Writing

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Who Taught this Kid?

The surprisingly reflective article in today’s New York Times (“Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers,” December 27, 2010) asks a question that statisticians often overlook in the evaluation of teachers.  Who taught this kid?

John White, Deputy Chancellor of the New York City Schools, addressed the problem of teachers getting ranked on subjects they did not teach or being omitted from the rankings altogether. This is more of an institutional problem, but it raises the more consequential issue of how to determine whether a teacher has been truly responsible for a student’s learning.

Mr. White reassured the Times that “before the next rankings was released, teachers would be able to review class lists to verify which students they taught, a practice that generally did not happen in the past” (A13).   But a more complex question that I rarely hear addressed by statisticians is: How many school days should a student be in class before he or she  can be considered a student of that teacher?   Is 90 out of 180 days enough?  70 out of 180? 50 days?

In city secondary schools this is not an academic question.  I can not cite individual attendance records for New York City schools, but 50% or lower attendance would not be irregular in an urban high school.  Should a teacher’s effectiveness be judged from the performance of a student who is present less than half the time?

Statisticians always assume that variables like school attendance will even out, if a large population is studied. Everyone will have attendance issues in their classes. But school attendance closely correlates with the socioeconomic status of secondary school students, because poverty often affects how much students have to work or baby-sit for caretakers who have to work.  So, unless each class has a random distribution of students from various socioeconomic classes, their rate of attendance will not be randomly distributed.

Every teacher knows which classes in a school will present attendance or behavior problems, and they will use every device in their repertoire to avoid teaching them. But someone will teach them, and they will be challenged by the discontinuity of learning and wearied by the endless make-up sessions that absent students demand.  They will work harder with less results, and they will be judged inferior for the test performance of students who were not in school enough days to really learn their subject.

As a writing teacher, I’ve been acutely aware of what happens to a student who does not attend school for ten consecutive days.  Consistent with good writing pedagogy, I might assign a major writing assignment over two weeks, allowing students time for brainstorming, drafting, conferencing with peers and instructor, proofreading and final publication.  Writing teachers understand that critical instruction, including grammar lessons, takes place in the midst of this process. Students learn very little from the final draft, returned with dozens of red marks and a “D.”  They learn about as much as a traffic officer learns from the wreck of an accident after the fact.

If a student misses five out of the ten days that a writing assignment was in progress, he or she will probably miss the critical instruction that occurs during the process.  It is not a question of grabbing the assignment sheet and catching up at home.  It is a question of producing a draft and getting appropriate feedback before it is ultimately due and graded.  It is a question of understanding why the writing that received a “B” last year can not qualify for a “C” this year.  It is a question of how to address a sentence structure problem that has persisted for four years, without sitting down with that student for fifteen minutes before the final draft is due. This is why you can hardly teach a student with marginal literacy, when he or she is absent 50% or more of the school year.

I’m sure teachers of other subjects, for which learning is a seamless process, could testify to this problem. I wouldn’t presume to speak for them, but I am sure that discontinuity of learning is a problem across subjects.

People who administer schools seem to have forgotten that when learning is interrupted, it is very difficult to grab the threads again when the absent student returns to school.  Your heart sinks when a student returns from a two-week absence and asks at the beginning of class, “What did I miss?”  Then you tell the student he or she will have to return at the end of school to catch up on missed work, and the student forlornly reports, ” I have to go home to babysit for my mom. She works the afternoon shift at the hospital.”  So you hand the student the assignment and steal a few minutes during class for a briefing that took twenty minutes one day of class and five minutes follow-up each day of the process. Only this students gets two minutes.

Not to get too sentimental about disadvantaged students, this vignette serves to show the impact of attendance on learning. The fewer days students attend your class, the less impact you will have you their learning. Sounds logical enough, but where is that considered in the byzantine complexity of value-added assessment? How do we decide who, if anyone,  taught this kid?

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Saying What I Mean

It was on July 14 that I launched a campaign to proclaim “the democratization of writing.” I sorely regret it.  Not the campaign, the “democratization.” That is an arid, scaly, bureaucratic word that discredits the glory of “Everybody can write!”

Recanting deserves more than a paragraph, because this coinage (“democratization”) is an example of the language that the public abhors or should abhor.  E.B. White, one of my stylistic heroes, warned me sternly about applying the “-ize” suffix in the “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” chapter of Elements of Style.

Never tack ize onto a noun to create a verb. Usually you will discover that a useful verb already exists. Why say “moisturize” when there is a simple unpretentious word “moisten”? (50-51)

White was not always right, but on this I think he nailed it.  Writers have a wanton attraction to bombast, and they are well-served by E.B. White or some trusted reader, who can advise them when they are lifting off from the solid ground of meaning into the gust of affectation.  Even that sentence was a stylistic leap that might bear scrutiny.

