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They write poorly, their reading levels are way below where they should be and they speak just as poorly.
But..as long as they pass the state test then all is good.
I'm focused on trying to understand why things are that way and what we can do to improve them.
I'm focused on trying to understand why things are that way and what we can do to improve them.
I try to stay positive and constructive.
In his book Joining the Literacy Club, Frank Smith posits that people don't learn writing by writing--they learn to be good writers by reading. It is the repeated exposure to authentic written language that gives people the patterns that they need in order to lay the foundations for explicit writing instruction. That's one reason that I think psikeyhacker's idea of a national reading list isn't such a bad idea. In fact, that is what E. D. Hirsch tried to do with his Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, which I kept for years in my classroom before donating it to a student who would spend class time perusing it after finishing his assignments. Mortimer J. Adler created his Great Books program as a similar push to provide a common body of knowledge for readers. One of my favorite books was his How to Read a Book. If we could teach that book to students in middle school, they would get so much more out of their secondary school experience.
From my own personal experience, I found that as a high-school student, I had no trouble with formal grammar and writing instruction, primarily because I had been an inveterate bookworm from the age of four. I literally spent hours with our family's World Book encyclopedias, and I devoured the Reader's Digest in one day when it arrived every month. By the time I was ten, I had read nearly everything of interest in the children's side of the public library, and I began with adult science fiction. That was where I not only learned the patterns of written language, but I also learned more science than I ever learned in school, where I was not required to take a lab science beyond biology.
In my opinion, the biggest mistake that we are making with our children academically is that we are failing to ensure that all children arrive at school with common experiences that form the foundation for our schooling. Part of that is experiential, as I believe that all children should visit a zoo, a museum, an amusement park, a farm, a beach, etc. To provide all that to children would be problematic and unrealistic. However, providing common reading experiences is very doable and would aid enormously in providing students with an advanced vocabulary and hours of exposure to formal language patterns. I believe that the narrowing of the curriculum to the kinds of passages that are found on the state tests has actually had a counterproductive result, limiting students to a very narrow focus of test-related excerpts that don't really provide the same kind of exposure that traditional children's literature does.
I'm focused on trying to understand why things are that way and what we can do to improve them.
I try to stay positive and constructive.
Because the powers that be are idiots.
We HAVE the ability to track individual students through the system and look at things like average and overall increases from year to year. Yet we insist on looking only at the bottom. The level of the average reader, in a grade level, is irrelevent. All that matters is that number who don't meet the minimum. So, all the effort goes to the bottom of the class while the rest languish. We frustrate the bottom by trying to push them to levels that they cannot achieve while we frustrate the top because they cannot move up because we're too busy dredging the bottom and we're denying the middle exposure to more difficult material that while they may not get it they could benefit from seeing.
I answered the call to put subject matter experts in the classroom and raise the bar on education only to find we've lowered the bar. I'm a pole vaulter who has a job doing the limbo. As long as we focus on the bottom of the class, we do not need or want subject matter experts. We want entertainers and motivational experts who can get the bottom engaged in some way while entertaining the top enough that they won't complain about being bored.
If we want to change education, we need to changed the definition of raising the bar to really raising the bar. Right now the definition is that all kids take classes like chemistry and algebra II and all kids pass. What do you think happened to the bar when they started putting kids in those classes who never used to take those classes? It went DOWN, however, that doesn't matter because more kids now meet the minimum standard (which is dismal) so, in the eyes of the government we've improved things.
I'm starting to think that education is about making everyone the same. We can't make the bottom smart but we sure can deny the top an education so it looks like there's no gap.
My dd's high school, BTW, is a focus school because there is too much gap between the top and bottom performers. Personally, I'm ok with that. It shows me they're actually teaching the top (it's a naturally tracked system with kids choosing the classes they want at the level they want). They had to allow any student who wanted to leave to move to a better school (I don't know of any who did because most parents know the score here and that we'd have FAR MORE of an issue if there was no gap because the easiest way to get rid fo the gap is stop teaching the top.) and now programs are being put in place to pull up the bottom. I just pray that is not done at the expense of the top.
Test scores (using % passing anyway) have us, focused on the bottom with a microscope while no one cares what the bulk of students do because they already pass the tests and THAT is all that matters.
Tests could be used but they'd need to be tests the student has a vested interest in, such as, common final exams that students are required to pass in order to pass their classes. We could also track the average ability of students as a class as well as the average year over year gains for all students. We have computers that can process data like this. It is moronic to continue to use % meeting the minimum standard as the bechmark. One school can have 90% of kids passing with low passing scores on the test while the next school has 80% passing with high passing scores and the school with the 20% not passing is the one they focus on and demand improvements from. This is stupid.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 05-19-2013 at 02:29 PM..
I was not criticizing Wikipedia as a source. What I was stating was that cutting and pasting a Wikipedia article in total is what many students will do, if they can get away with it. They will have no idea of the content of the article. Most will not use academic journals. There will be no organizing, writing introductory paragraphs or drawing conclusions.
