My student, Abraham Lincoln. Part One.

"There is, thank God, no Teacher Meter," wrote the poet and essayist and sometime teacher Wendell Berry, "And there never is going to be one.  A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild."

My former students aren't old enough to have grandchildren yet.  I don't know what good I did any of them and never will know.  I like to think that all over Indiana there are these thirty-something parents reciting their favorite poem from college to their kids at bedtime in the bad music hall cockney accent used by that professor, what was his name again?---

Now in Injia's sunny clime
Where I used to spend my time
A-serving of her Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din...

Don't scoff.  I had them in tears by the end of it, every time.

What I hope, though, is that, since so many of my students were education majors, that I managed to impress upon them the one truly useful insight I had into the teaching of composition, which was this:

Written English and Spoken English are not two different languages.

Very shortly after I started teaching I discovered that a great many of my students couldn't write.

But they sure could talk.

They could tell me anything.  They could describe a process, analyze a poem, compare this to that and contrast that to this, and narrate an adventure, not always eloquently, but thoughtfully, coherently, interestingly.  They were a pleasure to listen to.

But when they tried to write out a description or an analysis, when they compared and contrasted, when they narrated an event on paper the result would be something close to gibberish.

They wrote in a different language than they spoke, following different rules of grammar and usage that they understood imperfectly and using vocabularies that were not their own or which contained a mere fraction of the words that flowed out of them when they spoke. 

I had them writing three drafts of every paper and I met with them individually to go over their first drafts with them---some weeks I would have sixty to seventy half hour editorial conferences to go over essays sentence by sentence.  I don't know how I managed this.  I was young.  I thought I was superteacher,  I guess.  Usually there'd come a point in a meeting when, hiding my exasperation, I'd point to a particularly tangled or empty paragraph and ask the student what he or she had been trying to say in it.

They'd look at it, their own words, often less than a hour from their printer, and they wouldn't know.  They wouldn't even recognize it as their own writing.  It was gibberish to them too.

I'd pull the paper back and say, "Tell me what you wanted to say."

And they would.

Sometimes it took some prompting.  But they would do it.  They would tell me a paragraph that was thoughtful, coherent, interesting.

And while they were telling me, I'd write down what they were saying.

When they were done I'd read back to them what they'd said.

This would lead to an exchange that went something like this:

Me:  Sounds a lot better, doesn't it?

Student:  Sure does.

Me:  Try writing like that.

Student:  How is that?

Me: Write like you're talking to me.

Student:  I can do that?

Me:  Well, leave out the ums and ers and like you knows.

Student (very doubtfully):  Um...ok...

They tried, but it was difficult for them.  They thought speaking and writing were very different skills, like painting and sculpting or carpentry and plumbing.  Basically, they didn't believe they talked smart enough.  Writing looked smarter than they felt, it looked more difficult to decode than anything anyone told them.   Then I realized what was happening.  To them good writing looked like something.  It didn't sound like anything, let alone an ordinary person talking.  When they wrote they weren't transcribing what they heard inside their own heads, they were copying something they had seen, something they had been taught was good writing.  Being normal American teenagers, most of them weren't readers, and this meant that what most of them were trying to make their writing look like was what they thought teachers thought was good writing, textbooks and encyclopedias.

It meant that for the most part they were trying to make their own writing look like boring writing.

I keep saying look like because to them it didn't sound like something.  Writing had no sound.  Words on a page probably weren't completely silent to them but they didn't speak with a normal human voice.  The words they read had no feeling, and I mean that they conveyed no emotions, but I also mean that my students didn't feel the words.  Their bodies didn't react to them.  The written word was actually alien to them. 

I had never thought deeply about this before and I'd had no experience teaching small children and, since this was years before my own kids came along and went through it, I had no idea what was going on in grade schools these days.  I had only my own vague memories of learning to read and write.  But what I mainly remembered was that when I was a kid grown-ups were always reading to me.

My favorite books had been books that Captain Kangaroo read to me and when I was old enough to read them myself I read them like the Captain did, out loud.  You should hear me read Caps For Sale .  I still read it just as I remember the Captain reading it, drawing out the peddlers call almost mournfully, "Caaaaaaps!  Caps for sale!  Fifty cents a cap!"

At some point before I reached fourth or fifth grade this must have stopped.  I don't think I ever read the Hardy Boys out loud or that any of my teachers read The Gift of the Magi or The Ransom of Red Chief out loud.  But it was around this time in my life that I found a paperback copy of Macbeth among my father's books.  By the time I got to eighth grade, I'd read all of Shakespeare's plays except Henry VIII (because I knew he hadn't written all of it.  I still haven't read it, and I refuse to bother with The Two Noble Kinsmen either.).  And reading Shakespeare inspired me to write my own plays.  Writing my own plays made me want to read other people's plays to find out how it was done in contemporary English prose---I never got the hang of writing in Elizabethan blank verse.   For the end of my grade school years and on into high school, then, my personal reading mostly included plays, which is to say, writing that was meant to be spoken out loud, and since I joined the Drama Club, that's what happened to a lot of what I read.  It got said.

Had I but world enough and time....end of Part One.  Follow the link to Part Two.

Comments

[clairehelene7]

Lance, I loved this. It resonates for a number of reasons. First, yesterday I happened to catch the end of Writer's Almanac on NPR and thought about how poems shouldn't be read silently but aloud. (I actually can't read any Shakespeare silently, I have to mutter it under my breath.)

I thought your descriptions of helping your former students find their writing voices interesting, too. I was lucky to be a reader, so I don't think I struggled with this as much as some of my peers. I remember several of my freshman college classes being chastised about people not being able to write a 5 paragraph essay. I silently thanked my high school English and journalism teachers.

I also *love* Caps For Sale. It was a favorite for some of my old babysitting charges. I think I still have most of it memorized.

[minstrel hussain boy]

i have the same stuff going on with my intermediate strings students at the local jc. i'm working very hard with getting them to actually listen to what they are playing. i have them bring in the music they are listening to right now (because of where we are it's heavy on norteno stuff) and we play along with it. slowly, they are catching on to the difference between notes on a page and music in the air.

i don't teach beginning strings because my nerves can't stand it. there's a special place in heaven for beginning strings teachers. or, maybe they're just masochists.

[Linkmeister]

I suspect I struggle with the "writing should be smarter than talking" syndrome.

OTOH, when I delivered a weekly throwaway paper in West LA in the early 1960s I used to recite "Gunga Din" aloud for three blocks, so there's that.

[CathiefromCanada]

I wonder if email and text-messaging will change this? Up until about 1995, millions and millions of people could go for months, even years, without ever writing anything except a grocery list and a cheque for the groceries, and reading nothing more than the TV schedule. Email changed all of that, and now text messaging.

[Ken Muldrew]

That's funny, I have been thinking just the opposite; that a person needs to see what they're writing for it to make sense. When I get blind reviews, some of them are written by physicians and the way they write is to dictate into a little recorder and then have their secretaries transcribe what they have said and render it into English as best they can. Because the reviews are blind, I don't know beforehand whether it has been written by a physician or a scientist, but reading gives away the game in an instant. The letters written by dictation are largely incoherent (and sometimes even approach gibberish) whereas the letters written at a keyboard are easily understandable (the confusion of ideas and general assholery of the writer remains an enduring mystery, but their words do convey their intentions clearly).

That being said, I guess this doesn't really argue against your point. The incomprehensible aspect is due to the transcriber not being familiar enough with the material and the unwillingness of physicians to edit their text. Still, it's an amusing comparison.

[Kevin Wolf]

Like clairehelene7, I always loved to read (though not ambitiously - no Shakespeare - hey, I was lazy) and I believe that helped hugely when writing. I think my art history teachers in college were thrilled to read some of my test essays, and I'm not bragging. They actually made sense.

If you read enough, and essentially internalize good writing, you'll pick up on what it is that's so good about it. (A savvy teacher can obviously point the way.) I don't think I ever had a particularly terrific English or Composition teacher in school, but with basic training, a lot of reading, and practice, I was able to learn how to write. That I still struggle with certain sins - like passive voice - is very much true but at least I'm aware of it.

More folks should read more. It's that simple. If everybody read more James Thurber, for instance, even terrible writers would be a little less terrible.

[Rana]

The issue of student voice - both literal and figurative - is something that I see my students struggle with on a regular basis. Their writing is either stilted and artificial, or bled dry of anything that resembles a personal opinion, and a lot of it is I think due to the factors you mention. I think too that they are actively discouraged from expressing their own voice - the use of the first person is forbidden (for reasons that have to do with teachers being too lazy to explain the difference between an unsupported opinion and a reasoned argument based on evidence) and all too many papers are about summarizing what other people wrote, rather than analyzing them and using them as support for one's own point.

Often my students are incredulous and suspicious when I tell them that I want to hear what _they_ think, in their own words - and they are right to be suspicious, because there are still too many teachers who want bland, narrative papers written in the passive third person.

On the sound of the language, I often suggest that students read their drafts aloud as part of the editing process - or, better yet, have someone else read them aloud. Listening to someone stumbling through your writing throws the confusing parts, the long awkward phrases, the inappropriate or lacking punctuation, etc. into high relief, and thus makes it easier to correct them.

Of course, many academics have problems with the written/spoken language issue, as sitting in on any academic conference will demonstrate. For every person who gives a lively, dynamic presentation of their ideas, there will be at least one and probably more who read their ideas directly from the page in a stilted monotone. It's rather sad, actually.

[Rana]

For all that - it occurs to me belatedly - I am myself one of those people who often thinks more clearly when I can SEE what it is I am writing/saying. One of the reasons why I prefer email over telephone conversations, for example, is that it allows me to keep track of the various leaps and jumps in my thinking, and it increases the odds that my thoughts will come across in a clear, linear fashion. Verbal arguments are my particular weak point - often I will lose track of what I was saying only a few minutes earlier, unless it was a particularly crucial point, and sometimes I'll talk myself into an outright contradiction of something I said before. (I would make a lousy politician, for this reason alone.)

I'm more of a visual thinker generally, so it's not surprising that my brain prefers the concreteness immutability of text to the ephemeral nature of speech.

[Rana]

Make that "concrete immutability" - obviously even seeing my words isn't enough to prevent tangles!

[Ronzoni Rigatoni]

As a long-term substitute teacher, I was given all the "bandits" in JHS, and of course I inherited an English class. It was the best time I ever had. "Just write the way you would tell me," I told them, exactly as you would say it." "Swear words and all?," they asked. "Of course. That's what God invented editors for. We'll discuss it when we see it."

Worked for us, but I'll never teach again LOL. I left the next year for a position in law enforcement, for which this particular class was perfect preparation.

[dglynn]

James Herndon wrote The Way It Spozed To Be in 1968. You'd love it Lance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Herndon_(writer)

By the way, I read this book after finding it on my Dad's bookshelf.

[joel hanes]

Richer than I you can never be
I had a mother who read to me.

[Mike Schilling]

Odd. I find that I write far more clearly than I talk, largely because I can go back and edit my ramblings into relative coherence.