David Foster Wallace on the seamy underbelly (and The Writing Revolution)

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? For instance, did you know that some modem dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the "corruption"and "permissiveness" of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special "Distinguished Usage Panel of outstanding professional speakers and writers" is an attempted, compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham populism!

Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?
Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage by David Foster Wallace | Harper's Magazine | April 2001

I was talking to Ed about this last night: my answer is, No I did not know (until just a couple of months ago) that U.S. lexicography had a seamy underbelly, and I am semi-sorry to learn that it does.^*

"Semi-sorry" because, in theory, I think discord and debate are good things in a democracy (and in a discipline). But "sorry" because I don't agree with the terms of the debate.

Scratch that. It's not that I don't agree with the terms of the debate. (The debate being: prescriptivist v. descriptivist.) It's that I don't relate to the terms of the debate. And I am a professional writer. I live by words (sentences and paragraphs, actually); I eat, breathe, and sleep words; I am an obsessive reader....

And I don't relate.

I don't care about prescriptivist, and I don't care about descriptivist. Not as battle stations in a shooting war. Not as anything, really. Where expository writing is concerned, I don't care about prescriptivist/descriptivist because prescriptivist/descriptivist is the wrong way to order the universe.

Which brings me back to the Atlantic piece:

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children do not have to “catch” a single thing. They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own. It is, at least initially, a rigid, unswerving formula. “I prefer recipe,” Hochman says, “but formula? Yes! Okay!”

Hochman, 75, has chin-length blond hair and big features. Her voice, usually gentle, rises almost to a shout when she talks about poor writing instruction. “The thing is, kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.”

I don't get this!

If a rule is really a rule, why would you break it?

Why would you write "a white small house" instead of "a small white house" just because you've mastered the rule that says size comes before color?

You wouldn't.

Good expository prose isn't fundamentally about breaking the rules. I'd put money on it Ms. Hochman doesn't encourage a lot of expository rule-breaking in her students; I'd also put money on it Ms. Hochman is friendlier to "1950s drill and kill" than she's willing to admit.^** At least, I hope she is.

Poetry and fiction may depend importantly upon rule-breaking. (I don't know.) But expository writing does not.

So why do we chronically have to come back to solemn invocations of "1950s" drill and kill accompanied by the inevitable assurance that, Don't worry, students who are actually being taught to write will get to 'break the rules' later on?

Answer: we chronically have to come back to solemn invocations of 1950s drill and kill, and to assurances that students will get to break the rules later on, because the terms of the debate are wrong.

Expository writing is not properly understood as a tension between prescriptivism (following the rules) and descriptivism (ignoring the rules, breaking the rules, and/or believing that the rules are whatever everyone happens to be doing now, whether they're any good at doing what they're doing or not).

Expository writing is properly understood as a practice akin to tennis, or to music. The "rules," so-called, aren't rules at all; they are techniques. Time-honored techniques that exist because they work.

Take the rule about putting a topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph. Putting a topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph; having a topic sentence in the first place; writing in paragraphs at all: these are techniques for thinking, communicating, and persuading that were invented by humans and,  subsequently, imitated by other humans because they work. A topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph helps you communicate, helps you persuade, and probably helps you think as well.

In short, putting a topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph is the most effective mode of expository paragraph writing we've come up with to date. If and when somebody else comes up with a better way to think, communicate, and persuade in writing, a new rule will be born, and the topic-sentence-at-the-beginning-of-a-paragraph rule will cease to exist.

Part 2. Writing instruction, in this country, is a rolling calamity.^*** One reason why it's a rolling calamity, I'm convinced, is that people are fighting about the wrong thing. Good writing isn't about following the rules AND good writing isn't about breaking the rules, ignoring the rules, or not knowing any rules in the first place. Good writing isn't about rules.

Good writing is about technique.

Back to the topic sentence. The writers who invented the topic sentence didn't invent a rule. In fact, the writers who invented the topic sentence didn't invent the topic sentence. Not consciously. They didn't have a name for the new sentence they were using. (At least, I don't think they did.) They developed the topic sentence through trial and error, and when they saw how well it worked they used it more and more often until the topic sentence became an established and favored technique.

Other people - teachers? scholars? - observed what writers were doing, characterized it in formal terms, and gave it a name: topic sentence. That was the moment the topic sentence became a 'rule': the moment it was observed, described, and named. But it's not a rule in the prescriptivist/descriptivist sense of the word 'rule.' The Topic Sentence 'rule' is an empirical observation of the way actual writers actually write. Actual writers (tend to) put topic sentences at the beginning of their paragraphs.^**** Hence the rule. The prescriptivist rule is a descriptivist description.

The proper goal of teaching expository writing in school, as every parent and taxpayer understands, is to teach effective expository writing, same as teaching tennis or how to play the piano. In tennis and piano, no one teaches "rules" they don't believe in -- no one teaches "rules" at all. Tennis instructors don't teach students a decent groundstroke while assuring parents and the broader public that: Don't worry, they can forget about their groundstroke down the line. A good tennis player never forgets about his groundstroke. A good tennis player practices his groundstroke and makes it better. Ditto good writers. A good writer doesn't forget about topic sentences once s/he knows how to write one. A good writer writes better topic sentences.

(Or, yes, maybe a good writer plays with the form. Maybe a good writer writes a two-part topic sentence using two sentences, not one, or maybe s/he divides a paragraph into 3 or 4 short, one-sentence paragraphs, with just the one topic sentence up at the top of the sequence. These are variations on a theme, serving the same purpose: effective communication, persuasion, and thought achieved via a topic sentence.)

Here is my frustration, reading an otherwise invaluable articles like Peg Tyre's The Writing Revolution.

I don't care what Lucy Calkins thinks about Judith Hochman.

I want to know what the people at Morningside think about Judith Hochman. I want to know what the people at Well-Trained Mind think. I want to know what Stanley Fish thinks.

I want to hear an argument and a debate between and among the practitioners of effective writing instruction that explicitly teaches effective writing.

And I don't want to hear another word about rules.

The rules aren't rules.

The rules are techniques.

^* Ed did not know that prescriptivists and descriptivists exist until last night. Lucky him.
^** I didn't notice any instances of creative rule-breaking in "The Writing Revolution."
^*** Homage to Peggy Noonan.
^**** I think it's possible the Topic Sentence rule is changing with the shift to shorter paragraphs. It's a possibility.

Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Rehnquist cites Cardozo in his Dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree:

Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.
- Benjamin Cardozo 1926

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace vs. Jaffree

from Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace vs. Jaffree

Some who trouble to read the opinions in these cases will find it ironic-perhaps even bizarre-that on the very day we heard arguments in the cases, the Court's session opened with an invocation for Divine protection. Across the park a few hundred yards away, the House of Representatives and the Senate regularly open each session with a prayer. These legislative prayers are not just one minute in duration, but are extended, thoughtful invocations and prayers for Divine guidance. They are given, as they have been since 1789, by clergy appointed as official chaplains and paid from the Treasury of the United States. Congress has also provided chapels in the Capitol, at public expense, where Members and others may pause for prayer, meditation--or a moment of silence.

[snip]

I make several points about today's curious holding.

(a) It makes no sense to say that Alabama has "endorsed prayer" by merely enacting a new statute "to specify expressly that voluntary prayer is one of the authorized activities during a moment of silence," ante, at 77 (O'CONNOR, J., concurring in judgment) (emphasis added). To suggest that a moment-of-silence statute that includes the word "prayer" unconstitutionally endorses religion, while one that simply provides for a moment of silence does not, manifests not neutrality but hostility toward religion. For decades our opinions have stated that hostility toward any religion or toward all religions is as much forbidden by the Constitution as is an official establishment of religion. The Alabama Legislature has no more "endorsed" religion than a state or the Congress does when it provides for legislative chaplains, or than this Court does when it opens each session with an invocation to God. Today's decision recalls the observations of Justice Goldberg:

"[U]ntutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive dedication to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it." Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 306 (1963) (concurring opinion).

[snip]

(c) The Court's extended treatment of the "test" of Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971), suggests a naive preoccupation with an easy, bright-line approach for addressing constitutional issues. We have repeatedly cautioned that Lemon did not establish a rigid caliper capable of resolving every Establishment Clause issue, but that it sought only to provide "signposts." "In each [Establishment Clause] case, the inquiry calls for line-drawing; no fixed, per se rule can be framed." Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 678 (1984)....In any event, our responsibility is not to apply tidy formulas by rote; our duty is to determine whether the statute or practice at issue is a step toward establishing a state religion.

Given today's decision, however, perhaps it is understandable that the opinions in support of the judgment all but ignore the Establishment Clause itself and the concerns that underlie it.

(d) The notion that the Alabama statute is a step toward creating an established church borders on, if it does not trespass into, the ridiculous. The statute does not remotely threaten religious liberty; it affirmatively furthers the values of religious freedom and tolerance that the Establishment Clause was designed to protect. Without pressuring those who do not wish to pray, the statute simply creates an opportunity to think, to plan, or to pray if one wishes--as Congress does by providing chaplains and chapels.

[snip]

If the government may not accommodate religious needs when it does so in a wholly neutral and noncoercive manner, the "benevolent neutrality" that we have long considered the correct constitutional standard will quickly translate into the "callous indifference" that the Court has consistently held the Establishment Clause does not require. The Court today has ignored the wise admonition of Justice Goldberg that "the measure of constitutional adjudication is the ability and willingness to distinguish between real threat and mere shadow." Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U. S., at 308 (concurring opinion). The innocuous statute that the Court strikes down does not even rise to the level of "mere shadow." JUSTICE O'CONNOR paradoxically acknowledges: "It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren." Ante, at 73. 5 I would add to that, "even if they choose to pray."

The mountains have labored and brought forth a mouse.