But my concern today is “democratization.” No word that begins with “demo-” (people) should end with “-ize.” If I were annotating White’s famous style book, I would add that admonition.  For the same reason I would not advocate “humanizing” anyone, although the word “dehumanizing” sounds just right.

Instead I searched for a natural metaphor for the recruiting of more writers into the realm of literacy, and I came up with the word “saturation.” Websters Unabridged defines “saturation” as “soaked, impregnated or imbued thoroughly; charged thoroughly or completely; brought to a state of saturation.”   This sounds more like a completed process than a goal for literacy, but I like the image of one substance being full of another. We begin in the realm of literacy, but we wish to populate it more and more with readers who identify themselves as writers.  It would not be enough to “infiltrate” this realm of literacy. No it must be “saturated.”

So allow me the writer’s privilege of revising my campaign, calling it the “saturation” of writing in the realm of literacy. I welcome reader participation in the coining of terms for this campaign, because it is, after all, a popular movement to give writing it due place.  Perhaps this is what I mean, but not what we mean.  I would be mindful of that.

So this is much ado about meaning, and I promise not to make a habit of it. But I felt some repentance was called for, especially since I think writing and meaning should be soul-mates. Writing is  often a prodigal child (in more ways than one) and needs to return home to the welcome of meaning at every opportunity.

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Days of Our Reading and Writing (continued)

In our last episode we left reading and writing in the plight of many marriages: can’t live with them and can’t live without them.  We saw that many who call themselves “readers” resist the name of “writer,” but that the writer enriches the life of the reader. Thus, the question persists: Can this marriage be saved?

Many adults, who would be humiliated to confess they could not read, might freely admit they could not write.  And not because they couldn’t fill out a traffic accident report, but because they could not write with flair and conviction and grammatical precision. Such writing would be for the chosen few. On the other hand, to read meant to understand important information and to live a fulfilled life. The option of not reading at all would be unthinkable.

In contrast, writing has always been attributed to professionals whose living depended on writing. The writing process was considered mysterious.  Grammar and style were viewed as arcane subjects best left to experts.  Probably the most memorable declaration of the ground-breaking reform document The Neglected “R” was “Writing today is not a frill for the few, but an essential skill for the many” (11).  That was a consequential pronouncement.

Recognizing that our jobs often required a different kind of reading than our personal lives, theorists combined the many forms of literacy in the term “lifelong literacy,” with the goal of reading to become “lifelong readers.”  Reading has played so many roles on the stage of life, that to confine it to functional literacy, critical literacy or personal growth missed the point.  Reading was pervasive, and the way we read shifted relentlessly in the kaleidoscope of 21st century literacy.

A lifelong reader understands that reading impinges on every moment of living, from reading the side effects of the pill taken after breakfast to deciphering the manual for a new cell phone to reading a favorite political writer in the online edition of the newspaper.   Reading pervades life and has become indispensable in a literate culture.

In contrast, writing has been regarded as a skill of the workplace. Even the groundbreaking The Neglected “R” and its successors described writing in its public roles: in school, in business, and in government. These reports raised the profile of writing as a tool of productivity, but not as an essential  part of living. Reading has continued to overshadow writing in the realm of “lifelong literacy.”

Why should we care whether writing is number one or number two or equal in significance to reading? Primarily because reading and writing are less efficient as singles than as a couple. It is a little like consumption and production in the economies of life. One must offset the other. Or to return to the competitive and noncompetitive sports analogy (see yesterday’s blog), we have to nurture both kinds of urges, the competitive and the noncompetitive, and not let one overwhelm the other. So, if we are planning to be lifelong readers, we should also put lifelong writing on the agenda.

To gain “lifelong” status, writing has to be acknowledged as pervasive and self-fulfilling in the same way reading has been.  More than for its art and for making transactions, writing has to make a case for enriching the lives of literate people in the same way reading makes this claim.  Traditionally writing has not taken this central position in life, unless in the lives of writing teachers. And writing teachers struggle to sell this image of the “lifelong writer” to their students.

