From pericles@astro.ocis.temple.edu Sun Sep 19 00:12:21 1999 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.08) with ESMTP id AAA42466 for ; Sun, 19 Sep 1999 00:12:17 -0700 Received: from typhoon.ocis.temple.edu (pericles@typhoon.ocis.temple.edu [155.247.166.103]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.08) with ESMTP id AAA02837 for ; Sun, 19 Sep 1999 00:12:16 -0700 Received: from localhost (pericles@localhost) by typhoon.ocis.temple.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id DAA11479 for ; Sun, 19 Sep 1999 03:12:03 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 03:12:03 -0400 (EDT) From: "Daniel P. Tompkins" X-Sender: pericles@typhoon.ocis.temple.edu To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: English teaching In-Reply-To: <199909181418.XAA07953@hma.att.ne.jp> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Thanks to Steve for his note. I'll try to hit some more high points, though secretly I'd rather be reading about the Vuelta a Espana now in progress, where the terrifying hills, competitive stages, individual and team performances, and dreadful weather, plus the apparent incompetence of the organizers, make the tour de France more or less a day at the beach (though it was thrilling in its own way). On Sat, 18 Sep 1999, Steven J. Willett wrote: > > On 18 Sep 99, at 8:20, Daniel p. Tompkins wrote: > > > If English teachers "can't learn" to use > > dictionaries in class or whatever complaint we have, that is > > in part our fault, because we college faculty never modeled > > this activity for them. ... > > Much as I'm sympathetic to Dan's premise--that the > problem is not personal but systemic--this does not make > much sense to me. > > 1. We know perfectly well how to teach writing, and it was > taught quite well all the way through the early 60s. ... > We were taught by simple and > time-tested methods that included (a) reading a lot ... >(b) taking dictation, (c) writing essay exams, > (d) learning the techniques of sentence variety, > paragraphing and logic, (e) practicing rhetoric, > (f) memorizing set passages and (g) reciting from > memory. Sounds pretty good to me. I'm not sure what the record of success was, though. One feature of education in Steve's youth no longer obtains: then, the failures could count on factory jobs. Now they can't. It is now necessary to teach as many students as possible to handle complex writing, thinking, and figuring, since the pockets of employability for those who can't think and write are smaller and smaller. > 2. colleges of education...cause of failure. They don't need more money--especially > if they're cash cows--only some diversion of funds (and I'd > like to see the evidence that many teacher trainees are > being effectively defrauded of their tuition). If they are being taught in large classes by adjuncts, they're missing out on a lot. More on colleges of education at the end. > They do need > a dose or rigor and reality. Finally, high standards for > teacher training are the prerogative of the schools of > education themselves, more their shame, so point the > finger there please. Let them heal themselves, or take > down their shingle. Who has trumpeted their certainties to > the world more than the mob of deweyists. One cannot > pussyfoot around the stark ethical failings of the schools > of education. yes, schools of ed have to set high standards. Some of them are raising standards as we speak. One of my points about cash cows was that as long as schools of ed generated income for a university administrators looked the other way when "standards" were mentioned. Gradually--too gradually--they are recognizing the importance of content knowledge. Building real training in a discipline into teacher training is not going to be easy (at least in the standard four years), and it is going to take very close collaboration between liberal arts and education faculty. I hope we will see a period of empirical testing of what balance of education and liberal arts works best. If a student goes to university and takes math with a teacher who writes formulas on the board and never works with the class, takes English from someone who prattles endlessly about some hobbyhorse without engaging a class iin sustained critique of writing, he or she will go into teaching emulating those behaviors. We are the teachers of math, English, language: future teachers take the majority of their college courses with us (omitting states where no BA in education is given). The shaping of the future teacher is as much our responsibility as anyone's, and I hope it becomes more so. I don't want to blow up colleges of education. I do want to create structures in which these colleges work together with liberal arts and others to produce good teachers. > 3. Universities can only do so much to rectify the > problem. English departments do not have a mandate to > train secondary school teachers. See above. "Mandate" puts it too starkly: English departments bear considerable responsibility for the quality of English teachers a university produces. At my institution, I recently brought together teacher educators from Ed. with English faculty. These people had been training future English teachers for twenty years. They had never met. They had never sat down together to discuss the progress of an aspiring teacher. It is not "Deweyan" (see below) to deplore this lack of coordination in professional education. > It would still be possible for educationalists to train > good teachers of reading and composition if the whole > celebrated Brook's taxonomy and all that has followed it > were thrown out and the old methods reintroduced through > the secondary system. That will not happen, and failure > will continue unabated when almost every culture I know > finds it fairy easy to teach the basics of reading and > writing. I think Steve means Bloom's taxonomy, and I don't understand the problem with it: it is not much more than Plato's line. > > > Until we change the system, getting a truly coordinated K16 > > progression and making teacher training as important as > > anything else, we're going to be stuck in this cycle. > > This is the perennial panacea of the educationalists. Just > change the system and next year, next decade, next ... > and all will be well. ... I have no illusions that all will be well. My colleague Lawrence Steinberg gets a huge amount of press for his demonstrations of the negative effects of peer groups, teen-age employment, familial neglect, etc. on student performance in schools. His subtitle is "Why School Reform Has Failed." Has it? In many ways, and Steinberg's work invites a sort of fatalism. Must it? No. The examples of student improvement under the right conditions abound (the Tennessee class size study showed that reduction in class size helped everyone, but especially students in inner city schools. I mentioned other examples in my last post.) It is clear that a concerted approach is needed, both in teacher training and in organizing the schools' relationship with parents, etc. > > Looking around your universities, ask this: is the sequence > > of writing courses students take, from Comp. through a > > senior paper, coordinated? ... > > 4. Most students cannot learn to write at university. It's > far too late, and elementary writing classes have > absolutely no place there. "Learning to write" is not a binary thing. We are always learning to write better, and a huge amoutn happens at university. I did not begin to write decently until I reached graduate school. So yes, the sequence of writing instruction at the university level is critical. > > 5. Since Dan will almost surely retort with the benefits of > remedial education, let me add that research into its > effectiveness is all against him. Already answered. > > Dan apologized in public quite unnecessarily because, I > suspect, some of his flabbier colleagues in the educational > field wrote him privately with distress about his candid > comments. My educational colleagues -the ones I work with--are as tough as we are. But the imagined communications are merely imaginary. I apologized because I'd been unnecessarily sarcastic in expressing disagreement with Elias. Now: colleges of education. These are the units that train most American teachers, whether as BAs or at the post-graduate level. They have two tasks: a) to fit into the American university by emulating the research model of liberal arts colleges, and b) to train professionals to go forth into the world. a) and b) don't always sit easily together. Some of what they do under b) is absolutely essential: ask a Philadelphia principal what he/she most wants in an incoming teacher and the answer will likely be, "classroom management skills": not just discipline but the ability to keep every student focused on learning. At the middle school level, knowledge of adolescent psychology is important, and so on. One of the things that most impresses me in our college of ed. is the placement and supervision of student teachers: the guy who runs this is dedicated and seems to work seven days a week. There is a growing literature on teacher training; some of the best general stuff is by Linda Darling-Hammond, now at Stanford. It's important. It is half of what a teacher needs (or part): the other half is real content knowledge, too long scanted. Myself, I think it is time for folks like us to get assertive about working with the ed. people to produce the best possible teachers. We have a lot to contribute; if we walk away from this task we'll have a lot to be sorry about. Dan .