August 28, 2008.  Start of the Fall Semester

My night class in English Composition kicked off last night.  I am encouraged because I have an older group than I had last spring, which was one of the worst classes I've had in more than twenty years at the community college.  I'm guessing that the average age is in the mid-twenties, with a handful even older than that.  Students who have been out of school for a while usually have compelling reasons to return and are therefore more motivated than many who have just completed high school.  One 21-year-old said that he was trying to "rebuild my life."  I had to chuckle at the idea of rebuilding at age 21 (he's still building), but I got the message – I've been messing around for a few years; it's time to get serious.  Of course, I realize that some students are still messing around and may continue to do so in my course.

My back-to-basics approach, which I outlined at our first meeting, seemed to have been relatively well-received.  Even those who felt fairly confident about their basic skills conceded that they could benefit from a "refresher."  Whether or not that confidence is well-founded remains to be seen, but I suspect that even some of these individuals are in for a shock.  Everyone took a very fundamental diagnostic quiz last night.  I am positive that it will again do what it is designed to do – to make them aware that they know less than they think they do.  The class average, on a 100-point quiz, was 46; only two students of the thirty who took the test cleared 70 (both with scores of 80).  The midpoint was very close to the average of 46 (it was around 44), suggesting that there were no curve-breakers at either end.  Indeed, exactly a third of the students fell within the pitiful range of 40 to 47½.

I have determined that two-thirds incorrectly believe that one should never begin a sentence with because, and a third believe that spell-check will catch any wrong word that they write.  A third cannot use its and it's correctly, and half are confused about then versus than.  Half think that a sentence must have a subject, verb, and direct object.  (Thus, "I am here in class" must not be a sentence because it has no direct object.) 

Ignorance of parts of speech is rampant.  On a multiple-choice question about the definition of "parts of speech" with two blatantly wrong definitions and one "all of the above" choice, almost two-thirds selected "all of the above," and only two students chose the correct answer.  Asked which of the following is not a part of speech (adverb, predicate, conjunction, interjection), only six students got the right answer (predicate).  A third said that an interjection is not a part of speech, and another third said that none were parts of speech.  Nearly two-thirds thought that a word that modifies a noun is called a pronoun; a third got the right answer (adjective).

Here's an interesting one.  They were asked to identify the preposition in "When Timothy spent several years living among primitive people, he learned to appreciate simple things."  The correct answer is among, and I fully expected many students to select to (although it is used here as part of the infinitive verb, not as a preposition).  They surprised me.  Only three fell for the trap (to).  The most popular wrong answer, selected by nine students (the same number as got the right answer), was when.  Others found these prepositions:  several  (1), living (2), primitive (1), and things (1).  Never mind that it is impossible to use these words as prepositions.  Four were convinced that the sentence had no prepositions.  Message:  About two-thirds of these college freshmen have no idea what a preposition is.

As usual, they are confused about gerunds (understandable) but even more confused about verbs (not understandable).  In the sentence, "Writing clearly and correctly is a challenge," 18 did correctly identify Writing as the subject, but in the next question (using the same sentence), 14 said Writing was a verb.  Seven thought clearly and correctly was the verb.  Only six correctly identified the verb as is.  Furthermore, in the sentence, "After a good night's sleep, Mary felt refreshed and alert," nine students thought sleep was the verb, and six chose either refreshed or refreshed and alert.  In other words, only half correctly identified the verb (felt).  Here's proof that, even with a simple sentence, high school graduates have trouble identifying a verb.

As usual, everyone got my "trick" question wrong.  It says:  "A rule of grammar states that: (a) Subjects and verbs must agree in number.  (b) Subjects and verbs must agree in gender.  (c) Subjects and verbs must agree in tense.  (d) All of the above.  The favorite answer (chosen by nearly two-thirds [19]) was "(d) All of the above," even though it should be obvious that verbs do not have gender and that subjects (nouns and pronouns) do not have tense.  (One student selected b, and nine selected c.)  The correct answer, of course, is (a), since number is the only quality shared by both subjects (nouns/pronouns) and verbs.

Punctuation is little better.  On a multiple choice question in which one of four sentences was correctly punctuated, only a third of the students identified the correct sentence.  On a second question in which none of the sentences were correctly punctuated, only five recognized that all three were wrong and correctly chose "All of the these sentences are incorrectly punctuated."

Finally, they aren't very swift on pronoun case.  Although most got the correct answer on "He and I will be going to New York," seven thought that "Him and I will be going to New York" was correct.  In four choices where "Please send the check to Mr. Jones or me" was the right answer, 17 students chose "Please send the check to Mr. Jones or myself," while six liked "Please send the check to myself or Mr. Jones," and two liked "Please send the check to Mr. Jones or I," leaving only five who got the right answer.  Do we assume that these students go around saying, "Send the check to myself" or "Send the check to I"?

What does this all signify?  An obvious conclusion, for me at least, is that I won't be able to communicate with my students about correct grammar until they learn grammatical terminology.  Another is that school teachers are teaching nonsense about not beginning sentences with because and totally neglecting real principles of grammar and usage.  (Do the teachers know this stuff themselves?)  A third conclusion is that many students are blissfully unaware of their ignorance.  Half of the class labeled the quiz "Easy," and three said it was between "Easy" and "Difficult."  Some refused to rate it, but the rest said it was "Difficult."  Nobody said it was "Very Difficult," even though a third of the class got below 40% correct.  Yes, folks, they spent twelve years in our public schools, where they not only didn't learn very much but also didn't develop much awareness of how little they do know.  If this is as true in other subjects as it is in English, we're in big trouble.

September 1, 2008.  Musings

> As Hurricane Gustav makes landfall west of New Orleans, I can't help shaking my head.  Long ago, the Native Americans said, "Don't build here.  It floods."  We did anyway.  Not only that, but we destroyed some of the natural protection from storms that the area had.  After a storm devastates much of what we built, what do we do?  We rebuild.  It's a safe bet that, after Gustav is done, the geniuses will be talking about nothing except rebuilding.  Brilliant.

> The human race is still in its adolescence.  Adolescents treat their mortality as if it were only a theory, not an absolute fact, and therefore take unreasonable risks.  Very often the human race does the same.  Adolescents resist authority, no matter how experienced it is; they arrogantly believe that the rules that authority tries to enforce do not apply to them.  Human beings arrogantly believe that they can outwit nature.  Adolescents sometimes don't get the message even when they're hit on the head by a two-by-four.  Human beings are similar in that they refuse to adjust even when nature delivers repeated blows with a two-by-four.  Adolescents sometimes feel that their generation is an exception to every rule.  Although human beings know that other species have become extinct, we are convinced that ours will not.  We could be wrong, but adolescents are never wrong.

> Everyone is trying to stay young, even though the population is aging.  That is not always good.  An article in Mother Jones magazine mentions that Holland has four retirement homes for drug addicts, that 18- to 49-year-olds are 35% more likely to watch the Cartoon Network than to watch CNN, and that the typical age of video game players has jumped from 18 to 33 from 1990 to today.  So much for the idea that age = maturity.

> Speaking of aging, I haven't felt as old as I am for years.  Maybe that's because I try to "think young," even though I don't watch the Cartoon Network or play video games.  (I don't want to think that young.)  I don't even think that I look as old as I am, although that could be because I avoid mirrors.  Nevertheless, it's becoming tougher not to feel old, especially when I wake up in the morning.  The only way to describe it is that all my joints feel as if they need oil.  It has become a struggle to put a body that has been at rest for a few hours back into motion, sort of like cranking up a car with a dead battery.  I've begun to appreciate a remark by an old guy I once knew:  "If I wake up in the morning and don't see candles and smell flowers, I know I made it."

> If I could go back in time, I wouldn't return to my teens, unless I could take with me what I know now.  I just couldn't stand returning to a state when I was clueless, didn't know it, and thought that almost everyone over 25 was clueless.  I wouldn't want to relive those days when every little thing was a crisis.  It's much better knowing that just about everyone, including me, is clueless about the important stuff and that amost everything perceived as a crisis is merely a transitory nuisance.

> I know some people who write down everything that is troubling them (especially when it's something they can do nothing about) and put it in a "God Box" (if you aren't religious, you can call it a "Worry Box").  They say it's quite an eye-opener to look in the box periodically and see what they put there a year or even a few months ago.  Invariably, their reaction is, "Was I really worried about that?  What as I – nuts?"  They have a point.  I think I've lost more sleep over disasters that never happened than I have over those that did.

September 10, 2008.  Third Week of Class

My class progresses.  OK, maybe progresses is the wrong word.  It is meandering on in some direction that I hope will lead somewhere.

My students have written their first "major" paper and have gotten it back with my comments.  I am running out of red pens.  A few (too few) papers were reasonably good and showed promise.  Some showed faint glimmers of hope.  After these came a huge gap.  I hadn't noticed it as I was reading individual essays because I spread the agony over a full week and spent an average of an hour reading, correcting, and critiquing each essay.  It became clear when I recorded the grades.

Few papers fell in the middle range of "satisfactory – nothing especially good, but no horrors either."  After those few that showed promise and another few with glimmers of hope came the many that were riddled with the most fundamental mistakes, which would not have been distressing by themselves except that entire sentences were incomprehensible.  After more than twenty years of teaching the products of our dysfunctional secondary schools, I expect the usual their/there, then/than, its/it's confusion and have even reached a point where I am unsurprised by the use of were for where (which, of course, utterly destroys the sense of the sentence in which it occurs).  It's much more difficult, even after all this time, to not be appalled at how adult human beings can write utterly meaningless prose and not see that it is meaningless.

I suppose I forget from semester to semester – and especially over the long summer break – how utterly devoid of sense many student essays are.  I read their papers, shake my head, and ask, "What are they thinking?" or, more accurately, "Are they thinking?"  To make matters worse, most students seem to have a built-in mechanism that they believe will compensate for lack of thought – more words.  It doesn't matter whether the words mean anything or add anything.  Students are all graduates of the "one thousand words or you fail" school of composition, so, though they have learned little else, they have learned to overstuff their essays so that the result is the verbal equivalent of a deformed and pregnant elephant.

I think I'll stop with that image and pick up this entry another day.

September 14, 2008.  Third Week of Class (continued)

Anyone who senses frustration in the above entry is correct.  Rules of grammar, usage, and syntax can be taught – perhaps not with ease, but they can be.  Clear, concise style is more difficult to teach, especially when students have developed a habit of being vague and roundabout.  Emphasizing the value of directness and clarity is doubly hard when students have been rewarded for writing more, not less.

I fully understand why secondary school teachers may not comment on wordy phrasing or awkward sentence structure.  They have their hands full just noting the blatant errors,  Nevertheless, when teachers limit corrections to grammatical or mechanical errors, students come believe that technical correctness is the sole determiner of effective writing.  They have no idea that a sentence containing seventeen words when seven would express the thought is just as ineffective as a gramatically incorrect sentence.  Indeed, it may have become grammatically incorrect as well because the extra words made the sentence more involved than it needed to be.

Achieving conciseness and clarity also requires thought, perhaps not profound thought but at least a modicum of common sense.  One doesn't need to be a deep thinker to recognize that "in the modern world of today" or "in my personal opinion" is redundant.  Could "the modern world" refer to any other time but today?  Does one have opinions that are anything but "personal"?  Students use these and similar phrases without thought.  Yes, without thought – that is precisely the problem.  When they are asked to think about the silliness of the phrase, they recognize the redundancy immediately.

However, once they recognize a specific phrase that is wordy or muddled, they are incapable of recognizing the same fault in other phrases.  That's another reason why conciseness and clarity are difficult to teach.  Rote learning may get students to memorize the rule that "due to the fact that" can almost invariably be replaced by "because," but no one rule covers all instances of wordiness.  For instance, the phrase "when it comes to," which is becoming one of my pet peeves, is eliminated in a number of ways depending on context, ranging from deleting it altogether, through using a preposition instead, to rephrasing the sentence.  Wordy writers don't even notice that they're using it, much less think about how to eliminate it, so they write, "I am very wordy when it comes to writing" instead of "I am a wordy writer."

Achieving clarity is even harder to teach than achieving conciseness.  Here I'll give my students some credit – while most are blind to their wordiness until it is pointed out to them, they are usually aware that they are unclear.  A common complaint is, "I know what I want to say, but I don't know how to say it clearly."  When I ask students to read a sentence aloud, they may not notice the wordiness, but they will usually recognize immediately that it is not clear.  Why then do they hand in papers that are almost utterly incomprehensible, even when they have had time to review them?

I'm not sure I have a definitive answer to that question.  One answer, of course, is that, even when they spot the muddle, they don't know how to fix it.  However, I believe that there is a deeper (though related) reason.  They are not practiced in editing or rewriting.  Whatever written work they have done has been a one-shot deal.  It may come back with corrections and criticisms, but they are never asked to write a new version.  They glance at the comments and the grade, toss it, and go on to the next assignment.  Without having cleaned up the mess they made, they create another.

Few professional writers are satisfied with first drafts; even after years of experience and cultivating the habit of self-editing as they write, they review and fine-tune their first drafts.  Obviously, if that is true of professionals, it is certainly necessary for novices.  I firmly believe that one learns more about writing by rewriting than one does by merely writing.  Chances are that someone who has written and rewritten 100 pages will emerge as a much better writer than someone who has written 1,000 pages and never revised any of them.  It isn't only that the 100 pages will be far superior than the 1,000 pages; it is that everything one writes after reviewing and rewriting the 100 pages will be better.

We all believe that practice at any skill leads to improvement (even if practice does not "make perfect," as the saying goes.  However, students can practice writing muddled sentences forever, and all they will accomplish is to write more muddled sentences.   Without realizing it, they are working hard at reinforcing bad habits.  If they spent half their effort trying to detect and correct these habits, they would have a shot at overcoming them.