It’s time to get back to the basics, whether we like it or not.
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This week I’ve been provoked by a New York Times Op/Ed titled The Fallacy of Balanced Literacy by Alexander Nazaryan, senior writer at Newsweek.
Nazaryan’s eloquent essay recalls his days teaching seventh grade in Flatbush, Brooklyn in the middle of the last decade when he attempted to meet imposed requirements. His students were immigrants and poor, and many of them lacked the necessary language skills to read books like To Kill a Mockingbird or to benefit in any tangible way from the composition of memoirs.
I know exactly the kind of writing Nazaryan means—stories of departed pets or family holidays—exercises that, meant as opportunities for individualistic expression, only reinforce the bad communication habits formed over years of schooling. Students will come having experienced little, if any, instruction in the basics of formal language, and many will have never seen their errors corrected.
New York, it seems, abandoned the methods that led to this kind of instruction, dubbed “balanced literacy”. But now the city is returning to it.
It’s a bad idea and will not improve outcomes. This kind of loose-end, unguided education, especially in gateway or disadvantaged communities, sets a lot of young people back, sometimes irreparably.
I want to explain the particular ways these methods harm boys who grow to be men I teach here at the community college.
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Let me go out on a limb and present a radical theory: if you take someone to a river and say Catch fish now but provide them neither equipment nor instruction, their catch is going to be small.
I’m sure someone will scoff: “Fishing and language are not analogous.” I wish I could take their point quietly without needing to embarrass them.
If you see no analogy between employing a series of tools and techniques while imagining how an animal will behave, what it will desire, in order to experience the animal first hand…if you see no similarity between the necessary patience, the attention to shifts in the wind, resilience to discomfort in cold and rain, the sensitivity to the beauty of a northern Michigan sunset…then…well…
You can’t fish if you don’t know how to use a pole, and you can’t read or write if you don’t know how the language works. Learning how English works takes work, a shitload of it, as our slippery language twists and fights away just when we think we’ve finally landed it. I’m in my early 40’s and read daily. I learn new words all the time, new patterns of phrases to admire.
Here at the community college, I have students, high school graduates, men and women, who have no idea what a phrase is or what makes up a basic declarative sentence. It wouldn’t matter, of course, if their essays about gang violence and dinner at a buffet were insightful and fluent. But they usually fall somewhere between tedious and unreadable, so strained that few people would read beyond the first few lines.
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Generally speaking, young men do not write worse than young women. However, when I have that rare good writer, she tends to be a young woman, and there’s a simple reason. Women are more likely to have a consistent reading habit.
Now, when a young man has a strong reading habit, he will usually also demonstrate good writing skills, and he will almost always share something with the skilled young woman. They will both come from backgrounds where literacy was valued.
What does that mean? It means people read and discussed materials together; they learned to pay attention not just to arguments and “finding the main point” but to phrases, punctuation, individual words, the nuances of syntax, the differences between formal and colloquial language, details like a cat’s tail and the cats’ tails, etc. These things are trivial if we want them to be. What’s certain is they’re not anything we can pick up simply by wading about a river full of fish. It would take an intelligent freak to learn all this stuff without any instruction or correction.
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Many young men I’ve taught have benefited from reading Richard Whitmire’s Why Boys Fail. I leave it on a list of books available as starting points for research projects, and each semester a half-dozen or more men—and also a good portion of moms with sons—will choose it. The book reveals things my Catholic grammar school took for granted, methods studies like this one examine to conclude that “…tutoring models that focus on phonics obtain much better outcomes than [other teaching methods].”
According to Whitmire and others, boys respond particularly well to phonics and phonetic instruction because it turns language into something like a puzzle. Words can be “figured out” instead of “remembered”.
In my experience, I have found that phonics instruction carries over to larger lessons, teaching students to notice patterns not just in individual words but in language as a system. Students who’ve had phonics can tell language is made up of parts within parts, and they’re not shocked to see how subtle changes to patterns—any patterns—can yield profound effects or consequences.
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I have heard many arguments against phonics or other structured instruction of things like grammar and syntax. Some of the critiques mean well—drilling doesn’t work—even when their assumptions—structured instruction equals drilling—are shortsighted.
Other arguments—learning should be joyous, not tedious—sing along the lines of Lucy Calkins whom Nazaryan criticizes in his article. I’m not personally familiar with her, but I think I speak for a large group of composition instructors when I lament: there is no joy for a student with a shortage of skill. If we want students to feel the joy of penning an essay about their family dinners, we’d do well to give them the language skills that turn the experience from a singular release of feelings to actual communication.
After a decade of toiling through trendy teaching method #15 and fancy assessment tool #11, I’ve finally cut the fat from my lessons. A colleague and mentor joins me in a method I first implemented last semester to a decent amount of success.
We’ve essentially become Catholic nuns. We’ll read a few things the students write over the first week of class and then offer a checklist of things s/he needs to learn over sixteen weeks in order to pass. Sometimes it will say things like, “You need to learn when to use commas and periods.”
We offer the possibility for one on one tutoring during office hours, and we present a host of resources, including skills labs. But the bottom line remains: student writing needs to be fluent and they need to be held to a standard. In college, we cannot evaluate (or contrive) how much joy or freedom they feel, not when we’re teaching them to do things like manage fish populations, build bridges or save lives.
Photo by MadebyMark.
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True Community runs each Wednesday. Gint Aras explores his experiences as an instructor in a community college that serves a lower-middle to lower class district in Chicagoland.
Previous True Community articles:
The Young Man With No Guests At Commencement
I Had To Kill A Guy At Work Yesterday
Top 3 Education Myths and How They Affect Men
Very nicely argued and written GintAras. You hit the nail on the head, commas included. I can freely say to anyone who asks, I know THAT grammer school, those nuns that hight school and community college personally and can swear on a stack of bibles that every word you say is true as true can be. Love the picture, it’s a scene stealer. Stay in the front lines of teaching, you might salvage more than one soul from drowning in that fast paced river of future schlock.