According to Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (Guiding Readers and Writers, Heinemann 2001), lifelong writers exhibit certain social and personal characteristics:

  • Writers write voluntarily and often
  • Write in a wide variety of genres
  • Have confidence in themselves as writers
  • Present themselves as writers to others
  • Use writing as a tool for thinking
  • Write to communicate on personal and professional levels
  • Write to share experiences or information with others
  • Are sensitive to other writers, noticing techniques and styles
  • Invite comments on, responses to, and critiques of their writing
  • Draw on literary knowledge as a resource for their writing
  • Use  organized sets of information as a resource for their writing
  • Explore favorite topics and genres

Starting with “Write voluntarily and often,” these characteristics suggest daily living outside of the workplace, and such traits as “communicating,””sharing,” and “exploring” suggest self-fulfillment rather than productivity. Although these traits are integral to many K-12 school curricula, it would be overstating their importance to say they pervade the lives of average citizens. Becoming a lifelong writer is hardly a shared value of literate citizens in the United States. Me, a writer? Are you kidding?

So, as we leave the aging couple, lifelong reader and lifelong writer, we see that one (the reader) is much more prepared for retirement than the other (the writer).  The writer is infatuated with productivity and his or her role in the workplace, while the reader believes that reading is a continuous, pervasive activity from workplace to self-fulfilling recreation.  This is not merely an issue for retirement, but an issue of balance and compatibility. The question persists for another day of our lives: Can this marriage be saved?

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Reading and Writing: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Are Readers from Venus and Writers from Mars?

As a teacher of future secondary English teachers, I am always struck by the many  future teachers who proclaim themselves readers, but not writers, especially writing they call “creative.”  It is just this distinction that has inspired many reform documents, such as The Neglected R, to recommend that “Statewide policy and standards should require that teacher preparation programs provide all prospective teachers with exposure to writing theory and practice” and to “provide support for multiple workshops and other opportunities that encourage teachers already in the classroom to upgrade their writing skills and competence as writing teachers” (26).

Considering that English Language Arts is defined as the integration of reading, writing, speaking, listening and viewing, it is surprising how many English teachers identify themselves as readers, but not writers.  Writing teachers should be writers, just as reading and literature teachers are readers, but in reality, not so much. Why should this be? I would  venture an explanation with the analogy of competitive and non-competitive sports.

First, obviously competition is a function of individuals, more than sports. There are some who could make a competition out of coin flipping (you know who you are) and some who can play basketball without keeping score (not even in your head).  So, these are admittedly crude analogies.

Reading is like a non-competitive sport, such as jogging or biking or swimming. There are many readers who receive intrinsic pleasure from the act itself and enjoy sharing their experiences with a few trusted friends, especially readers of the same genres, such as mystery, romance, sports, or political expose.  We can choose to count the books we have read and choose to share with opinionated types, but we could be content just to read and not expose ourselves to the competition.  This is not to say there aren’t plenty of competitive readers, but we don’t have to talk to them.

Writing is like a competitive sport, such as soccer, basketball, or tennis. You play to keep score and you declare winners and losers.  The competition arises from committing your own words to print and allowing indiscriminate readers to review them.  You can protect your privacy and receive personal satisfaction like Emily Dickinson, but generally writers like to be read. If no one is reading them, their motivation wanes. Yet if critical readers vivisect their writing, it can be just as destructive to their motivation, and reading writing reflexively calls for criticism.

You might think, when I say “critical readers,” I am alluding to professional critics of writing (teachers, editors, reviewers); they are indeed a fearsome audience for a writer. But the imminent danger for writers comes from friends, family and fellow students, people we thought we could trust.  Those we trust with our writing can be most critical, merely because they have been raised in a culture where writing is described by its deficiencies.  (Q. What do you think of this poem, Mom?  A. Very nice, but did you know you misspelled “sincere”?) Writing is perceived as a competitive sport and to excel, we must constantly be reminded of our weaknesses. When we remind writers of their weaknesses, we also exert some temporary power over them.

Reading, therefore attracts both the competitive and non-competitive in the realm of literacy, but writing tends to attract those who believe they have a competitive advantage and can escape the most scathing criticism.  The upshot is that most of my pre-service English teachers declare themselves readers, while many declare themselves writers of only the most formulaic texts. Everything else they label “creative writing,” as if outlining the perimeter of an abyss.

So our history records that all literacy is divided into two parts: reading teachers and writing teachers.  Research continues to report this as a tragic mistake for teaching and learning. Most recently a report from the Carnegie Corporation “Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading” (Steve Graham and Michael Hebert, 2010) validates ways in which writing about a text could increase comprehension gains on standardized tests.

So all evidence indicates that reading and writing should be intimate partners, in spite of the incompatibilities of their proponents.  Like all marriages, this one can be saved only if the spouses learn to respect the virtues of the other partner.  And like most marriages, it may thrive more without intense competition. Writing, in particular, needs to appropriate the non-competitive culture of reading.

What will this mean for our conversations about writing and how we treat writers? Stay tuned.

