The release of SAT scores last week gives strong ammunition to proponents of a core curriculum. As reported in the Wall Street Journal , reading scores hit their lowest figure in four decades. Writing scores hit their lowest number since a writing component was added to the exam six years ago; in fact, writing scores […]
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After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the […]
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The teenage girl standing with her father in line behind me at Kroger was clearly annoyed with her teacher. “I just gave her some b.s.,” she said. They were discussing the school day, and a writing assignment. Her father asked her what the topic had been and between loading my items onto the conveyor belt […]
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Last semester, in an unguarded moment, I did what literature teachers should never do. I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom. I invited my students to engage with me in online debate on whether an interpretation could be wrong. What […]
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As Charlotte Allen points out here, required summer reading for college freshmen is often highly politicized. That goes double for freshmen introductory writing courses and textbooks. Teaching composition to new students ought to be an ideology-free effort, but for many years on many campuses it hasn’t been. For example, take Ways of Reading: an Anthology […]
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