My Back Pages: Bad English Odyssey

"An unsettling odyssey through the world of high school composition!"

An article in the March 1980 issue of Educational Leadership, "How Writing Isn't—But Should Be—Taught in American Schools" (PDF), tells how Arn and Charlene Tibbetts drove their station wagon 18,000 miles around the country in 1976–77, visiting 50 schools and unintentionally getting an education on how writing was being taught in high schools.

The authors described what they saw as appalling. They decried the teaching of "formal writing," labeling the language taught as "garbage English" used by "linguistic imcompetents" (the bureaucrats, politicians, and social scientists of the day, apparently). The authors went on to say students "are being trained to produce copy as calculatedly as one might teach one's dog to roll over and play dead."

What do the authors suggest as alternatives? Improved teacher training, textbooks that "teach English as it is actually spoken and written by effective users of the language," and principals supportive of "effective use of language." Do you agree with the authors' critique of the teaching of writing? Is it still relevant today?

In "My Back Pages," we look at important issues through the historical lens of the Educational Leadership archives. ASCD members have access to EL issues from 1943 to the present in the myASCD Online Library. Submitted by David Snyder, a reference librarian in ASCD's Information Resource Center.

Comments

[TeachMoore]

Thank you so much for finding and sharing this article. Unfortunately, much has not changed in the teaching of English at the secondary level; in fact, with the emphasis on test prepartion and basic skills, things appear to have gotten worse for many students and their teachers. Too few Ed Schools are providing the type of training for secondary English teachers that this article calls for. We would do well to share this more broadly.

[Jerome Smith]

I taught writing in the Detroit Public Schools from 1962 until 2001.

I remember a major research report in the early 1970s that complained less than 2% of the time spent in high school classes was devoted to actual writing.

I shared that with my Cass Technical High School English classes. They uniformly observed, "It's obvious the researchers did not visit Mr. Smith's class!"

Students can only learn to write by writing, or doing sufficient reading of good writing, perhaps both.

I was one of six to ten teachers who served on the committee which set the standards for the high school writing proficiency test of the MEAP (Michigan Educational Assessment Program) test from 1996 to 2002.

While I saw some very bad writing, I also saw some very excellent, unforgettable writing.

The authors in the cited article are right that English teachers are faced with 150 students a day; I taught 5 classes of 35 students a day for many years--175 students daily. My students wrote several compositions a week, so I read a great many compositions during my teaching career.

[Garreth Heidt]

When I teach a college class in Writing and Thinking, I begin with a quote from Donald Graves: "The problem with writing is not writing... it's not writing." And thus we begin a class that, while it's filled with nifty little exercises in essay writing, appositives, etc, engages teachers in meaningful, extensive writing. Many of the teachers, elementary through high school, have noted (understand, this is a class for teachers who already possess their Bachelor degrees) that this is the first class where they actually had to write. Sure, this is a non-scientific sample, but applicable to enough of the teachers I've met to make me worry for my own children when they hit high school.

So,yeah, I agree with the Tibbetts, at lest on this crucial argument: Teachers (especially teachers of writing) need to write more. Even with the National Writing Project and programs such as the fantastic Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, there are too many teachers who don't share their writing with their students and who don't engage in the difficult, messy, frustrating act of writing along with their students. Really...ask yourself: Would you allow someone to work on your car who can identify the fact that it needs a new water pump but who doesn't know the first thing about how an engine works? Certainly time (as always) is the enemy, but unless we write with our students, unless they recognize us as practitioners of the craft we profess to know, how can we expect them to value writing as a way of thinking, learning, and making sense of the world?

[Dan Smith]

I really don't think this article did a very good job of outlining the problems or the cures for teaching writing. I found the examples to be too general to guide specific improvements.
As a high school principal, I believe the entire staff has a responsibility to teach writing skills in the context of their subject. The burden just doesn't fall to the English teachers.

[FH]

As a teacher, my students read and studied an array of literary genres by exemplary writers. We then used these as models for numerous writing activities. Over a period of several years, we developed a group of readers and writers.As an administrator, I have observed teachers with minimal knowledge and skills related to the teaching of reading and writing. With so much time taken up with test prep for NCLB, the opportunities to model for teachers have declined. Children need good role models and teachers need professional development to acquire or enhance their teaching skills. Children can and will learn when lessons engage and challenge them.

[Bart Smith]

About the time the Tibbetts were crossing America, authors Brooks and Warren(1979) wrote that writing meant thinking and that rhetoric was the art of using language effectively. As a teacher and director (retired) I spent most of my career teaching the thinking skills and rhetorical patterns behind the writing of fiction and essays. Yes we should be exploring the art of the essay with elementary students, but as educators we have to sell it. Too often I encountered, either through experience or my own daughters' high school tribulations, the stand-alone essay assignment, the yearly topic sentence review, and many (not all) language teachers who were poorly read or there by default. To speak properly is to think properly. To write well is to think well. Effective use of the language? Yes, I agree with the Tibbetts.

[Dr. Marybeth Peebles]

Like other respondents, I am dismayed by the lack of English skills, particularly in speaking, displayed by English teachers themselves. Verb forms (e.g. I seen it), pronoun cases (e.g. Me and her are going shopping.), subject-verb agreement (e.g. We was all there.), and double negatives (e.g. I don't want none of that) are just a few of the utterances I've heard my English teaching colleagues use. If writing mirrors the way we speak, and we speak the way we think, then I think English teachers-in-training should demonstrate proficiency is speaking as well as in writing as part of the requirements for licensure as an English teacher at the middle or high school level.

[Thesis Writing]

nice information.. thanks for sharing with us.