Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Do I hate public school teachers?

Not really. Many of the comments in this blog sound as if I do, but my daughter, ex-wife, and uncle all are public school teachers. Several of my friends are. My aunt spent her whole professional career teaching special education classes in a school less than 200 yards from her front door. My daughter in law is a deaf interpreter in a public school. My public education roots run pretty deep.

I know that public school teachers work under an enormous bureaucratic burden. Every day seems to bring some bright new idea from the school board or law makers or someone, without any extra time or resources to implement them. Every low grade means a potential run-in with the principal and the kid's parents (by the way, when you get a poor grade in college, do not bring your parents to see the dean).

And yet, I've got a list of horror stories that all seem to say that something went wrong in the public education process.

  • Over half of my incoming students are totally clueless about basic English grammar issues: sentence fragments, run-ons, comma usage, and spelling. This isn't college material. It isn't even high school material. By the time you leave the fourth grade, you should know when to use there, their, and they're.

  • I asked a teacher why she teaches that sentences over a certain length are run-ons. She said, "It's easier than teaching them structure."

  • Students always arrive with their heads full of fake rules: "any sentence over seven words is a run-on," "you cannot use a semicolon more than three times on a page," "the word although always has a comma after it," and so on. None of these "rules" is correct; they all have the appearance of being invented by someone who didn't really understand grammar.

  • One of my students went to my supervisor (with her father) to complain that I was teaching commas wrong. Her high school teacher had said that you put in a comma every time you take a breath. (Do trained athletes need fewer commas? Do heavy smokers need more? There's another of those fake rules.)

  • One really poor student confided in me that his high school English teacher passed him because she knew how much he loved to play basketball, and she couldn't bring herself to deny him that. I often wonder how many of my other students have similar stories.

Now I know the fault isn't all with the teachers. I'm often astonished when a student tells me what I said to the class and somehow leaves out a "not" or a "don't." But things are so consistent and so many of my students write something that's nowhere near college English that I've got to wonder.

What this means to you

This blog wasn't intended to be my personal rants and complaints, though this entry certainly feels that way. It's addressed to high school seniors and college freshmen, and attempts to help you become better equipped to survive college English. I'll close with a four-step, guaranteed-to-help prescription.

  1. Spend some time every day reading quality stuff. I don't mean Facebook, USA Today, or Yahoo. I mean smart, well-edited material: quality fiction (go to a used bookstore and find an anthology that was used in college courses), big-city newspapers such as The Washington Post or The New York Times, or national news magazines.

  2. Decide that you're going to get good. Don't smugly assume that you are perfect because you got good grades in high school (after all, even the best student should become better at 18 years old than she was at 14). What would you do if you wanted to become really good at basketball? At skateboarding? At computer programming? You'd look at examples of excellence, you'd critique your own work, you'd ask for coaching, and you'd find books to read. Why not take the same approach to writing?

  3. When you write something, use one of the major word processing programs (Microsoft Word is actually quite good) and run the spelling/grammar checker. When you run it, don't mindlessly accept the first suggestion. You won't learn anything that way, and you'll probably stick in "defiantly" when you meant "definitely." For every suggestion it makes, ask what the program is suggesting, why it wants to make this change, and whether you want to accept the suggestion (the computer isn't always right, after all).

  4. Ask questions when something puzzles you. As I was writing this blog entry, I got an e-mail from a friend asking punctuation advice on an incredibly long sentence in a doctoral dissertation. I suggested enclosing a non-restrictive subordinate clause in commas. It's always OK to ask a more expert person for help.

No comments: