Published: April 25, 2008 08:24 am         

We have the way, but the will?

By Jim Atwell

You already know that, in what now seems another lifetime, I was once academic dean at a big community college. Besides the standard English courses in composition and literature there, we also taught non-credit remedial courses for enrollees who, though high-school graduates, weren’t ready for basic freshman English. We even had a special remedial sequence for immigrants, “English for Non-Native Speakers.” One faculty wag said we ought to add a parallel course: “English for Native Non-Speakers.” That quip drifted back recently as I was discouraged to read about a piece of quackery that is still earning money for charlatans on the national speaking circuit. It was and is an example of California Dreamin’ that offers a solution for inner-city students’ problems with standard English. Ebonics (that’s the scam’s name) says to solve the problem by recognizing teens’ slang as a legitimate language, one they have an inherent right to use.

The educationist’s world (I know it well) is always prone to slapping a political or rhetorical Band-Aid on a running sore — and then calling it cured. Lord knows, lost skills in language is such a sore. And yet theorists, perhaps because they’re stumped and scared, are still willing to cob together a new pseudo-cure — or even break out an old one: That Ebonics con has been around a long time, at least since the 1960’s.

But the sad fact remains: The country is full of young Native-Non-Speakers. And not just in cities. When warm weather really settles in, go sit for a while in Pioneer Park. Sit and listen. You’ll hear the local equivalent of Ebonics.

It’s based on a very narrow vocabulary. Missing words and emotional intensity are expressed through a one-syllable obscenity that serves as noun, as verb (transitive or intransitive), as adjective, and as adverb, as well as expletive.

Deprived of that all-purpose obscenity, I suspect that some Pioneer Park denizens would be struck mute.

Can something be done for language skills, which continue to decline nationally? Yes, if we have the will. I found out what it takes 35 years ago, over in Edmeston. I learned it from Margaret Jones, one of my late first wife’s teachers and her lifelong friend.

Margaret grew up on a poor farm in North Ed and attended a one-room school there. Then, though Edmeston was only four miles away, she boarded with two widows in the village so that she could attend high school. After her June graduation, she went to Oneonta Normal for a two months’ methods course and started teaching that very year — 1918, the year of the Spanish ‘flu. She kept on teaching, as she used to say precisely, for the next “fifty years and four months.”

For 30 of those years she was full staff for as series of one-room schoolhouses — boarding with neighboring families; arriving early to start the woodstove; staying late to sweep the room; and, in between, teaching eight grades all their subjects. Margaret never married. With her church, teaching was her life’s focus. She was devoted to it, kept all her grade books, still had sample work for most years she taught.

In 1971, still an English professor, I sat next to Margaret, examining themes written 50 years before by farm children. I marveled at spelling, punctuation, complex sentences those supposedly deprived kids had produced. “Margaret,” I said, “I can’t get work like this out of the college freshmen I teach. How did you do it?” Her answer was immediate: “It was what we made them read and what we made them memorize.”

As she talked on, I realized that she was preaching heresy by present-day standards. Make students read classics, works beyond their full understanding? Well, how else, Margaret would say, to stretch their abilities? How refreshing, how sensible, at a time when the first whine of “It’s too hard!” sets colleges to buying dumbeddown texts — college texts written to an eighth-grade reading level. And memorization! Margaret’s pupils learned a poem a week, often eight to 10 stanzas. Then each one recited it, standing before classmates who could mouth each word and waited for the first mistake. That made poetry stick. I’ll bet many aged farmers, driving tractors through crisp fall air, still recite snatches of “October’s Bright Blue Weather.”

As they read and memorized, those farm kids were grasping, in unconsciously, the capacities of English. And, if they didn’t understand every word, they were still internalizing rhythms and other language resources, making them their own. Challenging reading and rigorous memorizing. There they are, beyond the smoke and mirrors of gimcrack schemes, the two keys to language skills. In their simplest forms, they are the way we began the job as babies: by mimicry, by making sounds even before we fully understood them. In Margaret’s classrooms, that process continued, broadened, deepened. When she confronted her farm kids with “The Gettysburg Address,” she had them study the text, memorize it, and declaim it before their peers and parents. After that, Lincoln’s rich rhythms and depth of feeling were theirs.

Of course, it takes willpower to learn language that way. And work. I wonder, have we still enough of the first to enforce the second? The signs don’t look good. Find out about Jim Atwell’s book, “From Fly Creek

— Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country,” at www. JimAtwell.com.