Avoiding Linguistic Discrimination

Response to Ellen Cushman's "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change"

The first thing that struck me about Cushman's article is the voice. After three months or so of the rather stiff, traditional academic tone of the readings, it's nice to have a bit of a break. That being said, by the end of the piece I was about sick of the voice. I’m not sure what exactly was irritating to me, but after a while Cushman didn’t strike me as very professional sounding. Ah, well. Minor issue I suppose.

It was good to read about the issue of division between school and community. Her example sounds a bit more extreme than the tension we may see around this area, but I think the separation between educational institutions and community is something that schools should address. If one must exist within the community, good ties to it are certainly necessary. Though the situation of secondary is a little bit different (mostly in that they are, theoretically, part of the community as a whole), some of the same division occurs. Through improved communication and volunteering, who knows? Perhaps the educational world (and its surrounding community) will be a little bit brighter place to be.

Response to Report of the Committee on Composition and Rhetoric – Charles Francis Adams, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, and George R. Nutter (1897)

As I read the report addressed to the Harvard board, I amused by how little some things have changed in the past 110 years. University composition teachers are finding their incoming students woefully unprepared and often blame secondary schools for not doing their job. There are several interesting (and decidedly more intellectual) ideas within the report, but instead I’ll draw your attention to a few quotes that stuck out to me.

“The indications are, however, that the Normal school standard is in this respect unduly low, and that our teachers need themselves to be taught” (106).

Like the other problems that the reports authors address, it’d be nice to think that this has been remedied, but I really don’t think it has. It is a common practice for teachers in my building who are working toward advanced degrees to bring drafts of papers to the English faculty to edit. The amount of train-wreck sentences I see composed by otherwise intelligent people never ceases to amaze me. I am a little leery, though, of the report writers wholeheartedly negative view of teacher preparation in composition. The writing samples included from the normal school sound pretty decent to me (I realize, though, they probably selected some of the better ones for the appendix). It would be interesting to know how many Normal Schools added (or already had) composition classes around the turn of the century.

“The papers filed in [the Lawrence Scientific School] were noticeable inferior in nearly all respects,—thought, neatness of execution, spelling, penmanship and observation,—to the papers in the other courses. They contributed nothing to the general result, and no extracts of them are included in the Appendix” (108).

“For, while the mass of the papers [from all the courses] are, as was of course to be expected, commonplace and monotonous, a few of them contain matter bright, observant, reflective, and at times humorous; and from such the Committee has endeavored to make a selection” (110).

These two quotes (as well as others) make me question the methods of the committee members. I realize that the better papers have more content on which to base analysis of composition education, but it is hard for me to wholly dismiss the Lawrence papers as the authors do. It looks like the writers missed a good opportunity to report on the state of training in technical communication. And who said you can’t learn anything from bad examples? This focus on only the best writers has its point and value, but I’m more curious about those muffled voices.

“School-masters are mortal; and, being mortal, they must have rest from their labors. They cannot work out of hours, as well as in hours” (114). Um…yes, they can. It’s just unpleasant.

“The province of the preparatory schools is to train the scholar, boy or girl, and train him or her thoroughly, in what can only be described as the elements and rudiments of written expression—they should teach facile, clear penmanship, correct spelling, simple grammatical construction, and neat, workmanlike, mechanical execution” (123). Poo. That doesn’t sound very interesting. In fact, to some students it might feel like a mechanical execution of an entirely different sort.

And my personal favorite…

Teaching in secondary school “demands steady, daily drill, and drudgery of a kind most wearisome. Its purpose and aim are not ambitious,—its work is not inspiring” (123). Need I comment on this one?

A Couple Questions...No Answers

I was drawn to the excerpts from Bain and Hill early in the semester as I am interested in the transition from oral to written composition. Since I did not end up presenting on the matter, I'll take this opportunity to explore a couple of the areas I intended to discuss. Bizzell and Herzberg mention that the shift to writing "tended to be a shift from public to private discourse" (1142). This view of writing as a generally private experience is one that persists to this day and can pose a problem in the classroom as it goes against the goal of making communication more public (which seems to be a common theme in teaching). For example, in my Creative Writing classes I want the students to become more comfortable with the idea of people (real people, not just me) reading their work. This is an ongoing battle. Apparently most, if not all, of their past writing experiences have been addressed to themselves or only one other person. Their hesitance is noticeable in a variety of ways - "forgetting" drafts on peer review days, refusing to read work aloud or allowing me to do so, not participating in the class book project, etc. I'm not sure it would help if our academic world were still more saturated in orality, but certainly the problem of private vs. public composition is something worth contemplating.

The work of Hill points to a problem that is seemingly without solution. This is "the conflict between descriptive linguistics and the need to teach usage" (1143). In high school Language Arts classes I remember the prescriptivist drills and was relieved when the concept of descriptive grammar was revealed to me in college. But the fact remains that popular usage isn't always the best language for writing. Or at least formal writing. Or really any writing that has a broader audience in mind than the group of people who understand and use language the same as the writer. I suppose this is somewhat related to the public/private thing. If one is writing for a public audience (whether it's actual publication or just something out of the range of peers), the composition has to be seen by the audience as acceptable. I am certainly not a die-hard supporter of prescriptive grammar only, but do see that there needs to be a line drawn somewhere. I mean, no matter what some things just can't change with common usage. I'm sorry, but I don't think that all of my students who think they are going to "collage" after high school are going to make it. There's just not enough demand for that kind of art. The implications for teaching language, however, I'm still not sure about.

