Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Friday, February 12, 2016
‘Remediation’ in the United States: A Brief History
‘Remediation’ in the United States: A Brief History
San José State University Academic Retreat
February 11, 2016
My area of research is the history of writing instruction in American higher education. More specifically, I study the functions that writing instruction plays in institutions of higher education. The organizers of today's event invited me to talk today about the history of remediation in America, because, as it happens, writing instruction—often combined with reading instruction—is the commonest form of remedial education in American high education, and it has been for nearly two centuries.
Before I get into the history, I want to set out some basic parameters. First, remediation is a relatively specific term that refers to programs designed for quote/unquote “underprepared students.” The assumption, and often the accompanying assertion, is that remedial students did not get some key aspect of the education they were supposed to bring to college. Remediation, therefore, is commonly cast as the repetition of some fundamental training that students should already have mastered.
Second, in keeping with this definition, remedial education nearly always refers to “Basic Skills” —usually reading, writing, math, and/or study skills. It is worth noting that designating reading, writing, math, and studying as “basic skills” reinforces a pervasive belief that they are sub-collegiate. As I noted before, remediation refers to relearning fundamental skills, and those fundaments—reading, writing, math, and studying—are therefore designated as sub-collegiate.
The definition and domains I’ve sketched here are well understood and widely used, and they feed a long-standing belief that remediation is transitory—that we are in a period of uniquely underprepared students, and that we might one day reform education to the point where remediation is not necessary. However, what my historical work suggests is something like the opposite. In fact, what I plan to argue today is that remediation and American universities are, and have always been, mutually dependent.
There is no better place to start such a history than at the beginning. Harvard College was the first institution of higher education founded in what is now the United States. It was established by the Massachusetts legislature in 1636 as a sort of finishing school for future clergymen. Harvard’s earliest curriculum was a thoroughly classical one, conducted primarily in the so-called “learned languages.” As such, the entrance requirements were simply that students could read and speak Latin and Greek. Despite its reputation as a [QUOTE] “haven for the world’s most ambitious scholars,” matriculating students were not always fully prepared. Consequently, beginning in 1636, Harvard offered remedial Latin classes.
Harvard’s remedial Latin class offers us some useful points of consideration. For one, it suggests the omnipresent tension in remedial education between access on the one hand and standards on the other. Harvard offered remedial Latin because the school needed matriculants in order to stay solvent. There was not a ready supply of college bound youth in the American colonies, and Harvard’s survival literally depended on their ability to attract students who were geographically close enough to attend and pay tuition. Harvard educators made the college accessible to whomever they could and provided whatever education students needed.
Harvard’s Latin course also points to the aspirational nature of college standards. Harvard faculty and administrators wanted students to be fluent in Latin prior to entering college, but that was an unrealistic expectation under the circumstances. Hence the need for remedial Latin. In other words, Harvard’s early standards were actually goals, not standards. For the next two centuries or so, Harvard was exemplary where remediation was concerned. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as new colleges were founded throughout the colonies and states, faculty and administrators went to great lengths to attract enough students to stay in business. Despite explicit “standards” that required students to be prepared before entering, underprepared students seemed to proliferate. Consequently, remediation was a ubiquitous survival mechanism.
In the early 1800s, as colleges strengthened, remediation took on a new cast in American higher education. Specifically, it became a more overtly political tool. In 1828, for example, a faculty committee at Yale published a report designed to defend the classical curriculum against the encroachment of modern, elective curricula. Among the arguments for maintaining the classical curriculum was that Yale (and other colleges) could provide appropriate remediation in the classical subjects (which, by that point included, quote “VULGAR ARITHMETIC”), but faculty would be less capable of serving underprepared students if the fields were expanded too greatly.
One important aspect of this argument is that it conjures remediation in support of a distinctly political cause—defending the classical curriculum—by attempting to balance access for students with quote “deficient preparation” against the standards of the college, which the authors claimed were rising every year. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the assertion of rising standards. In fact, Yale’s standards had risen considerably in the century and a quarter between when it was opened and when the Yale report was produced. The defense of the classical curriculum belies the fact that the curriculum had changed a great deal over the years. What had been courses for graduating seniors in 1701 had gradually moved toward the first year or even down into the secondary schools by the early 19th century (Broome 35-37). Even more plainly, when the Yale report was published, what counted as “deficient preparation” was very different than it had been just decades earlier. This was the case at virtually every institution of higher education.
The importance of Yale’s ever-rising standards is important in a history of remediation because it indicates that standards are moving targets. Remember I noted earlier that standards are aspirational. Once they’re achieved to any meaningful degree, standards are reimagined. This process of raising standards, which is observable throughout the history of American education, undermines one of the important claims made by the Yale authors, which is that remediation is temporary. As the argument went, if the classical curriculum was maintained, the lower schools would eventually get up to speed, and students eventually wouldn’t need remedial education. But the persistently rising standards suggests that remediation is absolutely necessary, and in fact, the need for remediation is indispensible for balancing the goals of access and standards because institutions can claim to be holding standards high enough that they’re rigorous enough to need remedial education as a bridge to underprepared students.
