I’m afraid you picked a rather poor example in your opening. According to statistics compiled nation wide approximately 80,000 Americans per year die as a direct result of MISPRESCRIBED medications by Physicians. Simply do the math and you will soon see that by logical extension that American Physicians constitute the greatest unindicted mass murderers in history. In short, I think the medical profession as a whole is rather unsavory and not a particularly good model to use.

The whole grammar and syntax thing has been parlayed into a system that unduly complicates what we tend to do quite naturally, namely, speak correctly. This defect has bled over into the instructional models for teaching foreign languages. I speak Farsi and Chinese (Mandarin dialect). How did I learn these languages? The same way a little Child, by interacting and conversing with accomplished speakers.

Your “direct instruction” approach harkens back to The Dark Ages when books were scarce and literate people even more so. The didactic model is inefficient, counter productive, and leads to memorize then regurgitate which is not “learning” so much as a memory trick. The current iteration of The Socratic Method is infinitely superior to the teacher lectures while students sit quietly and take notes. There is more than ample evidence of my assertion by way of formal studies.

BTW, as a passing note, I found more than a couple typos in your post and some rather awkward language use as well.

The issue isn’t that English teachers are not English majors. Everyone in my department has an English degree — most of them at the Masters level. When was the last time a university required mastery of grammar and usage as part of the degree requirements for English?

Used wisely, there’s nothing wrong with a LITTLE group work with very specific learning outcome objectives. The perpetual problem is the “if a little is good, all is better!” mentality of education. Carefully designed group work balanced with direct instruction is a highly effective mix in my classroom.

FWIW, I’m not a geezer. I was a little surprised not long ago when a colleague with nearly 40 years under her belt asked me to help identify a part of a sentence — it was an object complement — easy stuff. So it isn’t just an issue among us whippersnappa’s.

I understand Gene’s point that “teaching a language and its usage is a moving target”. However, it seems that instead of improving techniques or intelligently discerning which aspects of English instruction need to be updated or adapted, the trend is to abandon all basic instruction of the English language for newer (unproven) techniques.

These are not cartoons. These are children who were short-changed out of the basics of their education, have now grown up, and are now educating other children. I wholeheartedly agree with Renee that “teacher preparation” must be taken more seriously.

Thanks to Mr. Strine for an excellent post and call to indeed “Wise up, America.”

My point is that teaching a language and its usage is a moving target. No, after 38 years in the classroom, I can’t stand to hear the way our young English teachers speak and write. I can’t comment on their teaching methods or effectiveness. But even I didn’t learn the language the way it was used by my grand-parents or our nation’s founders. Dictionaries grow and words take on new meanings. That’s the nature of a language.

My career was in science. My job was to teach the methods of discovering how nature works. Some facts were presented. There isn’t time to invent the wheel for every topic. However, the theme is that nature doesn’t change, so we’re not chasing a moving target in physics. Certainly our understanding has changed over the years, but that’s not the same as our agreeing to change the rules of acceptance.

I’m personally glad that doctors tend to be more scientific than grammatically correct. Ninety-nine percent of the doctors have been “taught” that peptic ulcers are pH oriented and can be treated with a bland diet and by avoiding acidic food. Fortunately, we now know otherwise due to one investigative mind.

Rachel, with five degrees in physics and biology, I can’t teach math either since I started with the Calculus and never had a college level algebra class. At the same time, my math department had to hire a university consultant to help pick a new Calculus text.

I think you miss the glorious side of it. The point of making teachers into facilitators is to allow them to fill out paperwork during class time. While the students work in groups, teachers can write up conferencing notes, running records, anecdotals, incident reports, student goals, individual assessments, graphic organizers, authentic comments, reading behavior checklists, and all those other necessary things. If teachers were teaching the subject during class time, they wouldn’t be able to do all that. Nor would they be able to do it during prep time; they’d be busy preparing substantial lessons.

We may not have poetry or grammar. But oh, do we ever have data!

Diana Senechal

Can we hear from some other English teachers?

My classroom experience (which, I admit is much more limited than Fred Strine’s) suggests that there are very few simple answers.

But though I see less focus on building up a structure of basic factual knowledge than I’d like, I also don’t see “group work” taking over the way this post suggests. From the corner of the education word I’ve seen, students doing nothing but group work, not caring about subject-verb agreement, and being taught by teachers with little academic training except what they got from education professors who are enamored of Cuba and the Soviet Union is a cartoon.

On one very specific issue, California, at least, makes it very difficult for secondary teachers to teach outside of the field they majored in in college. It isn’t even simple for a someone who majors in physics to teach math. So the picture of teachers with no subject matter training just doesn’t fit with the reality I see.

More generally, the problem I had with the post was that what I learned was how Fred Strine felt about the issue. And certainly 36 years of teaching experience gives anyone a right to tell people how he feels, and to be taken seriously. But I also know progressive educators with 36 years experience (Deborah Meier, for example) who could tell me, with equal passion, about the great strides their pupils made in truly progressive environments.

So at the end of a day of blog reading, it helps to have something more concrete than a variety of strong opinions to take away with me. Thanks for providing the references to Project Follow Through — it actually wasn’t obvious from the original post that direct instruction was central to what you were advocating.