classes until I added a journalism
certification a year later.
My classes
were small and my students were eager—and I was/am a perpetual learner, so all
worked out well. You can see, though,
where the situation could go wrong: I
knew a lot about literature, nothing about methods and journalism, and little
about grammar and writing.
It’s that experience and the hundreds of college students
that I met later that cause me to feel strongly about the need to focus on
writing AND reading (yes, including classics) in high school. Actually, I’ve thought of this for so long
that I’m going to break my posts into two:
1) factors affecting writing success in high school, and 2) why read.
- Look at teacher preparation and teaching requirements: Are secondary teachers required to take composition theory and methods courses taught by specialists? Are they required to complete a grammar course that incorporates teaching methodology?
- Look at hiring standards:
Do prospective hires in all disciples complete a writing sample on-site? Do English prospects complete a grammar
proficiency exam?
- Look at educational philosophy: Does the district support writing throughout
the curriculum so that both students and staff understand that effective
communication is a major educational objective?
Are faculty and staff expected to demonstrate effective written
communication in their professional capacity?
Are district-wide netiquette and social media policies published,
taught, and implemented?
- Look at the curriculum:
Does the district-wide curriculum incorporate writing opportunities
throughout its courses of both formal and informal types? Does the district support those initiatives
by providing writing-across-the-curriculum support for faculty and writing
center support for students? Do faculty
and students receive appropriate incentives and rewards for incorporating
writing effectively and consistently throughout the school year?
Another aside: I am not a fan of capstone projects that allow students to procrastinate because of a lack of progress checks throughout the year. Five times I have had to deal with college freshmen whose high school experiences had conditioned them to procrastinate. They even wrote of how teachers, under pressure to have students succeed, bailed them out of their senior thesis at the last minute. Despite my warnings to the contrary and progress checks incorporated into the assignment, they assumed that I would behave similarly. I didn’t, and five grades fell, as did one scholarship. - Look at technology:
Does school software support writing?
(Is a robust writing program readily available?) Is a school-wide grammar support available on
computers and/or learning management software?
- Look at reading: Does the faculty read for professional advancement, for information, and for enjoyment? Do the students see the faculty reading? Is substantial reading expected of students in all courses? (More on reading in the next post.)
