Eclecticism

Interesting timing on this one. My friend Prairie is working on getting her teachers degree, and teaches English classes at her college. She stopped by for a few hours last weekend on her way through Seattle, and we ended up chatting for a bit on just how often students seem to have, at best, a very questionable grasp of the English language.

One of the things that drove this home for me within the past few years was corresponding with a friend of mine who I know is quite intelligent, knows how to express herself quite well, and generally is quite handy at doing so. However, all these strengths are almost entirely verbal — when it comes to the written word, reading e-mail from her was like corresponding with a different person. Little use of capitalization or punctuation (and what there was was often used incorrectly), poorly constructed sentences…the works. Eventually I had to break down and ask her about it, and she attributed it in large part to how she was taught in school. Apparently, teaching basic things like grammar, punctuation, spelling, and all the building blocks of the English language had fallen by the wayside, usually being replaced with an admonition from the teacher to be sure to use the grammar check and spell check on the computer.

Quite frankly, I was pretty floored by this. Admittedly, much of my command of the language (which, though it may be somewhat egotistical, I like to think is fairly decent [though I do tend to over-use parenthetical remarks {like this} too much]) was greatly influenced by having two parents with a love of the language, but even without their assistance, I know that proper writing was still being taught when I was in school. Is this just not deemed worth paying attention to anymore? Or are teachers just getting lazy? Either way, it’s a fairly disturbing development.

What started all this rambling, though was an article in the New York Times about how today’s teachers are coping with students using online abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons in their writing.

Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. “They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end,” said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. “If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown.”

As Trisha Fogarty, a sixth-grade teacher at Houlton Southside School in Houlton, Maine, puts it, today’s students are “Generation Text.”

On the one hand, suddenly typing — and writing in general — is ‘in vogue’ again among kids, due to the explosion of the ‘net and its associate technologies, such as IM programs like Yahoo! Messenger, chatrooms, and weblogs. However, if teachers aren’t able to help train these kids in the differences between the online slang and the correct usage, today’s students may very well be in for a world of hurt later in life, when they’re asked to write something more formal than a quick IM note to set up a date or pass gossip along. The teachers in this story sound like they’re all at least making some effort to make sure they’re actually instructing their students well — it’s the other teachers, those who ‘teach’ their classes to rely on all-too-inaccurate grammar- and spell-check software, that really worry me.

“Kids should know the difference,” said Ms. Harding, who decided to address this issue head-on this year. “They should know where to draw the line between formal writing and conversational writing.”

Found via MeFi