Through the course of the 19th century, the argument that remediation was transitory took on new dimensions, usually in keeping with evolving political goals. In 1848, the University of Wisconsin opened, and the next year, despite their dismay at having to do so, they opened a preparatory department to bridge the gap between secondary and post-secondary. The department lasted 31 years, and it was replaced with remedial classes, rather than a department, soon after. The University of Wisconsin was hardly unique in this regard.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Harvard sought attract public high school students by offering an elective curriculum. Although the goal was to boost enrollments, Harvard’s efforts were predicated on arguments bemoaning the woeful underpreparation of students. When the elective curriculum was fully in place, several courses were required in the first year, all but one of which Harvard’s president called [QUOTE] “obviously matters which properly belong to the secondary schools” [END QUOTE]. In other words, they were remedial. The notion was that they would eventually be returned to secondary schools, once the high schools got up to speed. One of the remedial courses Harvard introduced at that point was the original first-year composition course, English A, which became a model for first-year composition nationally. First-year composition has been attacked routinely and viciously over the years as belonging in high schools, and yet, it has enrolled more students than any other course in the past century.
To read through the history of remediation is to discover that on the one hand, administrators, faculty, trustees, legislators, and commentators have been complaining about the need for remedial education for centuries. But the goal, as I’ve been arguing, is tied to the moving target of standards and the unfortunate albatross of access. The results of this situation—in which standards move, access must be maintained, and remediation persists—are complicated. Burgeoning numbers of students with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds have attended colleges and universities over the past two centuries because of access to remedial education. According to recent research, underprepared students are often very well served by remediation, and many go on to graduate in similar timeframes as their [QUOTE/UNQUOTE] college-level counterparts.
At the same time, the myth that we will rid ourselves of remediation has persisted. Despite the demonstrable shifts in what constitutes “college-level” reading, writing, math, and study skills, producing well-wrought laments about the dire state of education and the regrettable need for remedial work is practically a cottage industry. Often these complaints have described courses or students using highly derogatory labels including “bonehead courses,” “the awkward squad,” and “the vandal horde.” Likewise, because of the belief that they are “sub-collegiate” basic skills courses, remedial courses have often been outsourced, degraded, defunded, and even outlawed.
Even when schools attempted to rid themselves of remediation, however, it nearly always creeps back in. In 1960, the California Master Plan for Higher Education relegated remedial instruction to California’s Community Colleges. Soon thereafter, the California Legislature cut funding to the CSU that had been earmarked for writing clinics that served underprepared students. Less than a decade later, in 1974, the CSU issued a report indicating the need for remedial courses, and two years after that the CSUs introduced the English Placement Test and remedial courses. The UCs, as well, have long found ways to accommodate underprepared students even when they were pretending not to accept them.
Rather than continuing to enumerate examples, I want to finish by returning again to Harvard. From what I can ascertain, Harvard has offered some form of remedial work in almost every year of its existence, even when it wasn’t officially requiring remedial courses. In 1914, after about 20 years of requiring remedial students to take “special instruction,” Harvard finally reintroduced an official remedial writing course. The course shifted and changed over the years, and in the 1970s, they renamed it “Expos 10: Introduction to Expository Writing.” It remains on the books to this day. What is so striking about this remedial class is that Harvard is so unlike most other post-secondary institutions in America. In 2015, they accepted fewer than 6% of their applicants—less than 2000 of the more than 37,000 people who applied. These are some of the most accomplished applicants in the world—maybe the history of the world. And Harvard still needs to offer remedial writing courses for some of them.
It’s worth asking why, and the simple answer is that students need reading, writing, math, and study skills instruction. Notwithstanding the political value of remediation in arguments about post-secondary education, the history of remediation helps us to recognize that basic skills are not basic in the sense of being prior to more complex instruction—they are basic in the sense of being fundamental to all instruction. Remediation is not going away any time soon, and perhaps counter intuitively, the final expulsion of remediation would be a bad sign for higher education because it would signal the end of aspirational standards. Remedial education allows universities to serve student needs and pursue higher standards, and I think we would do well to recognize it.
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Academic Job Market--One Thing I Wish I'd Been Better Prepared For
(originally written 10/11/11)
I'm watching several friends take on this year's academic job market, and having just come off the market myself, I have one bit of advice I wish had been shared with me earlier in the application process.
The job market is likely to be one of the most emotional years of your career to this point. One reason is that being on the market is so drawn out. You spend the summer waiting for ads to be posted, you spend September-December writing and sending applications, you spend the same period waiting for requests for more information or invitations to interview, you spend winter break waiting for MLA, you spend the few weeks after MLA waiting for invitations to interview on campus, you spend time after that waiting for additional information and/or an offer. If you get a job, you have to wait 3-4 months for it to start; if you don’t, you start the process again. In short, you spend a year of your life in limbo, just waiting for some resolution.
At every step, you will likely experience incredible highs (“Hinterlands University emailed to ask for my teaching philosophy!”) and incredible lows (“Hinterlands University emailed to say they received 400 applications and do not intend to interview me at MLA.”) In fact, it’s quite possible that on any given day you could experience both peak and valley, maybe even several times over.
The emotional rollercoaster is compounded by any number of other factors: noticing a typo in a job letter that’s been replicated dozens of times, seeing a job posting that seems to describe your exact qualifications, not hearing anything from anyone for long stretches of time, being invited to interview, reading job wikis (avoid this if you can—they can be poisonous), getting unexpected encouragement, learning that a position (or positions) was cancelled, getting helpful or enthusiastic feedback on any of your job documents. The list could easily extend for many more pages, and while the factors may change from candidate to candidate, it’s unlikely that anyone, regardless of qualifications and preparation, will avoid the job market ups and downs.
There are as many ways to meet the emotional challenges of the job market as there are causes of potential emotional swings. I relied heavily on chocolate, meals with close friends, and regular contact with people who could put my “plight” in less emotional contexts; other people pour themselves into work or monster movie marathons. Whatever your preferred method, knowing that your emotions are likely to be running high, and preparing ways to meet those emotional challenges, is nearly as important as any other action that you take during your time as a job candidate, especially if you’ve done a good job of preparing to be a candidate during your time as a student.
I'm watching several friends take on this year's academic job market, and having just come off the market myself, I have one bit of advice I wish had been shared with me earlier in the application process.
The job market is likely to be one of the most emotional years of your career to this point. One reason is that being on the market is so drawn out. You spend the summer waiting for ads to be posted, you spend September-December writing and sending applications, you spend the same period waiting for requests for more information or invitations to interview, you spend winter break waiting for MLA, you spend the few weeks after MLA waiting for invitations to interview on campus, you spend time after that waiting for additional information and/or an offer. If you get a job, you have to wait 3-4 months for it to start; if you don’t, you start the process again. In short, you spend a year of your life in limbo, just waiting for some resolution.
At every step, you will likely experience incredible highs (“Hinterlands University emailed to ask for my teaching philosophy!”) and incredible lows (“Hinterlands University emailed to say they received 400 applications and do not intend to interview me at MLA.”) In fact, it’s quite possible that on any given day you could experience both peak and valley, maybe even several times over.
The emotional rollercoaster is compounded by any number of other factors: noticing a typo in a job letter that’s been replicated dozens of times, seeing a job posting that seems to describe your exact qualifications, not hearing anything from anyone for long stretches of time, being invited to interview, reading job wikis (avoid this if you can—they can be poisonous), getting unexpected encouragement, learning that a position (or positions) was cancelled, getting helpful or enthusiastic feedback on any of your job documents. The list could easily extend for many more pages, and while the factors may change from candidate to candidate, it’s unlikely that anyone, regardless of qualifications and preparation, will avoid the job market ups and downs.
There are as many ways to meet the emotional challenges of the job market as there are causes of potential emotional swings. I relied heavily on chocolate, meals with close friends, and regular contact with people who could put my “plight” in less emotional contexts; other people pour themselves into work or monster movie marathons. Whatever your preferred method, knowing that your emotions are likely to be running high, and preparing ways to meet those emotional challenges, is nearly as important as any other action that you take during your time as a job candidate, especially if you’ve done a good job of preparing to be a candidate during your time as a student.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The End of Books
I just finished reading an article by Urusula Le Guin in Harpers about the precipitous decline of book reading over the past few years. Le Guin, herself a novelist, is not particularly worried about the decline of book reading. (She notes, for example, that the polls surveying people's reading only accepted "literary" works as valid. Non-fiction books apparently don't count as books.) After, all, people have only really read novels regularly for a few hundred years, at best. Rather, she's concerned that the corporate mentaility of booksellers and publishers compromises the quality of the books that are published.
Like Le Guin, I'm weary of the doomsayers who claim that the decline of book reading is a sign of the apocalypse. There are ample sources claiming that literacy and reading comprehension are declining, but in my experience, the people writing those sources generally define reading, literacy, and decline in really limited ways. The polls that Le Guin's critiques which don't accept anything but "literature" as books are a great example. Another of my favorite examples comes from Mark Bauerlein, who argues that young people are "the dumbest generation" because they don't engage information as their forbears did. Bauerlein denies that social networking is literate work because it's self-involved and lazy. His evidence? Kids don't pass standardized tests the way the once did. The list of doomsayers is long with polemicists.
What seems always to be ignored by doomsayers, though, is that literacy as the ability to read and write is higher than it's ever been. For the majority of human history, the majority of humans couldn't read or write anything. Less than 200 years ago, Americans were actively preventing slaves and many women from learning to read or write. And as Le Guin points out, literacy has always been rationed by the ruling classes as a way to maintain class privilege. In 2009, more people read and write more kinds of language than our "brilliant" forbears could have even imagined 30 years ago. For example, the Senate passed a resolution designating October 20 the "National Day on Writing" in recognition of the way writing shapes our world, and the National Council of Teachers of English sponsored the National Gallery of Writing to showcase a small fraction of the important (and not-so-important) writing that people are doing--people including all those dumb, illiterate young kids that worry Bauerlein and his friends.
I'm not going to claim that all the things people read and write today are better or worse than anything written or read in the past, but in a country that continues to support arguments about everything from health care to drinking water on the twin pillars of choice and competition, it seems a little silly to think that everyone needs to read The Brothers Karamazov to be considered intelligent people, much less contributing citizens. The landscape of new literacies in our digitized, globalized world gives people lots of choices and gives books lots of competition. And people are choosing. They're reading (this blog, hopefully), and they're writing (not this blog, hopefully). Books, contrary to popular belief, are no more moral than any of the choices competing with them for people's literate attentions. To sum up, boo to doomsayers, yay to Le Guin, and three cheers to rampant reading and writing, even if it isn't in the form of language accepted by the doomsayers as valuable.
Like Le Guin, I'm weary of the doomsayers who claim that the decline of book reading is a sign of the apocalypse. There are ample sources claiming that literacy and reading comprehension are declining, but in my experience, the people writing those sources generally define reading, literacy, and decline in really limited ways. The polls that Le Guin's critiques which don't accept anything but "literature" as books are a great example. Another of my favorite examples comes from Mark Bauerlein, who argues that young people are "the dumbest generation" because they don't engage information as their forbears did. Bauerlein denies that social networking is literate work because it's self-involved and lazy. His evidence? Kids don't pass standardized tests the way the once did. The list of doomsayers is long with polemicists.
What seems always to be ignored by doomsayers, though, is that literacy as the ability to read and write is higher than it's ever been. For the majority of human history, the majority of humans couldn't read or write anything. Less than 200 years ago, Americans were actively preventing slaves and many women from learning to read or write. And as Le Guin points out, literacy has always been rationed by the ruling classes as a way to maintain class privilege. In 2009, more people read and write more kinds of language than our "brilliant" forbears could have even imagined 30 years ago. For example, the Senate passed a resolution designating October 20 the "National Day on Writing" in recognition of the way writing shapes our world, and the National Council of Teachers of English sponsored the National Gallery of Writing to showcase a small fraction of the important (and not-so-important) writing that people are doing--people including all those dumb, illiterate young kids that worry Bauerlein and his friends.
I'm not going to claim that all the things people read and write today are better or worse than anything written or read in the past, but in a country that continues to support arguments about everything from health care to drinking water on the twin pillars of choice and competition, it seems a little silly to think that everyone needs to read The Brothers Karamazov to be considered intelligent people, much less contributing citizens. The landscape of new literacies in our digitized, globalized world gives people lots of choices and gives books lots of competition. And people are choosing. They're reading (this blog, hopefully), and they're writing (not this blog, hopefully). Books, contrary to popular belief, are no more moral than any of the choices competing with them for people's literate attentions. To sum up, boo to doomsayers, yay to Le Guin, and three cheers to rampant reading and writing, even if it isn't in the form of language accepted by the doomsayers as valuable.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Summer Writing
This summer session is the first extended period of time I've had free from teaching or taking classes since the summer of 2007. During that summer, I graduated from my masters program, moved my family from California to Arizona, and had a three-week teacher training session to attend. Realistically, this is the first extended period of time I have had in better than three years to simply focus on my own research and writing, and it has been eye opening.
The major problem, a not uncommon one for most people faced with unending "free time," is that I have been having real trouble motivating myself to work. It's not that my time has been unproductive, exactly, but my production has been otherwise directed. I read a novel for two days straight, then wrote a 4-page, single-spaced review of it. I've completely rebuilt my website. I have establish a new blog (thank you very much). I also set up profiles at LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, and some other ones I can't think of right now. I've been reading every day, so that's a check in the positive column, but I haven't been reading the books on my comprehensives list. So, reading academic literature? Yes. Reading academic literature I'm going to be tested on in the next 6 months? Not so much.
Of course, I know that the main reason I can't focus is a distinct lack of responsibility. That is, no one is expecting me to be to work every morning. No one is expecting work from me. That's kind of the idea behind self-directed time, right? But without the structure of classes to teach, meetings to attend, and coursework to complete, I'm finding it's much easier to take the intellectual break I've convinced myself I really need to get my batteries recharged (actually I'm not really convinced, but as when my wife overlooks some mindless indiscretion on my part because she loves me, I'm pretending to buy my own line out of pity and love).
Now that I've managed to waste yet another small chunk of my day writing this post, back to some other mundane, unproductive task that I'll scold myself for later when I rise from my desk and wonder where the day went.