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Everybody Can Write (Amen)

It’s time to quiet the ranting demon and  invoke the affirming spirit of educational reform: the democratization of writing.  We will invoke the spirit with the creed “Everybody can write.”   If there is a church where this creed is reliably practiced it is The National Writing Project, a professional development network of teachers of writing that holds summer tent-meetings (actually “summer institutes” in  air-conditioned settings) for its followers, called “teacher consultants.” Since launching itself from the imagination of James Gray in 1974, the NWP has begun its Summer Invitational Institutes with the invocation: “teachers of writing should be writers.” And that mantra has persistently inspired the faithful for thirty-six years of devotion to the profession of teaching writing (http://nwp.org).

The vertical axis of educational reform is the better-known and better-funded “Standards Reform,” led by think tanks like Achieve, Inc., foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and political coalitions like the National Governors’ Associations and the Council of Chief State School Officers. You can follow their work in the current edition of the “Common Core State Standards,” which claims to be “evidence-based,”  “aligned with college and work expectations,” “rigorous,” and “internationally benchmarked.”  You can also read a cogent and critical analysis of the work of the vertical axis over the last twenty years in Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books, 2010). I leave that in Dr. Ravitch’s very capable hands.

But the  gospel of the horizontal axis of educational reform should be proclaimed. It is an under-funded and under-publicized axis that has just begun to get traction. It begins with the origin tale of the National Writing Project (Teachers at the Center, James Gray, National Writing Project, 2000); continues in the eloquent preaching of Peter Elbow, his sermons compiled in the incomparable Everybody Can Write (Oxford University Press, 2000); it collects the epistles of its followers in the National Conversation on Writing (http://ncow.org/site/), and currently celebrates their contributions in the National Day on Writing ( http://www.ncte.org/dayonwriting), the second annual on October 20, 2010.  All of these prophets and evangelists deserve personal attention and will receive it in upcoming blogs.

You might think that “Everybody can write” would be a popular creed, but it is hardly a cultural norm . If you Google “Everybody can write” you will find lots of offers to make you a writer, including a company in the United Kingdom called “Rewrite,” which makes your miserable prose acceptable. If you are embarrassed by your writing or your employees’ writing, “The answer: put your message directly into the hands of the specialist yourself.” (http://www.rewrite.co.uk/).  This message corresponds to the memorable headline “Why Johnny Can’t Write” and other alarms that ring through the media.

So the gospel message that “Everybody can write” is not embraced by many, as the National Conversation on Writing has observed: “Public discussions about writing and writers rarely focus on the reading and writing that real people do every day. From essays for school to text messages, from grocery lists to business memos, everyone is a writer”(http://ncow.org/site/)

For the immediate future, let this gospel of the democratization of writing be proclaimed, Amen!

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We Interrupt this Writing Process . . .

Pay attention, educators.  Here are some verbs from our drafted National Standards that describe what writers should do to be “college- and career-ready:”

make an argument, inform, explain, represent, synthesize, convey, make claims, link claims and evidence, and produce high-quality text the first time.

We have trafficked in literacy standards long enough to know what these verbs foreshadow.  They foreshadow a highly-structured, rigidly-sequenced curriculum that features the kinds of writing privileged by college admissions tests for the past half-century.  They foreshadow the demise of personal and reflective writing. They foreshadow the repossession of genres, media, and styles that do not match the legal and corporate purposes of writing.  They foreshadow the revocation of ownership, passion, and reflection that inspires authors to do their best work.

Now here are some nouns which apparently do not apply to writing for  “college-and career-readiness” and which you will not find in the draft of “Standards for Reading, Writing and Communication:”

genre, voice, irony, code-switching, reflection, process, transfer, meta-cognition,  self-evaluation, and portfolio.

Mind you, this is only a draft of the Standards, so we accept that it is not an example of “producing high quality text the first time under a tight deadline.” According to this document, writers “frequently” engage in this kind of “writing on- demand.”  This draft of National Standards represents one of those rare occasions when writers “have the opportunity to take a piece of writing through multiple drafts, receiving feedback along the way, successfully polishing and refining the text.”  Moreover, someone has interrupted the writing process of these Standards, and we now are allowed to evaluate their unfinished work.  Probably the writers of the Standards would have gladly avoided the hassle of  “receiving feedback along the way,” but they also might have wished for more time to consider this freighted language about how all graduates of high schools in the United States should write. Their work has been published before they were finished. There might be poetic justice in this.

