In today’s Friday interview, Carolina Journal’s Mitch Kokai speaks with Nan Miller, retired North Carolina State University and Meredith College English professor, and author of the provocative article “English 101: Prologue to Literacy or Postmodern Moonshine?” The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
Kokai: By the title, “English 101, Prologue to Literacy or Post Modern Moonshine,” there are some concerns about English 101 or its equivalent and just how well students are learning to write. Is this a major problem?
Miller: This is a major problem. And I guess I shall open by saying that much of what is going on in the university system is moonshine, and the report points out the problems, the specific problems with today’s instruction.
Kokai: Your report goes into the history of college writing and how it has changed for the worse in recent years. Go through, if you will, how this came about.
Miller: I started teaching in the late ‘70s and, interestingly, was dismayed to see that the course that I was asked to teach had not changed much since I had taken it over, well a decade-and-a-half earlier. And so right away I was — okay, I became a little bit of a sneak because I didn’t believe in this notion that every student should prepare a formal outline before they wrote, and that you really could write from a formal outline. So I played around with the rules a little bit and discovered that if I had students write a draft that I had seen in my office before they wrote the final paper, and made suggestions for them to improve those drafts, that usually the finished product was a little better. So I started on my own this thing that now in the business is called “writing as process.” And when the theorists came in, initially they validated that process and so I welcomed them. But what has happened is that has evolved into something pretty radical and those are the problems that I outline in the paper.
Kokai: Now, you mentioned the theorists, and in quoting some pieces of your article here you say, “The theories must mutate to cut new edge and thereby extend the lifespan of a chic new field.”
Miller: Well, and that is exactly right, because what happens — anybody who knows anything about higher education knows that research is the name of the game. And so when, probably in the mid-‘70s, a group of scholars saw what I had seen when I started teaching composition, which is you’ve got a stagnant course that is probably not the best way to ensure that a student gets out of freshman composition a little more literate than he or she was when students entered. So the theorists came in and saw an opening to create a new field and I honestly believe that it was created in good faith, that they did have a good idea, and that they would make a difference in college writing. And initially they did. But what happens is, to stay on a cutting edge — and I think really they were sort of imitating what went on in the sciences — that you have to go somewhere with it, you can’t rest on any laurels. And so gradually this thing has evolved into — well the two big things about the course that is in place now at State and Carolina is that there is no literature taught any more. And they have generated their own research to say that literature is not only not helpful to a student, it actually impairs their process in writing. And that is a pretty radical thing to say. The other bit of instruction that is missing in the new course is grammar instruction. And that has been soft-pedaled now for probably two or three decades. And I think the reason that it started being thought of as a piece of writing that did not need to be emphasized — I think that what happened is that when you have an increasingly diverse enrollment in college. and a lot of students didn’t grow up writing or speaking standard English, they wanted to make room for what they call “varieties of English.” And anybody who has been in the classroom, the college classroom, for any number of years, knows that you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings who didn’t grow up speaking or writing standard English. But they’ve taken it to extremes and have validated, well, these varieties of English that will not be saleable in the marketplace. And so what you have is a business community now — and there is plenty of research now that says that business leaders are becoming concerned about the fact that college graduates no longer write correctly…in my opinion it is the greatest disservice of all to these students not to expect and require that they write correctly, too.
Kokai: So, there is no literature, no focus on grammar, punctuation, spelling in the writing classes. How does that then translate into something that is a problem for these students beyond just the English class and for the rest of their collegiate careers or lives?
Miller: Well, in 2003 a newly appointed commission on writing, a national commission on writing, did a great deal of research nationwide about the state of writing in the United States. And they said that writing, the level of writing — I think I am quoting this almost verbatim — the level of writing in our nation’s schools and colleges is not what it should be. And they called for a writing revolution. Now the problem with this report is that it goes on for pages and pages and pages but never says exactly what is wrong with writing instruction and how to fix it. And so that is what I’ve tried to do, coming out of a private college where English is still taught using pretty traditional methods. We used the process approach, which the theorists again introduced back in the ‘80s. We used that but we had absolutely stringent standards when it came to grammar, we taught literature in both sections of freshman English, and we also had a teacher in charge. The other innovation that the theorists have introduced that many of us don’t approve of is the student-centered class where students on the first day of class are divided into groups, and they meet in these groups every class period for the rest of the semester, and they critique each other’s writing, and they grade each other’s writing. And it is — the theorists have a lot of faith that students left alone will tap some vast depths of understanding and knowledge that most of us who have been in the classroom for a number of years know is simply not there, especially for students who are hooked on Google, iPod, text messaging and all of these other little electronic devices they like.