The major problem, a not uncommon one for most people faced with unending "free time," is that I have been having real trouble motivating myself to work. It's not that my time has been unproductive, exactly, but my production has been otherwise directed. I read a novel for two days straight, then wrote a 4-page, single-spaced review of it. I've completely rebuilt my website. I have establish a new blog (thank you very much). I also set up profiles at LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, and some other ones I can't think of right now. I've been reading every day, so that's a check in the positive column, but I haven't been reading the books on my comprehensives list. So, reading academic literature? Yes. Reading academic literature I'm going to be tested on in the next 6 months? Not so much.
Of course, I know that the main reason I can't focus is a distinct lack of responsibility. That is, no one is expecting me to be to work every morning. No one is expecting work from me. That's kind of the idea behind self-directed time, right? But without the structure of classes to teach, meetings to attend, and coursework to complete, I'm finding it's much easier to take the intellectual break I've convinced myself I really need to get my batteries recharged (actually I'm not really convinced, but as when my wife overlooks some mindless indiscretion on my part because she loves me, I'm pretending to buy my own line out of pity and love).
Now that I've managed to waste yet another small chunk of my day writing this post, back to some other mundane, unproductive task that I'll scold myself for later when I rise from my desk and wonder where the day went.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Want to Write? Write
In response to:
EDUCATION; Want to write? Read; [HOME EDITION] Michael Skube. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Aug 27, 2006. pg. M.3
A few years back, in preparation for hordes of students flooding the halls of elementary, secondary, and postsecondary schools alike, Michael Skube sent out a familiar (read: prototypical) call-to-arms, decrying the declining state of young peoples’ ability to write in America today. Skube, though more measured than some people discussing literacy issues, quickly betrayed his seething revulsion for American youths who are incapable of producing anything more substantial than puerile text messages or IMs, messages he deems not even written in “‘real’ English,” but in “expedient baby-talk.” Skube goes on to illuminate for those of us who read his piece the ways in which he believes students to be failures as writers, either cranking out “creative” tripe absent the standard rules of English grammar or awkwardly producing “leaden language” and “sentences stiff as starched shirts” at the behest of teachers and professors who relish the overly complicated flounderings of their inept students. Skube paints for readers a picture which many of them recognize: an incompetent group of young people, mesmerized by technological advance to the detriment of “real” language; lazy; unread; and ushered into mediocrity by a group of Pied Piper-esque educators who themselves have no respect for the educational standards once emblazoned on students’ minds.
Sadly, many Americans, including thousands of educators, agree with Skube. As one instructor I recently spoke with complained, “They [students] don’t read anything. How are they supposed to write anything substantive if they don’t care enough to read?” And, while there are many responses to the claim that “they don’t read anything,” few answers are deemed satisfactory by critics of student literacy, and truthfully, by the general public. In fact, I’m quite certain that many of the folks who happened across Skube’s article shook their heads knowingly as he advocated the sober, straightforward language exhibited in the E.B. White article Skube provides his students to help remedy their poor writing skills.
In fact, Skube’s vision of American education is ubiquitous, finding purchase in forums from dinner table discussions to the Los Angeles Times to the Department of Education (ask recently replaced Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings what state she believes students’ writing capabilities to be in). Certainly in schools across the nation the discussion about declining student literacy is taking place. Many teachers and professors in institutions across the country (and abroad) claim to experience the ineptitude of student writers, calling for English instructors to pull their noses out of esoteric tomes of postmodern theory and “teach our kids something useful!” In response, English departments, sitting presumably at the nexus of students’ needs and possible educational responses, are on every level torn by arguments about where “grammar” and “standards” belong: grade school, high school, freshman composition, all of them? Often, the standard complaint is that whatever previous level students came from failed to adequately prepare them for the current level: so high schools failed to prepare students for college, and middle schools dropped the ball in preparing students for high school, and on down the line. And of course, many Americans feel good about being proactive in casting blame for students’ declining writing skills. Say the Michael Skubes of the world, “let them read; only then will they write.”
But, Skube’s vision of America, however evident it may at first seem, is grossly misleading in its simplicity. For example, Skube calls for reading as an antidote to poor writing. And, while there are few, if any, literacy or writing experts who would disagree with Skube’s assertion that reading helps to improve writing, I believe it’s safe to say that most literacy and writing experts would agree that one must also practice writing to improve writing.
Practice writing to improve writing? What a novel idea, no pun intended. It seems a reasonable request, for, as one might argue, practicing to write by reading E.B. White’s article is somewhat akin to practicing to compose an aria by listening to Beethoven’s “Ah Perfido.” However, practicing to write is not exactly a satisfactory solution for some, either. Skube, himself, notes that students have long been importuned by teachers to “scribble away in journals, write skits and sketches, labor over sentences littered with misspelled words and faulty grammar.” Obviously, in Skube’s experience, practicing in a journal is not easily transferable to “highly accomplished writing,” especially because, as he claims, “the aim is not competency in the plain carpentry of prose but self-expression and creativity.” (Might we assume that Skube cares not a whit about what his students have to say, as long as they punctuate correctly and compose correctly?) And God save us if our students decide to practice their writing skills on a blog or MySpace page. It seems, practicing writing isn’t a sufficient remedy for poor writing skills any more than reading is.
