In this case, I don't mean "eduspeak," that quagmire of buzzwords and stolen terminology from other disciplines and professions. No, this is a story about English. It's not much of a secret that college graduates are abysmal writers. I don't mean that they have trouble with the nuances with MLA, APA, or Chicago standards or have a difficult time writing papers in a clear and fluid manner.
I'm going all the way back to the basics: parts of a sentence. I don't understand how students have been allowed to advance into college, and more specifically, into the education courses, when they can't easily identify the function of words within simple sentences. Should a person who wants to become a third or fourth grade teacher be able to quickly identify conjunctions and know the difference between pronouns and prepositions? From what I saw in my class, the answer is apparently, "Who cares?"
In the School of Education's composition course, students were asked to make a short presentation near the end of the semester. These presentations were supposed to build upon the "material" (read: opinions of three self-congratulatory authors) to create something called a "mini-lesson".
Allow me to take a moment to explain the "mini-lesson".
For those who don't know, a mini-lesson is supposed to be a rare occasion where the teacher has to actually lecture on a small topic for a short period of time. If you're scratching your head and wondering, "Aren't teachers supposed to lecture on all topics?" that's a good sign. Education courses drill into their students that lecturing for long periods of time is BAD. They have several reasons for this, but my two favorites are 1) it's boring, and 2) students don't have an attention span of more than (X) minutes, where X depends on the grade-level. However, I've never heard an education professor endorse any amount of time over 25 minutes.
I have read about wonderful teachers who laugh at this limitation and can lecture their young students for hours, if necessary, because they've taught the students focus. It also helps if the teacher knows their subject, which sadly, does not seem to be the case for those in the education majors. A person who does not know the subject in depth will always come across as a lousy lecturer.
The reason for this is simple. If you are not familiar with the difference between the broad information (the reason you teach a particular subject), how the larger sections should be broken into manageable segments, and which bits of specific information need to be included, and in what order, it is very likely you will go out of order and simply confuse students. If you don't know the subject of your class, then most likely you will teach the material in a compartmentalized way where nothing really builds on anything else.
Imagine for a moment, an English class. One of the requirements will be to teach poetry. If you know your content, you're going to start with poems that have themes the students are familiar with and then introduce them to various functions of poems, so that each builds upon the previous. A compartmentalized class would have a poetry segment. The educator would give the students poems, talk about their feelings and perhaps what they liked about the poem. Enter the mini-lesson.
Mini-lessons are supposed to be very short little explorations into some necessary topic that can't be covered through the normal regimen of group-think and "fun" alternatives. For example, the teacher is trying to teach poetry but needs to discuss meter, what makes a poem an Italian sonnet, or the difference between alliteration and assonance. She would probably turn the formal language of poetry into a mini-lesson, since these terms have specific, non-subjective definitions. Of course, the problem with this method is that these terms are now separated from the content. Tomorrow, there will be a different mini-lesson on other bits of information. The next day, the same thing.
Because actual lecturing is discouraged, education students are taught to make mini-lessons interactive and as short as possible. Additionally, lecturing is commonly mocked by many educators as "the sage on a stage." Because of its authoritarian presentation and mostly one-way communication, educators encourage would-be teachers away from the lecture format. While not explicitly stated, the overall impression an education student should walk away with is "lecturing is a necessary evil, so keep it short."
Now, in this "composition" class, the students were required to give a mini-lesson. Really, all this amounted to was a presentation with some kind of activity. The vast majority of students brought in lessons from preprinted workbooks available at teacher supply stores. For the most part, these presentations had nothing to do with the content of our course, but our professor didn't seem to mind. One of these presentations was an activity geared towards middle schoolers to refresh their memory of the parts of the sentence. It certainly couldn't have been to teach the students, because nothing was explained.
On an overhead projector, the student presenter put a single sentence. The students in the class were given a stack of laminated cards, each one containing a label: article, adjective, adverb, verb, noun, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. We were then asked to take the cards and put them in the same order as the sentence on the screen.
I suppose I was lucky to have gone to an elementary school where they took the parts of speech and sentence diagramming seriously. After quickly setting up my sentence, I looked around the room, shocked that several, if not more than half of the students were having a great deal of trouble. Some of the students didn't know what prepositions were. Others mixed up adverbs and adjectives. I don't think it would make this story any less depressing if I had been with a group of college freshman, but I might as well point out that this class only consisted of juniors and seniors.
If I had done this activity with a group of engineering majors, I might be a tad more sympathetic, although still disappointed. What scares me, however is that these were the people that were going to become the teachers of English. There are no education classes that explore how to teach grammar, much less review the basics (at least at this university). This class, founded on theories of composition that had little to do with serious writing, was as good as it would get. That presentation from the student was about the most contact these future teachers would ever have with grammar fundamentals.
It would be a lie to say that this revelation breaks my heart because the truth is… it scares the hell out of me.
The next time you wonder why students can't write, look first to the teacher. Does she know how to write? It might shock you to find that, in fact, she can't.