Much of this is also carried over to college. Talk to college professors and you will find that many see that college students are not much better. They typically know better than to cut and paste an entire article but in reality will use Wikipedia as one of their main sources without citing it and include a few citations from academic journals.
One of my college classmates is now a professor of history at our alma mater, a fairly academically rigorous private college with a definite emphasis on writing across the curriculum. When I attended, and when he attended, writing was a huge part of all classes, and unavoidable.
He has noted since he began his tenure on the faculty the serious decline in writing ability in the student body. Just a few minutes ago, he posted the following facebook status update, while grading papers:
"I am utterly dumbfounded that by this point in the semester, students would still turn in papers without a single citation. What grade do they THINK they're going to get?"
It seems like most students/young people have no problem with wallowing in ignorance. They show zero interest in expanding their knowledge.
You'd think that immediate access to vast amounts of information would make people more interested in knowledge, instead it's made them lazier.
You'd think that being able to look up any word instantly instead of having to leaf through dictionaries would make them masters of their language, instead they struggle to understand even basic words.
You'd think having access to all the greatest classics online for free (and a LOT of more modern books through piracy), ready to be read on computers, smartphones, and ereaders, would turn them into avid readers. Instead, they eschew books, treat them as obsolete, and the occasional book they read is crap like Twilight or Fifty shades of gray that will improve neither their writing skills nor their creativity.
They write poorly, their reading levels are way below where they should be and they speak just as poorly.
But..as long as they pass the state test then all is good.
When have teachers tried to find what kids like to read. It was mostly them telling us what we were supposed to like and these were usually the English teachers. None of my science or math teachers ever suggested anything.
I was hooked on sci-fi before I got to high school. English Lit was easy though mostly a bore. Never got complaints about my writing.
The Eng LIt suggested the usual SF, Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and they slipped in the short story by Arthur C. Clarke Rescue Party. I had already read it.
They could tell kids about the free stuff they could read on their tablets:
When have teachers tried to find what kids like to read. It was mostly them telling us what we were supposed to like and these were usually the English teachers. None of my science or math teachers ever suggested anything.
There were the classics we all had to read in class.
But when we went to the library that was our choice to find books.
And I remember teachers encouraging us to take out a few different types of books to see which we liked.
And that was back in elementary school. We didn't have AR back then and were able to check out up to 3 books.
There were the classics we all had to read in class.
But when we went to the library that was our choice to find books.
And I remember teachers encouraging us to take out a few different types of books to see which we liked.
And that was back in elementary school. We didn't have AR back then and were able to check out up to 3 books.
I was told to write 3 book reports during the summer after 3rd grade. I put it off and put it off having no idea what to read. Then I rushed into the library and just grabbed some books at random and wrote reports.
They did not collect the book reports. I was SO ANGRY!!!
But 4th grade was when I discovered science fiction. I expected it to be easy the next summer. They never asked us to do book reports over the summer again. Looking back school was so strange and limited.
Students are a product of their educational system. Crappy system, crappy students. Amazing system, amazing students. Now there are always the students who defy that but it generally holds true. Teachers in public schools teach what's on the test, not what needs to be taught. With school days lasting hours, it's hard to get extra help from your teacher whether they want to give it to you or you want the help. Some teachers care about their students and want them to succeed, while others don't care about anything other than the size of their paycheck. Hell, I didn't even learn the correct way to use a comma until 12th grade. Even then I struggle with them. It's not because I'm stupid, in fact I have a good shot at a 4.0 GPA this semester in college, it's that I never had a quality teacher. I know this is about writing, but I once had a math teacher who spent most of class telling stories or crying about how she didn't have a boyfriend. Most of my English classes were spent reading books, and taking reading quizzes, and writing essays on the books and not actually learning the proper way to write the essay in the first place.
Many educators (high school teachers and college instructors) complain about their students' lackluster writing ability?
Indeed, last year, less than 1/4 of high school seniors proficiently passed a National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test. See here.
Why do you think that so many American students write poorly? Are they not getting sufficient feedback on their writing? Do they not read enough? Do they not know how to do proper research? Are they not writing enough?
And how can we (from a grassroots level) help them improve such skills?
There's a very simple reason. They don't love, or even like to write. They write because assigned, and are told a bunch of strict, unyielding grammar rules (some of which, stupider teachers get wrong, such as that when you have "You and I" it only works if you split the two of them up, making "he and I" at the end of a sentence wrong), and are never shown how to enjoy writing stories, instead focusing on "persuasive essays." Creative writing often isn't creative, because it's judged by the worst teachers, ones that have never tried to write a novel or even a short story.
Have teachers interested and talented in writing, and the enthusiasm will rub off on... well, anyone who isn't taking the course by mandate.
Best approach: Get students to write fanfiction of their favorite book, movie, or show. Because, you know, the world doesn't have a enough fanfiction (being careful to make them aware of pitfalls, like the Mary Sue). But yeah, it would get them interested in writing, and they'd find a real style, rather than just parroting back the Hodges Harbrace Handbook method of writing.
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