But, sarcasm aside, Skube is not completely misled. If he has students read White, he may reasonably expect them to begin to write like White…eventually. Similarly, if he wants them to write like journalists, he might consider having his students read examples of journalism. But, here’s the catch: if Skube wants his students to write “well,” he’s likely to be disappointed with the lasting effects of White’s essay on his students. Actually, White’s writing from Skube’s example is potentially poor writing, depending on what is expected of the writing. I have to admit as an instructor of composition, any student who turns a paper in to me in which they expound upon a subject’s “bedraggled appearance” would draw a curious look. In spite of what Skube may believe and may teach, White’s charming prose is not at all appropriate for most of the work students are expected to do at the college level. That is, “writing well” isn’t as simple as it seems.
Truth be told, a student who writes spectacular vignettes in White’s careful prose could conceivably do worse in my classroom that one who writes in “forced and hollow” language. First and foremost, my students are expected to write academic arguments which demand a certain level of academic formality not present in White’s introduction. In academia, excessive physical detail often overwhelms the argumentative aspects of a student text, and a description that informs White’s reader might be distracting to a reader in another context. What do you suppose Skube would make of a news story written in White’s detailed manner? Or, even an email? The truth is that different types of situations demand different types of writing, and in spite of what Skube may advocate, White’s style doesn’t satisfy them all. So, when my students struggle with “forced and hollow” language, I choose to see them practicing a new form of writing as opposed to failing as writers on the whole.
But, through all my standing objections to Skube’s characterization of students, what I find most interesting (and most curious) is his unspoken assumption that students are somehow contaminated because of how poorly he judges them to write. Some writing historians might point Skube to over 120 years of similar complaints lodged by academics in which they claim, as A.S. Hill of Harvard did in the late 1800’s, educators should “[take] models from the traditional sources of literacy and [attempt] to impart grace, clarity, and correctness to students who otherwise would not know how to recognize it.” Some historians might point out to Skube that, in fact, when he was in school, his professors were complaining about his and his classmates’ inability to write to the standards of grammar and “real” English to which previous generations were held. I, however, won’t do that. What I will do is claim here, as I do to all those who would listen, that students today are no more or less capable than they have ever been. Students are not contaminated, but they are coming to us to help them understand what writing does and why. We may choose, as Skube does, to believe them incompetent and hopeless; or we may choose to see them as novices attempting new levels of development.
In the end, of course, it will always be possible to defend a claim that students aren’t writing to the levels of E.B. White or Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Skube; but most students (in any period in human history) also haven’t spent the time and effort on their writing that White or Skube have. Skube may be right that “younger students have an even better head start;” but he also might be encouraged to recognize that White, well into his 50’s, wrote his “expert” elegy after he watched his wife pass away. Given time, and given the interest that people like Skube might be in a position to promote, today’s students may very well find themselves writing like White as they mourn their loved ones who’ve passed, even as they may also (probably inappropriately) mourn the writing skills of the students in times to come.
EDUCATION; Want to write? Read; [HOME EDITION] Michael Skube. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Aug 27, 2006. pg. M.3
A few years back, in preparation for hordes of students flooding the halls of elementary, secondary, and postsecondary schools alike, Michael Skube sent out a familiar (read: prototypical) call-to-arms, decrying the declining state of young peoples’ ability to write in America today. Skube, though more measured than some people discussing literacy issues, quickly betrayed his seething revulsion for American youths who are incapable of producing anything more substantial than puerile text messages or IMs, messages he deems not even written in “‘real’ English,” but in “expedient baby-talk.” Skube goes on to illuminate for those of us who read his piece the ways in which he believes students to be failures as writers, either cranking out “creative” tripe absent the standard rules of English grammar or awkwardly producing “leaden language” and “sentences stiff as starched shirts” at the behest of teachers and professors who relish the overly complicated flounderings of their inept students. Skube paints for readers a picture which many of them recognize: an incompetent group of young people, mesmerized by technological advance to the detriment of “real” language; lazy; unread; and ushered into mediocrity by a group of Pied Piper-esque educators who themselves have no respect for the educational standards once emblazoned on students’ minds.
Sadly, many Americans, including thousands of educators, agree with Skube. As one instructor I recently spoke with complained, “They [students] don’t read anything. How are they supposed to write anything substantive if they don’t care enough to read?” And, while there are many responses to the claim that “they don’t read anything,” few answers are deemed satisfactory by critics of student literacy, and truthfully, by the general public. In fact, I’m quite certain that many of the folks who happened across Skube’s article shook their heads knowingly as he advocated the sober, straightforward language exhibited in the E.B. White article Skube provides his students to help remedy their poor writing skills.