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Jefferson's "wall of separation"

from Rehnquist's Dissent, in Wallace vs. Jaffree:

Thirty-eight years ago this Court, in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 16 (1947), summarized its exegesis of Establishment Clause doctrine thus:

"In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and State.' Reynolds v. United States, [98 U. S. 145, 164 (1879)].

This language from Reynolds, a case involving the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment rather than the Establishment Clause, quoted from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association the phrase "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole Americanpeople which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."  Writings of Thomas Jefferson 113 (H. Washington ed. 1861).

It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history, but unfortunately the Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years. Thomas Jefferson was of course in France at the time the constitutional Amendments known as the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress and ratified by the States. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the Amendments were passed by Congress. He would seem to any detached observer as a less than ideal source of contemporary history as to the meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment.

Jefferson's fellow Virginian, James Madison, with whom he was joined in the battle for the enactment of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty of 1786, did playas large a part as anyone in the drafting of the Bill of Rights. He had two advantages over Jefferson in this regard: he was present in the United States, and he was a leading Member of the First Congress. But when we turn to the record of the proceedings in the First Congress leading up to the adoption of the Establishment Clause of the' Constitution, including Madison's significant contributions thereto, we see a far different picture of its purpose than the highly simplified "wall of separation between church and State."

After this opening, Rehnquist reviews the process by which the Establishment Clause came to be included in the Bill of Rights. Rehnquist shows that the notion of state neutrality toward religion did not come up in the deliberations of the First Congress.

Ed says that if you read our friend Ruth Bloch's Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800, you understand that it would not have been possible for the founders to have intended that the state be neutral on the subject of religion. The founders lived in a religious world. Secularism had yet to be invented, and neutrality did not exist. In fact, the Representatives spent time considering how to write an Establishment Clause so that it did not interfere with the state-established churches in New England, which were then "the rule rather than the exception" according to Rehnquist.

My favorite bit of historical evidence from Rehnquist's dissent is the fact that on the very day Madison introduced his proposed language for the Establishment clause, the First Congress reenacted the Northwest Ordinance. The Northwest Ordinance provided that:

"[r]eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution

My first post on Wallace vs. Jaffree did not make clear that Justice Rehnquist supported Alabama's statute § 16-1-20.1, which authorized "a 1-minute period of silence in all public schools 'for meditation or voluntary prayer.'"

An Appeals Court found 16-1-20.1 unconstitutional; the Supreme Court upheld.

Justices Rehnquist, White, and Burger dissented. They argue that prayer in public schools is constitutional.

Here is Rehnquist:

The Framers intended the Establishment Clause to prohibit the designation of any church as a "national" one. The Clause was also designed to stop the Federal Government from asserting a preference for one religious denomination or sect over others. Given the "incorporation" of the Establishment Clause as against the States via the Fourteenth Amendment in Everson [1947], States are prohibited as well from establishing a religion or discriminating between sects. As its history abundantly shows, however, nothing in the Establishment Clause requires government to be strictly neutral between religion and irreligion, nor does that Clause prohibit Congress or the States from pursuing legitimate secular ends through nondiscriminatory sectarian means.

The Court strikes down the Alabama statute because the State wished to "characterize prayer as a favored practice." Ante, at 60. It would come as much of a shock to those who drafted the Bill of Rights as it will to a large number of thoughtful Americans today to learn that the Constitution, as construed by the majority, prohibits the Alabama Legislature from "endorsing" prayer. George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of "public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God." History must judge whether it was the Father of his Country in 1789, or a majority of the Court today, which has strayed from the meaning of the Establishment Clause.

The State surely has a secular interest in regulating the manner in which public schools are conducted. Nothing in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, properly understood, prohibits any such generalized "endorsement" of prayer. I would therefore reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

I'll post excerpts from Justice Burger's dissent as well.


and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

bad writing, bad thinking

From the Atlantic article (Grace's post  here):

And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects.

"Writing is thinking."

You hear that, and, if you're me, you believe it.

But what does it mean, exactly?

I'm thinking Douglas Biber's work on corpus linguistics has light to shed. Will try to translate my thoughts re: Biber into a set of coherent sentences in the not too distant future.

'good writing matters'

in the Atlantic:

I have an MBA and was a turnaround corporate and real estate banker for over 23 years. My husband also has an MBA and is a senior-level manager in the financial services industry. What we've both seen, in the course of our careers, is that good writing matters. While the weak writers may get hired -- job interviews rarely require a writing sample -- once the candidates get the job, they don't tend to go far. Soon after they start work, they are asked to prepare a presentation or simply send an email. Then, the trouble begins.

Writing longer pieces -- presentations, for example -- only confirms the negative impression weak writers make in the workplace. While they might be very intelligent, their inability to clearly and concisely advocate their position on paper completely undermines their reputation. As a result, others become reluctant to have them on their team. Even individuals in verbally focused careers such as sales need to write pitches and send frequent follow-up correspondence.

