I've often said to all of you that it is not so much what is said that is important -- but how it is said. I recently wrote a short piece on students, and I received a two page response from a fellow teacher, Mark Smith. He was reacting to some comments by me about how students today do not work hard. He agreed, and here are just a few of his wonderful, well written words.
"We have entered a new stage of arrogance....Every ignorant student is encouraged to believe in the goodness and rightness of his gut feelings over the discipline of the academic. I had a nearly functionally illiterate girl withdraw during the last week of term, in tears, blaming me for her failure because she could not accept that she was not worthy of better than a C or D. It was simply my "opinion" that her writing was full of mechanical errors, syntactically tortured and essentially meaningless."
Part of the problem is that students cannot seem to accept less than an "A." As Garrison Keillor jokingly says about his mythical town, "all the children are above average." In this country, everybody wants to be above average. Every student expects that if he or she has done work -- it is above average work and should receive an A, at worst a B.
This student blamed the teacher for the fact that she failed, and yet Mark Smith's words ring so true. So many of the student paper I receive are, to use Mark's wonderful words, “full of mechanical errors, syntactically tortured, essentially meaningless." The writer often doesn't say anything. The syntax -- the way the English language is used, abused -- is tortured. I often write on a student paper -- people don't say it that way -- which is a polite way of saying I've never heard anything like this before in my entire life. You are not writing any kind of English I've ever heard of. Or, your writing is syntactically tortured, and tortured syntax is almost always accompanied by a massive number of grammatical errors.Mark Smith, writing to me, makes clear what good writing can do: good writing can transmit ideas clearly, can make one person know what another person thinks. We are all locked up inside our minds, perceiving what we think to be reality. The only reality check available to us is others: how do they see the world out there. If their writing is essentially meaningless, we learn nothing; but if they can tell us what they think, we can check and see how closely it parallels, or how far it diverges from, what we think, what we see. Here is another sentence written by Mark.
"Arrogant individualism which is already inherent in the American character, coupled with the relativism of the sixties..., mixed with the general dumbing down of everything, including the news media, and topped off with the lies, distortions and demonizing of the left by...talk radio, all form a potent brew which makes it nearly impossible to get a grip on the truth." How well said: arrogant individualism, relativism, the dumbing down of everything, lies, distortions, demonizing. He is so right: it is very hard to get a grip on the truth.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein