Teachers Need to Learn How to Read and Write Before They Teach

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 5, 1999 | by Morris Freedman

President Clinton and others have called for an additional 100,000 teachers, and the country needs them. But how do we improve the inadequate teaching we now have? How can we ensure that new teachers will be any better?

Studies suggest widespread near-illiteracy among many teachers. Of 3,200 public-school teachers in Houston who took a competency test, for example, more than half failed the reading portion, and more than a quarter failed the writing portion.

Defenders of teachers claim that you can't ever really measure good teaching -- a dubiously sweeping generalization. If nothing else, you certainly can measure grasp of reading and writing, necessary in teaching any subject. But too many teachers never do learn how to do either in most college English courses today.

During the last half-century, departments of English have come to offer a manically heterogeneous assortment of subjects, from comic strips to pop psychiatry.

Many English departments have indeed become nearly anarchic. Some professors dismiss as tyrannical standards of good writing and of originality. They sneer at traditional grammar and forgive plagiarism. They flaunt their ignorance. One professor that I know liked to boast that he received his doctorate without ever studying Shakespeare.

Where standards are observed, counting has replaced judgment. Some teachers prefer to grade multiple-choice tests mechanically rather than judge written assignments. Too many, in and out of English departments, are more impressed by the length of a paper than its quality. Few understand that brevity and effective expression remain the soul of good writing.

A substantial number of my students do write clearly and attractively, demonstrating that they've actually encountered good teachers or have overcome the influence of poor ones.

But until the profession as a whole again focuses on the fundamentals, we should hold off on the wholesale, government-stimulated hiring of more teachers, in any subject, who would only perpetuate and spread our present faux literacy.

Morris Freedman is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, now teaching in its honors program.