When my husband and I were children in the public education system, we routinely wrote five to six paragraph essays across several subjects. We also learned proper handwriting, a skill that's far too underrated today. (One cannot use the computer to fill out a worksheet or critique a colleague's hard-copy document.) In addition, we rarely took multiple choice tests, instead tackling open-ended questions that required at least full-sentence answers. None of this is the case in many schools today. What's particularly frustrating to us is seeing these shortcomings in a school district like ours, one that has far fewer obstacles than a lower-income school like New Dorp.
Why I Took My Child Out of Public School

As long as process pedagogy rules the day, matters will not improve.

Of course, it could always be worse:

Pedagogical resistance is perhaps most apparent in the claim that writing cannot be taught, which stems from the argument forwarded by Kent that writing is a situated, interpretive, and indeterminate act. In Paralogic Rhetoric, Kent suggests that accepting a post-process perspective (at least in a paralogic sense) means rejecting process as the ultimate explanation for the writing act and instead recognizing the role of interpretation and indeterminacy in the writing act. Consequently, if we consider writing as an indeterminate and interpretive activity, he asserts, then "writing and reading -- conceived broadly as processes or bodies of knowledge -- cannot be taught, for nothing exists to teach" (161).
Post-Process "Pedagogy": A Philosophical Exercise by Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch

I wonder how post-process people feel about comma splices.

all teachers should pay attention to anaphora

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Morningside teaches students how to read anaphora, and that my own freshmen students seem to have difficulty understanding anaphora.

I saw another example this week (post here).

Some combinations of words are possible in English, while others are not possible. Every native speaker of English can easily judge that ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ is a possible English sentence, whereas “Home computers now much are cheaper” is not, because they know that “much” is wrongly positioned in the second example. The ability to recognise such distinctions is evidence that in some sense native speakers already know the rules of grammar, even if they have never formally studied grammar….”
An Introduction to English Grammar by Sidney Greenbaum and Gerald Nelson

Most of my students did not know what the words "such distinctions" referred to. They did not know that the authors were alluding to the distinction they had just made, in the previous sentence, between ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ and 'Home computers now much are cheaper.'

My students understood the first two sentences of the paragraph perfectly. That wasn't the problem.

They were having a specific problem with the words "such distinctions." They believed that the author had brought up a new issue referring to something 'out in the world,' and they were stumped because they couldn't tell what that new issue might be. What distinctions, out in the world, were the authors talking about?

So now we're focusing directly and explicitly on anaphora in the texts we read.

At the moment I'm thinking you could produce a huge jump in reading comprehension in an awful lot of students just by teaching anaphora comprehension explicitly and making sure students become fluent in reading and understanding anaphora.

I'm also thinking this may be a skill students can pick up quickly.

We'll see.

Revolutionary writing instruction that is 'an old idea done better'

Here's another case of everything old is new again.  A New York City school finds that returning to fundamentals like explicit grammar instruction and formulaic writing has succeeded in turning around the dismal performance of high poverty students.  No iPads were required.

The problems at New Dorp High School were similar to many that afflict other lower-income public schools.

... students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams....

Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects....

... the students’ sentences were short and disjointed.

... These 14- and 15-year-olds didn’t know how to use some basic parts of speech. With such grammatical gaps, it was a wonder they learned as much as they did. “Yes, they could read simple sentences,” but works like the Gettysburg Address were beyond them—not because they were too lazy to look up words they didn’t know, but because “they were missing a crucial understanding of how language works.

This writing skills problem is widespread.

According to the Nation’s Report Card, in 2007, the latest year for which this data is available, only 1 percent of all 12th-graders nationwide could write a sophisticated, well-­organized essay. Other research has shown that 70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through 12 write poorly. ... for decades, achievement rates in writing have remained low.

There appears to be a massive failure in learning writing skills.  What type of writing instruction is used in most public schools?

... elementary-­school students ... today mostly learn writing by constructing personal narratives, memoirs, and small works of fiction ...

... pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-­expression and emotion over lucid communication....

For most of the 1990s, elementary- and middle-­school children kept journals in which they wrote personal narratives, poetry, and memoirs and engaged in “peer editing,” without much attention to formal composition....

The explicit instruction of previous times has morphed into discovery learning, where students are encouraged to figure it out themselves, to "construct" their own learning.  Being creative has become more important than following formal rules.

... Fifty years ago, elementary-school teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid paragraphs into full-blown essays....  About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be “caught, not taught,” explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will “catch” what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression.

Low-income students have particularly suffered from the current approach.

The catch method works for some kids, to a point... Kids who come from poverty, who had weak early instruction, or who have learning difficulties, he explains, “can’t catch anywhere near what they need” to write an essay....

New Dorp High School tried something different.

Education schools don't spend much time on how to teach writing, so it's not surprising that New Dorp teachers were unaware of their own teaching failures.  They blamed the students' poor performance on poverty, low intelligence, or laziness.  The school tried 'innovative' methods, like small learning communities and special after-school programs.  Nothing worked, until they carefully explored the missing skills and took specific steps to address the gaps.  Deirdre DeAngelis, the school principal, learned of the acclaimed writing program used by principal Judith Hochman of the Windward School, a private school for learning disabled children.

The way Catholic schools used to teach, using explicit instruction and a writing "formula"

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children do not have to “catch” a single thing. They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones... It is, at least initially, a rigid, unswerving formula. “I prefer recipe,” Hochman says, “but formula? Yes! Okay!”

... “The thing is, kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.”

... Teachers stopped giving fluffy assignments such as “Write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I” and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay describing three major causes of the conflict.

The successful results of the back-to-basics (revolutionary) writing program at New Dorp

... This spring, the graduation rate is expected to hit 80 percent, a staggering improvement over the 63 percent figure that prevailed before the Writing Revolution began.

... newfound ability to write solid, logically ordered paragraphs about what she’s learned, citing examples and using transitions between ideas.

Reading comprehension also improved.

As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica’s reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words,” she says. “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”

More schools should try this '"old" way of instruction.
The Hochman Program being used at New Dorp High School is writing instruction that offers direct and precise guidance incorporated into a systemic process, along with explicit grammar instruction and a strong focus on sentence  composition.  This is very similar to the Kerrigan method of Writing to the Point, a personal favorite of mine.  I strongly believe this type of instruction would benefit most types of students, offering better preparation for college or career than the fluffy free-for-all type of writing instruction now popular in many public schools.  Perhaps this New Dorp success story will help fuel a change with more schools following in their footsteps.

(Cross-posted at Cost of College)

Related:

• Creating a Facebook page is high on list of high school writing lessons (Cost of College)
• ‘Writing, writing, writing’ – a skill lacking among too many college graduates (Cost of College)

tour de force

C. is taking John Sexton's "The Supreme Court and Religion." Last week the class read Wallace vs Jaffree, which includes this passage from Justice Rehnquist's dissent:

For example, a State may lend to parochial school children geography textbooks that contain maps of the United States, but the State may not lend maps of the United States for use in geography class. A State may lend textbooks on American colonial history, but it may not lend a film on George Washington, or a film projector to show it in history class. A State may lend classroom workbooks, but may not lend workbooks in which the parochial school children write, thus rendering them nonreusable. A State may pay for bus transportation to religious schools 10 but may not pay for bus transportation from the parochial school to the public zoo or natural history museum for a field trip. A State may pay for diagnostic services conducted in the parochial school but therapeutic services must be given in a different building; speech and hearing "services" conducted by the State inside the sectarian school are forbidden, Meek v. Pittenger, 421 U. S. 349, 367, 371 (1975), but the State may conduct speech and hearing diagnostic testing inside the sectarian school. Wolman, 433 U. S., at 241. Exceptional parochial school students may receive counseling, but it must take place outside of the parochial school,12 such as in a trailer parked down the street. Id., at 245. A State may give cash to a parochial school to pay for the administration of state-written tests and state-ordered reporting services, but it may not provide funds for teacher-prepared tests on secular subjects. Religious instruction may not be given in public school, but the public school may release students during the day for religion classes elsewhere, and may enforce attendance at those classes with its truancy laws.
WALLACE, GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA, ET AL. v. JAFFREE ET AL. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT No. 83-812. Argued December 4, 1984-Decided June 4, 1985. (110-111).

All of these inconsistencies could be easily resolved with vouchers and tax credits! update: In an ideal world, that is. Not inside the actual world we live in.

update 9/29/2012: Rehnquist compiled the list above to support his argument that the Court's 1971  "Lemon test"^* had resulted in unprincipled and inconsistent decisions.

...[T]he wall [of separation between church and state] idea might well have served as a useful albeit misguided analytical concept, had it led this Court to unified and principled results in Establishment Clause cases. The opposite, unfortunately, has been true; in the 38 years since Everson [1947] our Establishment Clause cases have been neither principled nor unified. Our recent opinions, many of them hopelessly divided pluralities, have with embarrassing candor conceded that the "wall of separation" is merely a "blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier," which "is not wholly accurate" and can only be "dimly perceived." Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 614 (1971); Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 672, 677-678, (1971); Wolman v. Walter, 433 U. S. 229, 236 (1977); Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 673 (1984).

^* Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 612-613 (1971)

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

onward and upward

In today's paper:

In 2011 the Legislature passed, and Mr. Otter signed, a regulatory overhaul of public education: eliminating tenure and stripping teachers of most collective bargaining rights, yet promising hand-held computers for students.

What Do Teachers Deserve? In Idaho, Referendum May Offer Answer
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: September 23, 2012 | New York Times

question

For example, in Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U. S. 158, 164 (1944), the Court wrote:

"If by this position appellant seeks for freedom of conscience a broader protection than for freedom of the mind, it may be doubted that any of the great liberties insured by the First Article can be given higher place than the others. All have preferred position in our basic scheme. Schneider v. State, 308 U. S. 147; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296. All are interwoven there together. Differences there are, in them and in the modes appropriate for their exercise. But they have unity in the charter's prime place because they have unity in their human sources and functionings."
Source: WALLACE, GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA, ET AL. v. JAFFREE ET AL.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 83-812. Argued December 4, 1984-Decided June 4, 1985

Why "differences there are" instead of the customary "there are differences"? (Assuming, of course, that "there are differences" was the customary written form in 1944.)

Glen on Daniel Boone

on the subject of using historical documents to teach reading and writing, Glen writes:

I find the writing in Daniel Boone's autobiography interesting. Here is a man who was raised on the frontier in "Indian country," who had some of what today we would call homeschooling but very little formal schooling. His father justified the state of Daniel's formal literacy by saying that his daughters did the writing and Daniel did the shooting.

So what did a frontiersman with nothing but some homeschooling and Bible study write like, back before the state took over the job of education? Here's how his autobiography begins:

"Curiosity is natural to the soul of man and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections. Let these influencing powers actuate, by the permission or disposal of Providence, from selfish or social views, yet in time the mysterious will of Heaven is unfolded, and we behold our conduct, from whatever motives excited, operating to answer the important designs of heaven.

"Thus we behold Kentucky, lately an howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful field...."

Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

In the Event of Moon Disaster

Another terrific historical document for use in reading and writing classes, particularly on the subjects of parallelism,  cohesion, and punctuation:^* Bill Safire's "In the Event of Moon Disaster." Transcript and image of the original at Letters of Note.

To: H. R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire
July 18, 1969.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT:

The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:

A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to "the deepest of the deep," concluding with the Lord's Prayer.

Each of the widows-to-be.

Terrifying.

^* Semicolons!

Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

onward and upward

The poll...asked human resource professionals to identify the greatest “basic skills” and “applied skills” gaps between workers age 31 and younger compared with workers age 50 and older.

• Basic skills – more than half (51 percent) of human resource managers indicated they find older workers to have stronger writing, grammar, and spelling skills in English;
• Applied skills – more than half (52 percent) of human resource managers said older workers exhibit stronger professionalism/work ethic.

SHRM-AARP Poll Shows Organizations are Concerned about Boomer Retirements and Skills Gaps | 4/9/2012

I've been talking to a Manhattan teacher who has a late-afternoon class in the room where I teach. When she learned that I teach freshman composition, she wanted to know whether I was seeing deterioration in students' writing. She expects the next wave of students to have no writing skills at all, and she wondered whether those kids are already showing up in colleges.

The reason she expects the next wave of students to have no writing skills at all is that Manhattan schools are required to use the Lucy Calkins program. The teacher said that everyone in her school hates the curriculum so much they spend every lunch hour venting, and she herself is desperate to find a job in the suburbs because friends have told her suburban schools "let you teach grammar." There's no escaping Calkins in the city. The principal of a neighboring school tried to get rid of the program and was told to reinstate it or find another position. So the program stayed.

In my experience, suburban schools don't teach grammar, either, although I haven't seen the level of micromanaging here that Manhattan teachers are subjected to. If a teacher in my district wants to teach grammar, and knows some grammar, it's not against the rules. But Manhattan teachers are monitored.  Administrators enter their rooms unannounced to inspect the bulletin boards and observe the mini-lessons, and if teachers are found teaching grammar, they're in trouble. Such is educational reform in the big city.

I shared my Geographical Theory of school quality with her: the closer a school's location is physically to Teachers College, the worse it is.

She said, "Well, imagine how bad things are for us."

and see:
Nightmare from Teachers College
Coach Class by Barbara Feinberg

Stanley Fish on teaching writing in college

Stanley Fish answers the question Isn't the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier?

By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all. The exception seems to be Catholic schools. More than a few commentators remembered with a mixture of fondness and pain the instruction they received at the hands of severe nuns. And I have found that those students in my classes who do have a grasp of the craft of writing are graduates of parochial schools. (I note parenthetically that in many archdioceses such schools are being closed, not a good omen for those who prize writing.)

I really want to start a Catholic school. Really, truly. My building used to be a Catholic school; I'd like it to be a Catholic school again.

By the way, I do realize that if I had actually attended Catholic schools as a child I might feel different. But I was raised a flat-footed Methodist, as I think I once heard Huston Smith say on TV, and to me the Catholic Church was magic. The nuns in their black habits, the priests, the Holy water in the doorways and the crucifixes on the wall ---- and the sign of the cross! Oh my.

A couple of years ago I asked my second to oldest sister whether she had liked the sign of the cross as a child, and she said at once and with great enthusiasm, "Of course!" She had been so taken by the Catholic Church she wanted to be Catholic. I had no idea. Were all 4 of us kids having our own private Catholic crush?

Truth to tell, my own Catholic crush wasn't so private. I took piano lessons from the nuns for years, and my parents made arrangements for me to attend the Catholic school one day each school year.

I remember reading somewhere that charter schools copied Catholic schools, and the observation struck me as true. I bet, if you scratched the surface, you'd find a lot of charter founders who as children pressed their noses against the windows of a Catholic school, outside looking in.

Computerized teaching: the feedback gap

Yet another breathless account of the wonders of computerized learning appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine in an article entitled "The Machines are Taking Over: advances in computerized tutoring are testing the faith that human contact makes for better learning."