Vico Response

Overall, I thought Giambattista Vico's On the Study Methods of Our Time was a fairly interesting comparison of the differences between the education methods of the two time periods. I was particularly struck by the statement that "young scholars should not be admitted to the study of eloquence unless they had previously studied their way through the whole curriculum of learning" (877). This goes against the educational system I found in college and now the high school in which I teach. At both levels students are encouraged to take public speaking as soon as possible, usually within the first two years of a four year program. At first glance, this seems logical. Not only do students who jump right into Speech class get that graduation requirement out of the way, they also are gaining skills to utilize through the rest of their educational career. From the perspective of the instructor it is in some ways useful to get the younger students. Their attendance is usually better and, quite frankly, it's typically a lot easier to keep younger students in line (this may be true at the college level as well, although I don't know for certain). With reasoning along these lines, I have believed that getting students in Speech earlier was better for the past three years.

Seeing Vico's words and thinking of the students that I currently have in Speech, my position is now shifting. This year, the course itself is 90 minutes long, every other day. There are currently 20 students, although I often have a few more than that. Most of these are ninth-graders, as per recommended by the counselor. With the exception being the first time I ever taught Speech, this class has been a constant struggle. I don't know how many days have ended with me wondering if any of the students draw anything useful from the class (which I feel could be most useful to them). And I'm beginning to think it's because they haven't mastered "the whole curriculum of learning." (Although they could just be yahoos; I'm not completely dismissing that.) Concepts I see as basic are elusive to them, things I assume to be prior knowledge are mysteries, and in all reality they can't handle being in the same room for more than an hour. Silly little kids. In past years, when the upper-class students were extremely rare, it was easy to dismiss it as kids having no appreciation for communication skills. This year, however, I have a handful of juniors and seniors. And they are brilliant. That, of course, is a lie. But they do have a broad base of knowledge from which to work (which does seem to be one of the important things to Vico), but also, and perhaps more importantly, they are closer to that "real life" I keep warning students about. They can actually name possible situations where they may use their newly developed speaking skills and they ask for focused instruction in the specific areas they know are necessary for their future lives.

So, perhaps I am teaching only four or five students last block. Perhaps these are the only few that should actually be there. With any luck we'll all survive and the other yahoos will still have their notes when they grow up enough to realize that I'm not completely full of crap.

The Principles of Letter Writing

The extent of letter-writing, as well as the principles and uses for letters, might have changed a lot over the past few centuries, but it is good to see that some things don't change. For example, I never forget to address letters to my parents with "servitude of filial veneration." They'd never forgive me if I left that out.

On a serious note, though, there are some similarities between letter writing past and present. When I was reading about the overview of the parts of a proper letter I couldn't help but be transported back to that secretarial training known as high school business courses. They might not have been labeled in such a way, but I've certainly written (and responded to) fictitious complaints and inquiries to imaginary companies with letters that had salutations, securing of goodwill, narration, petitions, and conclusions. I didn't know I was that talented. I suppose those experiments with business letter writing (and their real counterparts in actual businesses) don't match the importance of the kinds of letters envisioned by the writer of Principles of Letter-Writing, but the form is the same (or at least not significantly different) nonetheless.

Though I'm still curious about the other four parts, it was amusing to read through the examples of salutations. I am particularly taken with the teacher/pupil examples. I will now anxiously await the day when a student actually writes me a letter. And then I will pretend that instead of saying "Dear Ms. [horrid misspelling of my name]," it instead goes on about my Ciceronian charm. I suppose this shift is just another indicator that the minimum level of respect held by instructors has significantly diminished in the past several centuries. It makes me wonder what expected signs of respect teachers have left. No Ciceronian charm comments, no standing when professors enter the room...it looks as though we're about at rock bottom. I guess we've still got the title/last-name address form...for the moment anyway.

Quintilian's Quest for the Happy Medium

Since I work in the education field, I read the selection from Quintilian with great interest. While some of his ideas don't seem quite as applicable in the 21st century American school system (such as having the best teachers at the youngest ages...I don't know how professors would feel about teaching, say, kindergarten), I think I need to keep Quintilian in mind more as I respond to students' work. Many teachers give students gads of positive comments, while many others lay on the criticism (constructive or otherwise) without drawing attention to the good points of students' work. In our world now filled with scoring guides, some projects are evaluated without a single comment from the instructor. I have been guilty of all of these at times in my career thus far. So, yes, the happy medium. As teachers we need to offer advice on needed improvements, while encouraging students with positive comments. I also like Quintilian's "This is okay for this level" comment to show that the performances will not be acceptable in the future.

The thing with Quintilian's thoughts on the education system is that even though as I was reading I kept thinking, "Yeah, that makes sense..." and "Whoa, that really hasn't changed that much in a couple millenia...", there is the part of me that sees that, like the above example, this is obvious stuff every teacher should intuitively know. And maybe they do. But even for those of us who think we at least occasionally get something right in the classroom, it's good to read a respected ancient reaffirming what I think I know.