In this document, narrative writing actually has its own sidebar. Rather than an honorable distinction, it appears to be a disclaimer about the diminished importance of narrative.  While giving it credit for “faithfully describing the steps in a scientific process,” the sidebar also characterizes narrative as a “principal steppingstone to writing forms directly relevant to college and career readiness.”   The role of “steppingstone” lacks the dignity that we might accord to some forms of narrative, such as eyewitness testimony, college admissions essays, and the narrative background for proposing national standards. Narrative deserves better than a sidebar.

Why are these nouns, from “genre” to “portfolio,” absent from national standards, when they overpopulate the curricula of first-year writing programs in our nation’s colleges?  Why are words synonymous with “thinking” excluded from literacy standards? Their omission is no oversight or exclusion for lack of space. These words represent the leisure of pre-writing, the power to select (topics, genres and formality of language), the luxury of process and self-evaluation, and the dignity of explaining what you have written.  Once the domain of writing is allowed to expand beyond the “on-demand” kind, our testing instruments become expensive and time-consuming.  No one will say this openly, but Standards may only represent what we can conveniently and economically test.
If you follow the work of Achieve, Inc. for the last twelve years, you will find their fingerprints all over this document.  Through the auspices of the National Governors’ Association they have become the arbiters of state requirements, until 46 states have subscribed to their college- and career-ready standards.  When they examine each state’s standards they claim to have benchmarks created by academic and corporate experts, but the ultimate criteria are whether their standards are testable. The critical question they ask of all state standards is “How clear, specific, and measurable?”

When standards are created to be measurable, they become reductive.  Not that standards should not be measured, but measurement entails efficiency and efficiency implies reduction. Hence the jettisoning of the writing process. Hence the neglect of genre study.  Hence the absence of reflection, meta-cognition, and self-evaluation.  Hence the  demotion of  narrative writing, a mode of expression with messy boundaries.

If we have intruded on the writing process for these Standards, then it is not a moment too soon.  They are not mere standards, but blueprints for national testing.  They are an emerging national curriculum, a criterion for funding, a pretext for punishment, and the subversion of effective teaching of literacy. On the pretense of raising the bar, the designers are erecting a guillotine. No one should doubt from the content and structure of these Standards that they are for execution, not for a benign “race to the top.”

This writing process for National Standards badly needs the feedback and revision it would deny to high school writers in the “on-demand” environment. For those who designed the draft we are seeing now, it would be a process well-learned.

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Death of the Apostrophe

Bravo to the Mayor of Birmingham, England, who recently decreed that apostrophes will be banned from local signs.  This follows too many Birmingham City Council debates about the proper and improper application of our most confused punctuation practice: the apostrophe to denote possession.  No longer will council members and sign painters  debate the need for the flying comma before or after the “s.”   Naturally the nation’s language purists are up in arms.

In an article posted on MSNBC a popular British grammarian is cited. In her best-selling book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy “Two Weeks Notice,” insisting it should be “Two Weeks’ Notice.” “Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended,” she wrote.

When grammar commentators argue on the basis of the tradition or elegance of some rule or usage, we know it has outlived its usefulness.  I don’t hear one complaint that omitting the apostrophe will cause confusion, because we already know that an ”  ‘s” sounds just like an “s” when we converse. Never have I been asked when I spoke the word “its” or ” it’s” whether I referred to the one with an apostrophe or the one without. Why? Because the meaning is conveyed by the context. We depend on the meaning of the sentence to settle any ambiguity.

Those who insist on conserving punctuation practices and quaint prohibitions like the split infinitive are usually those who have more or less mastered the rule in question. They realize that if the rule no longer applies, then some arcane knowledge they have mastered will be useless. And the power they felt by applying that rule confidently will be dissipated. In other words, they will have fewer reasons to be smug.

Most European languages have flourished without an apostrophe. The “s” functions very comfortably as plural and possessive. The native speaker of English is disconcerted at first, finding no redundant apostrophes to complicate a foreign language, but soon it becomes a pleasure to read without the tiny obstruction between letters.

I’ll concede one ulterior motive to the extermination of the possessive apostrophe, and that is the burden of circling it in my students’ writing.  It is astonishing how many otherwise brilliant writers may be genuinely confused by the distinction between simple plurals and possessives. And this is the final reason why the apostrophe as possessive should be unemployed. Many intelligent people find them extraneous to their education. Rather than argue that point, I have joined the selectively literate masses, who find no significance in a tiny mark that has often been confused with a speck of dust or an imperfection in the paper.

If a speck can be a punctuation mark, then imagine the importance of the merest ink smudge or a ragged margin?  I’d rather take a little cosmetic license and ignore them all.

The entire article from MSNBC is posted at

http://neologophilia.pbwiki.com/Literacy-in-the-News