The article opens with a scene of an actual human being tutoring a fellow species member. While her tutee works on a problem (calculating average driving speed), the tutor provides lots of interactive feedback. Neil Heffernan, the tutor's fiance, catalogued the various different types of feedback she gave under such categories as “remind the student of steps they have already completed,” “encourage the student to generalize,” “challenge a correct answer if the tutor suspects guessing”). According the the article, Heffernan then "incorporated many of these tactics into a computerized tutor," which he spent nearly two decades refining. Now called ASSISTments, it is used by by more than 100,000 students "in schools all over the country." The article describes the experience of one of these 100,000 students with the program's interactive feedback:

Tyler breezed through the first part of his homework, but 10 questions in he hit a rough patch. “Write the equation in function form: 3x-y=5,” read the problem on the screen. Tyler worked the problem out in pencil first and then typed “5-3x” into the box. The response was instantaneous: “Sorry, wrong answer.” Tyler’s shoulders slumped. He tried again, his pencil scratching the paper. Another answer — “5/3x” — yielded another error message, but a third try, with “3x-5,” worked better. “Correct!” the computer proclaimed.

In other words, it's the same old binary right-or-wrong feedback that nearly every educational software program has been using for decades. As the article notes:

In contrast to a human tutor, who has a nearly infinite number of potential responses to a student’s difficulties, the program is equipped with only a few. If a solution to a problem is typed incorrectly — say, with an extra space — the computer stubbornly returns the “Sorry, incorrect answer” message, though a human would recognize the answer as right.

True, the program is still a work in progress. But what's being refined, according to the article, isn't the feedback. Rather, it's the program's ability to detect when a student is getting bored, frustrated, or confused (via facial expression reading software, speed and accuracy of responses, and special chairs with posture sensors "to tell whether students are leaning forward with interest or lolling back in boredom."):

Once the student’s feelings are identified, the thinking goes, the computerized tutor could adjust accordingly — giving the bored student more challenging questions or reviewing fundamentals with the student who is confused.

Or "flashing messages of encouragement... or... calling up motivational videos recorded by the students’ teachers."

Also being refined is the "hint" feature, which users click on when stumped. Human beings (particularly teachers) track common wrong answers and have other human beings (particularly students) come up with helpful hints. These hints are then incorporated into the next generation of ASSISTments.

Cognitive Tutor, a more established software program that is "used by 600,000 students in 3,000 school districts around the country," also limits its feedback to hints and right-or-wrong responses.  And it, too, is being refined based on data from human users:

Every keystroke a student makes — every hesitation, every hint requested, every wrong answer — can be analyzed for clues to how the mind learns.

Ultimately, this data will be put to use not to refine feedback on particular student responses, but to help decide how to space out material and schedule periodic reviews.

But it's carefully tailored feedback on particular responses by particular students that makes human tutoring--the inspiration for all these programs--as powerful is it is.

In my earlier post on Cognitive Tutor, I wrote that programming sufficiently perspicuous feedback for mathematical problems "strikes me as even more prohibitive" than the feedback I labored for years to provide in my GrammarTrainer program. Last night I ran this impression past a mathematician friend of mine who cares a lot about effective math instruction. She emphatically concurs.

When it comes to educational software developers--as opposed to educational software users--there is some somewhat perspicuous feedback on whether their answers (answers to students' educational needs) are on track. As I write earlier, that feedback isn't particularly encouraging.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

writing by ear

On the question of 'picking up' grammar through reading, Jean writes:

I think many people--like you--can learn general grammar rules by reading. I am also one of those people, BUT I have always felt insecure in my writing. There are many fine points that I did not absorb and that I make mistakes in. I have also noticed that my daughter, who reads no more than I did at her age but who is made to do a rigorous grammar course, can read at a higher level than I could at her age.

Reading Jean's comment, I'm thinking ... I probably would have been insecure about the fine points of grammar IF I had ever thought about the fine points, or cared. But I didn't! I didn't think about grammar at all, I thought about writing (comma splice intentional).^*

I write by ear. I don't recall ever consulting a grammar book, not once in an entire career of professional writing. In fact, I didn't even own a grammar book until a little over 10 years ago, when an editor told me that all the editors in New York liked The Grammar Bible. I bought it, but I didn't read it. (Hope to do so one of these days.)

I always wanted to be a writer, from the time I knew what writing was, and I was an obsessive reader (and still am). And I simply never gave grammar a second thought. I learned grammar through reading, and I practiced grammar through writing.

I wish now I had been taught grammar -- sentence diagramming in particular -- as I would have loved every minute of it, and I think formal instruction in sentence syntax would have made me a better writer sooner.

But I wasn't taught grammar, and I learned to write without thinking consciously about grammar and punctuation.

Back to the question of missing the fine points: I distinctly recall, from time to time (especially back when I discovered my affection for the semicolon) not knowing what 'the rules' said to do. But uncertainty about the rules never caused me to think I ought to actually go out and look up the rules.

Basically, I had just one ironclad rule: does it sound right? If it didn't, I rewrote; and I rewrote over and over and over again. One of these days I should count how many versions some of my sentences (and passages) go through. It has to be in the hundreds. Many hundreds, in some cases.

I'm sure that, like Jean, I was making subtle errors all those years. In fact, I know I was. After I finally started to learn the formal rules, just 2 years ago, I discovered one in particular that I hadn't picked up through reading, which is the prohibition against placing a comma between an independent clause & a dependent adverbial clause.

e.g.:

I went home because I felt sick.

not

I went home, because I felt sick.

I had never heard of this rule, and never conceived of it, either. (I had also never heard the rule about using a comma after a FANBOYS, or the rule about not putting a comma after "rule" 2 sentences ago.) Where commas were concerned, I had always followed my own rule, which was to use a comma if it sounded right. So sometimes I used a comma, and sometimes I didn't use a comma, depending.

After I learned the No Commas Before Subordinate Adverbial Clauses rule, I started to follow it .... but then, not too long afterward, I stopped. The rule doesn't work! Sometimes a sentence needs a comma, rule or no rule, and there's an end to it.

All of this said, I feel pretty strongly today that I would have been better off if I had learned formal grammar, including sentence diagramming, in K-12. But that is a subject for another post.

^* The fact that writing is grammar, pretty much, escaped my notice.

Magister Green on how the Greeks and Romans taught

Magister Green on the question of whether you can "pick up" the grammar of writing through reading:

Going back to ancient times, the Greeks and Romans taught their children not rules of traditional grammar but rather the works of the great poets and thinkers who had come before. In particular, emphasis was placed on memorizing and modeling one's own schoolwork on the works of past masters. If we accept that students can learn grammatical rules through exposure as opposed to explicit instruction (which I do accept), the fact that schools in general (public and private) refuse to teach, much less acknowledge, the works of "masters" would go a long way towards explaining why students today know so little of the rules of traditional grammar.

I've been only vaguely aware of the 'copy work' practices of the ancients (and of the Well-Trained Mind people), but I've come to be a fan.

I think Magister Green is right.

One reason students don't write (or punctuate) grammatically today is that they aren't spending enough time reading, studying, and 'mastering' important works under the direct guidance of their teachers.

I think there's probably something missing in terms of fluency training in the early grades, too: possibly just basic fluency practice in writing and punctuating simple Subject+Verb+Object and Subject+Verb+Complement sentences. But I don't know.

I speculate that 'basic fluency training' is missing because C. was reading important works under the direct guidance of teachers in high school (though not before then), yet his writing still had lots of comma splices. I asked him how he finally got rid of them, and he said he thinks his dad just corrected so many of them that he finally started to see them himself.

Which reminds me: I need to get a post up on Morningside and "discrimination training."

Morningside does not seem to teach "grammar" at all, really. They teach writing via sentence combining, and they don't teach sentence parsing or sentence diagramming. Kent Johnson told me he teaches grammar terminology after students have learned to write, and he teaches the terminology at that point because students have to know it for state tests.

I don't know how I feel about that. I gainsay nothing Morningside does; I've seen the results with my own eyes (and in a writing class, too). But the idea of 'withholding' or avoiding the vocabulary of grammar bothers me nevertheless. I wish somebody had taught me how to diagram a sentence back in the day!

On the other hand, I may be looking at it the wrong way. The Morningside program doesn't avoid teaching the vocabulary of grammar so much as it delays formal instruction in grammar.

Maybe that's the right sequence. Reading and writing first, grammar second.

I'm going to come back to this later.

SAT math is puzzle math

Ed and I had an amazing conversation last night with an SAT math tutor. He told us that for him SAT math is super-easy, so easy that the first time he saw the test he wondered whether it was a joke. He estimates that in his years of tutoring he has encountered 20,000 SAT math items: for each item, he instantly knew the answer.

At the same time, he's not adept at other aspects of math, particularly anything to do with spatial reasoning, which predicts success in math, science, and engineering. He has trouble doing problems like this one:

source: Fibonicci - spatial reasoning test

His brain, he said, works exactly like the brains of the people who write the SAT, and nothing like the brains of other people who are good at math. He himself is good at math, spent most of his life writing software for Wall Street and briefly taught math. As to the latter, he told us US math teaching would be much better if schools cut the curriculum by 2/3 and had students learn the remaining 1/3 really well. He'd never read Schmidt and had never heard of mile-wide-inch-deep.^* It just seemed obvious to him that a good 2/3 of US curriculum should go.

Naturally I was keen to know what kind of brain he and the SAT people have, and the answer was: a puzzle brain. He loves, loves, loves puzzles; puzzles are his thing.

That's SAT math, only the puzzles are too easy for him.

A funny moment: he said his ex-wife told him she was reading a book that explained his brain: "You have no right brain at all," she told him, or words to that effect. When he read the list of right-brain characteristics, he agreed.

I wish I'd asked him how he fares on find-the-hidden-right-triangle items specifically.

^* Schmidt: "[A]t eighth-grade [we're] telling teachers to teach 35 topics. Other countries are telling their teachers to teach 10 to 15."