In fact, Skube’s vision of American education is ubiquitous, finding purchase in forums from dinner table discussions to the Los Angeles Times to the Department of Education (ask recently replaced Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings what state she believes students’ writing capabilities to be in). Certainly in schools across the nation the discussion about declining student literacy is taking place. Many teachers and professors in institutions across the country (and abroad) claim to experience the ineptitude of student writers, calling for English instructors to pull their noses out of esoteric tomes of postmodern theory and “teach our kids something useful!” In response, English departments, sitting presumably at the nexus of students’ needs and possible educational responses, are on every level torn by arguments about where “grammar” and “standards” belong: grade school, high school, freshman composition, all of them? Often, the standard complaint is that whatever previous level students came from failed to adequately prepare them for the current level: so high schools failed to prepare students for college, and middle schools dropped the ball in preparing students for high school, and on down the line. And of course, many Americans feel good about being proactive in casting blame for students’ declining writing skills. Say the Michael Skubes of the world, “let them read; only then will they write.”
But, Skube’s vision of America, however evident it may at first seem, is grossly misleading in its simplicity. For example, Skube calls for reading as an antidote to poor writing. And, while there are few, if any, literacy or writing experts who would disagree with Skube’s assertion that reading helps to improve writing, I believe it’s safe to say that most literacy and writing experts would agree that one must also practice writing to improve writing.
Practice writing to improve writing? What a novel idea, no pun intended. It seems a reasonable request, for, as one might argue, practicing to write by reading E.B. White’s article is somewhat akin to practicing to compose an aria by listening to Beethoven’s “Ah Perfido.” However, practicing to write is not exactly a satisfactory solution for some, either. Skube, himself, notes that students have long been importuned by teachers to “scribble away in journals, write skits and sketches, labor over sentences littered with misspelled words and faulty grammar.” Obviously, in Skube’s experience, practicing in a journal is not easily transferable to “highly accomplished writing,” especially because, as he claims, “the aim is not competency in the plain carpentry of prose but self-expression and creativity.” (Might we assume that Skube cares not a whit about what his students have to say, as long as they punctuate correctly and compose correctly?) And God save us if our students decide to practice their writing skills on a blog or MySpace page. It seems, practicing writing isn’t a sufficient remedy for poor writing skills any more than reading is.
But, sarcasm aside, Skube is not completely misled. If he has students read White, he may reasonably expect them to begin to write like White…eventually. Similarly, if he wants them to write like journalists, he might consider having his students read examples of journalism. But, here’s the catch: if Skube wants his students to write “well,” he’s likely to be disappointed with the lasting effects of White’s essay on his students. Actually, White’s writing from Skube’s example is potentially poor writing, depending on what is expected of the writing. I have to admit as an instructor of composition, any student who turns a paper in to me in which they expound upon a subject’s “bedraggled appearance” would draw a curious look. In spite of what Skube may believe and may teach, White’s charming prose is not at all appropriate for most of the work students are expected to do at the college level. That is, “writing well” isn’t as simple as it seems.
Truth be told, a student who writes spectacular vignettes in White’s careful prose could conceivably do worse in my classroom that one who writes in “forced and hollow” language. First and foremost, my students are expected to write academic arguments which demand a certain level of academic formality not present in White’s introduction. In academia, excessive physical detail often overwhelms the argumentative aspects of a student text, and a description that informs White’s reader might be distracting to a reader in another context. What do you suppose Skube would make of a news story written in White’s detailed manner? Or, even an email? The truth is that different types of situations demand different types of writing, and in spite of what Skube may advocate, White’s style doesn’t satisfy them all. So, when my students struggle with “forced and hollow” language, I choose to see them practicing a new form of writing as opposed to failing as writers on the whole.
But, through all my standing objections to Skube’s characterization of students, what I find most interesting (and most curious) is his unspoken assumption that students are somehow contaminated because of how poorly he judges them to write. Some writing historians might point Skube to over 120 years of similar complaints lodged by academics in which they claim, as A.S. Hill of Harvard did in the late 1800’s, educators should “[take] models from the traditional sources of literacy and [attempt] to impart grace, clarity, and correctness to students who otherwise would not know how to recognize it.” Some historians might point out to Skube that, in fact, when he was in school, his professors were complaining about his and his classmates’ inability to write to the standards of grammar and “real” English to which previous generations were held. I, however, won’t do that. What I will do is claim here, as I do to all those who would listen, that students today are no more or less capable than they have ever been. Students are not contaminated, but they are coming to us to help them understand what writing does and why. We may choose, as Skube does, to believe them incompetent and hopeless; or we may choose to see them as novices attempting new levels of development.
