Comments on "Death to High School English" in Salon

To confront the typically unspoken truth about why students throughout this country have so little practice writing formal essays, read Kim Brooks's "Death to High School English" in Salon.com.  Though she approaches the problem, rather divisively, from the perspective of a college professor complaining about the lack of writing instruction her students received in high school, Brooks ultimately highlights the common issues that we all confront as teachers of writing and the common burden we share, whether we teach in secondary schools or colleges.  Most importantly, Brooks visits a high school and confronts what is to my mind the core "logistical issue" of why students don't write more, which boils down to:

...the almost insurmountable challenge of teacher-to-student ratios, miserable ratios that are only going to get more miserable in light of the devastating teacher layoffs taking place around the country. At this particular school, every English teacher teaches five sections of English, and each section has approximately 25 students -- a dream load compared to what teachers at, say, a Chicago public face. But that still means a three-page formal essay assignment would translate into 375 pages of student prose to be read, critiqued and evaluated. The very thought makes a cold, dark dread creep across my soul. It makes my own burden, two sections of composition, 15 students to a class, seem laughably light. And yet, to my more successful, tenured friends, even my numbers seem grueling. One of them says flatly, "I'd teach four sections of lit before I'd do one of comp. Four sections with my hands tied behind my back. It's just too much work."

As Brooks points out, the labor issue does not go away in college either: most of us who teach college English would prefer not to assign a lot of writing either, or to grade it with the care of a composition instructor.  Many literature professors get to teach with "their hands tied behind their backs" for most of the term, with the final papers in their classes used only for grading purposes.  


The labor of grading is the 500-pound gorilla in the room in any discussion of how we improve student writing.


In my own visits to high schools, I have frequently heard about this "logistical issue" that prevents teachers from assigning many formal essays in their classes: to do so would mean an unbearable burden and an additional month of uncompensated labor.  Who would willingly subject themselves to that if they did not have to?  -- especially when most of their colleagues don't do it and there will be no rewards for doing so.  In fact, assigning essays and grading them accurately will mean unhappy students and parents, talks with administrators, and little support from colleagues -- not to mention all of that work of commenting and grading.  


If we are honestly to confront how we get students to do more writing, we have to begin by confronting this problem and to do so at a structural level.  And I admire all of the great schools I've visited where administrators are the ones leading the way toward change, because it is they who are best positioned to deal with this "logistical issue" head on. 


Unfortunately, given the funding realities that public schools face, I don't have any easy answers for how they should do that.  Not yet anyway.  But I think it helps to raise the question and to do so honestly.  It will make us begin looking for an answer.