Friday, May 9
I teach college students how to write. Believe me, if anyone needs to learn how to write, it's college students. You wouldn't believe the kinds of writing our "best and brightest" are turning out. Hell, I once had a student spell the word "stupid" with a "6"! I'm not kidding. But it gets worse. I've seen 25 word sentences without verbs! I once saw a three-line sentence with eighteen commas, which basically meant that there was a comma after every other word.
But those grammar problems are no match for the content problems in student papers. Students generally struggle to understand even the most basic written argument. My wife (who also teaches college) gave her class of advanced composition students a quiz over a reading. The reading concerned a specific supreme court case that focused on a high school principal searching a female student's purse and finding pot. One of the questions on the quiz asked, quite simply, whether this was originally a civil or criminal case. It's an easy question, especially because the first paragraph of the article clearly stated, "This was a criminal case." Well, 75% of her students called it a "civil" case. Why did they make that mistake? I'll tell you why: because it was written down. It wasn't on TV. It wasn't delivered to them in the form of a song. Students just don't know how to read.
Now, I say "students" as if I'm talking about all students. That is, of course, a huge exaggeration. There are plenty of students who can read perfectly well, and who would easily get a question like the one I just mentioned correct. I also should add that I find the idea that people today are stupider than they used to be preposterous. Students are just as smart today as they were 20, 30, 40 years ago. Heck, they're smarter. The trouble is, the kind of intelligence that is praised and rewarded in our society today is rote learning--memorization, filling in blanks, calculating theorems. The kinds of learning that count--like critical thinking and analysis--are almost entirely ignored in high schools, largely because the only way to really evaluate critical thinking and analysis are through reading interesting books (which cost money) and writing interesting papers (which take time to grade and, hence, cost money). Learning how to write is learning how to think and how to reason. It's at the heart of college education, yet it costs money because that kind of learning can only take place in smaller classes. Hence, more classroom space is required, and hence more instructors are required. But colleges know that they can't escape the importance of their students learning how to write and think. The trouble is, high schools pretend that they can ignore that importance, so they do.
It's getting better, though. The SAT test now has a written component (or will). That should force high schools to make their students better prepared for the exam--we can only hope. Still, the results of that kind of development (along with many other developments, like the elimination of the idiotic notion of "whole language" learning, where teachers aren't supposed to teach grammar but let students magically learn grammar by immersing themselves in books) will not be felt for a decade or so. In the meantime, I'm planning to see a lot more "stupi6s."
But those grammar problems are no match for the content problems in student papers. Students generally struggle to understand even the most basic written argument. My wife (who also teaches college) gave her class of advanced composition students a quiz over a reading. The reading concerned a specific supreme court case that focused on a high school principal searching a female student's purse and finding pot. One of the questions on the quiz asked, quite simply, whether this was originally a civil or criminal case. It's an easy question, especially because the first paragraph of the article clearly stated, "This was a criminal case." Well, 75% of her students called it a "civil" case. Why did they make that mistake? I'll tell you why: because it was written down. It wasn't on TV. It wasn't delivered to them in the form of a song. Students just don't know how to read.
Now, I say "students" as if I'm talking about all students. That is, of course, a huge exaggeration. There are plenty of students who can read perfectly well, and who would easily get a question like the one I just mentioned correct. I also should add that I find the idea that people today are stupider than they used to be preposterous. Students are just as smart today as they were 20, 30, 40 years ago. Heck, they're smarter. The trouble is, the kind of intelligence that is praised and rewarded in our society today is rote learning--memorization, filling in blanks, calculating theorems. The kinds of learning that count--like critical thinking and analysis--are almost entirely ignored in high schools, largely because the only way to really evaluate critical thinking and analysis are through reading interesting books (which cost money) and writing interesting papers (which take time to grade and, hence, cost money). Learning how to write is learning how to think and how to reason. It's at the heart of college education, yet it costs money because that kind of learning can only take place in smaller classes. Hence, more classroom space is required, and hence more instructors are required. But colleges know that they can't escape the importance of their students learning how to write and think. The trouble is, high schools pretend that they can ignore that importance, so they do.
It's getting better, though. The SAT test now has a written component (or will). That should force high schools to make their students better prepared for the exam--we can only hope. Still, the results of that kind of development (along with many other developments, like the elimination of the idiotic notion of "whole language" learning, where teachers aren't supposed to teach grammar but let students magically learn grammar by immersing themselves in books) will not be felt for a decade or so. In the meantime, I'm planning to see a lot more "stupi6s."