In the end, of course, it will always be possible to defend a claim that students aren’t writing to the levels of E.B. White or Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Skube; but most students (in any period in human history) also haven’t spent the time and effort on their writing that White or Skube have. Skube may be right that “younger students have an even better head start;” but he also might be encouraged to recognize that White, well into his 50’s, wrote his “expert” elegy after he watched his wife pass away. Given time, and given the interest that people like Skube might be in a position to promote, today’s students may very well find themselves writing like White as they mourn their loved ones who’ve passed, even as they may also (probably inappropriately) mourn the writing skills of the students in times to come.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Notes on a Name: Dissoi Topoi
Dear Readers,
A note on the title of this blog:
Dissoi logoi is an ancient Greek concept traditionally translated as "different words." It is generally understood as the practice of arguing both sides of an issue in order to better understand your opponent's point of view on a given topic. A related definition is "making the worse case the better" with the same goal--to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. Other people, however, have argued that dissoi logoi can be better understood as taking a contrary position. That is, a practitioner of dissoi logoi does not take a stand on an issue and then attempt to understand their opponent's position. Rather, dissoi logoi is the practice of opposing any position as a way of sparking deeper thought, multiple reconsiderations, and different ways of thinking about a given issue. In the first sense, dissoi logoi is an argumentative tool; in the second, it includes an inventive aspect somewhat lacking in the traditional conception.
Topoi, on the other hand, are inventive categories. Ancient orators relied on topoi, literally "places to find things," (though some people disagree with this translation) to help them discover the available arguments to make about any given issue. Aristotle treated the topoi at length, dividing them into categories for students to memorize and access when they needed to consider the available means of a given argument.
So, dissoi topoi is a phrase I coined (I think) to play on these two ancient concepts. This is a blog of opposition meant to generate (my own) deeper thinking, to help (me) invent new ways to think about old issues, and to build a place (for me) to go for arguments. Hopefully it will help readers with some of the same things.
(Oh, and let's be realistic--I thought it made me sound smart. I mean, c'mon.)
A note on the title of this blog:
Dissoi logoi is an ancient Greek concept traditionally translated as "different words." It is generally understood as the practice of arguing both sides of an issue in order to better understand your opponent's point of view on a given topic. A related definition is "making the worse case the better" with the same goal--to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. Other people, however, have argued that dissoi logoi can be better understood as taking a contrary position. That is, a practitioner of dissoi logoi does not take a stand on an issue and then attempt to understand their opponent's position. Rather, dissoi logoi is the practice of opposing any position as a way of sparking deeper thought, multiple reconsiderations, and different ways of thinking about a given issue. In the first sense, dissoi logoi is an argumentative tool; in the second, it includes an inventive aspect somewhat lacking in the traditional conception.
Topoi, on the other hand, are inventive categories. Ancient orators relied on topoi, literally "places to find things," (though some people disagree with this translation) to help them discover the available arguments to make about any given issue. Aristotle treated the topoi at length, dividing them into categories for students to memorize and access when they needed to consider the available means of a given argument.
So, dissoi topoi is a phrase I coined (I think) to play on these two ancient concepts. This is a blog of opposition meant to generate (my own) deeper thinking, to help (me) invent new ways to think about old issues, and to build a place (for me) to go for arguments. Hopefully it will help readers with some of the same things.
(Oh, and let's be realistic--I thought it made me sound smart. I mean, c'mon.)
Welcome
Dear Reader,
No doubt you've wandered here accidentally, and I am happy to have you stop by, if only for a minute to browse and scurry. Chances are that you're looking for something witty and urbane to fill the void in your life left empty by the discontinuation of "The Jack Benny Show." Given enough time searching here, no doubt you'll come across something fitting that description (1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters, and all that), but by and large you'll find the haplessly and helplessly self-absorbed verbal meanderings of a prose addict. I'm no Jack Benny, I'm afraid.
That said, the content of this blog is likely to be relatively clean, occasionally polemical, and often self-consciously self-conscious. I'm sure to spend some of my musings on writing, graduate school, parenting, marriage, teaching, and politics. If any or all of those fit your needs or wants, I invite you to meander by periodically. Baring some unforeseen causatum befitting a Chicken Little-esque hysteria, I'll be here.
No doubt you've wandered here accidentally, and I am happy to have you stop by, if only for a minute to browse and scurry. Chances are that you're looking for something witty and urbane to fill the void in your life left empty by the discontinuation of "The Jack Benny Show." Given enough time searching here, no doubt you'll come across something fitting that description (1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters, and all that), but by and large you'll find the haplessly and helplessly self-absorbed verbal meanderings of a prose addict. I'm no Jack Benny, I'm afraid.
That said, the content of this blog is likely to be relatively clean, occasionally polemical, and often self-consciously self-conscious. I'm sure to spend some of my musings on writing, graduate school, parenting, marriage, teaching, and politics. If any or all of those fit your needs or wants, I invite you to meander by periodically. Baring some unforeseen causatum befitting a Chicken Little-esque hysteria, I'll be here.
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